8:21 AM: Grace graces us today wearing a maroon cowl neck sweater and faded brown pants. I imagine each morning, she plucks a sweater from a pile on top of a dresser, tosses it into the dryer to “fluff it up” and remove some dog hair, but forgets which sweater she chose in the process. So by the time she gets back to the closet to select her pants for the day, she has no idea what top she’ll be wearing and just thinks to herself, “Oh well, brown will go with anything!”
9:24 AM: I can hear Grace flipping through some papers and she just said, “Ow, ow!” Hopefully she’s okay.
10:03 AM: Grace nearly burned her house down on Christmas Day in 2015, when she turned the oven on to preheat while it had a plastic cutting board inside. The fire department came and her entire house was eventually cleaned for smoke damage. It seems she’s still dealing with some of the fallout from the cleaning…
Hi Arhlene, I’m just fine. I just talked to my friend Mike. He… well… I’m skeptical. He asked if somebody could meet with him next week… He was going to bring… I can never remember her name… He was going to bring someone out to talk about the lost items. But how do you prove something is missing? I can show him the broken ornaments, but everyone else is gone. How do we prove we gave our son a Carhartt jacket for Christmas? I actually kept the receipt for the Coach briefcase, so I can show him that… But I don’t keep copies of these things…
There was some clothing that was lost… You know, a crystal bowl I got as a wedding present… things that don’t have receipts. That’s my concern. We’re supposed to talk about this list I prepared, but how do you prove you had something and now it’s gone? We didn’t do what some people would do and try to screw em… you know, “Oh yeah, my laptop is missing…”
I can send you pictures of the broken ornaments… These ornaments are limited edition, so you can only replace them on eBay. So I gave him a printout of them on eBay six months ago. If I were to go to replace them, that’s not a firm price. It’ll change based on the season…
You know, I don’t want to disparage somebody who’s been ill… You know, it was his mother… Then it was the holidays… This is since August. Every time I asked about the status, he said he had to talk to what’s her name… Well, she’s been out…
There’s no way of proving it… But you know, my son’s Game Boy… the Game Boy disappeared and the games disappeared, but it was all in the same box and the box is still there…
And lord knows I’ve got more junk than… We’ve got our stuff, our kids’ stuff, our parents’s stuff, grandparents’ stuff, and in some cases, our great grandparents’ stuff.
When I was five years old, I made these candlesticks out of clay. They were sitting out on Christmas day and now those are gone… I don’t know why I didn’t get the pieces back… I told them specifically, “Don’t touch them.”
I try to always think well of people, but you have people who are just… Ya know… I’m not saying I’m missing a laptop or tickets to a cruise or a fur coat. These are just some things going forward that I wish we had been told ahead of time that we should take care of anything that we didn’t want handled.
It’s 2017, Grace. You could reprint your tickets to the cruise.
2:47 PM: Earlier this week, Grace asked me if I could give her a refresher on how to set up our video camera for the video shoots we conduct with our leadership. She’s nervous because she’s been in video shoots before and had no clue what to do. So she asked me for a refresher on the camera. We got into the conference room and said
What I want to do is have you set up the camera and the video monitor and all the cables and cords and I’ll film you doing it. Then we can take it apart and I’ll do it myself. And I figure that should be a good enough refresher for me and I can reference that when I need to do it alone on Wednesday.
I did my part and sat back to watch Grace perform her self-assigned task. The very first cable she tried to plug in was an HDMI cable. She talked to herself for a good 90 seconds during the attempt…
Grace: Ok, let’s see. If I can just get my hand under here… Okay, wait. It goes this way or that way? Alright, rounded side goes this way… Hmmm… Now why isn’t that going in? It shouldn’t need a lot of pressure, right?… Well, let’s see here [as she leaned down and groaned on the way] Why isn’t this working? Okay… I need you to take a look. What am I doing wrong here?
Me: You’re trying to plug it into the wrong hole. That’s for a display port. See here? It says “Display Port” You want to plug this HDMI cable into the HDMI port.
She did just fine after that, but we’ll see how she performs on Tuesday.
2:49 PM: We discussed as a group that both George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara are in the hospital. Phyllis said, “Yep. Just like Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher!”
These two are still living, but Nurse Phyllis has already declared the time of death.
4:16 PM: Phyllis did one of her things where she just starts talking without knowing if anyone was listening…
I don’t know anything about posting online, but I can tell what happened here at this site I’m looking at. Instead of an ampersand posted in the title like it’s supposed to be, it has the title and the word “ampersand” stuck in the middle there. I’m looking at it and thinking, “Well, that’s not right!”
8:21 AM: Grace has joined us. She got a haircut. The general shape of it reminds me of the helmets from Mulan. But she clearly tried to sleep on her professionally-styled hair because it’s flat in some places and sticking up in others. She’s wearing a forest green, studded sweater and some gray dress pants that are alarmingly loose in the hips. Very Golden Girls. 
40 Square Feet of Hell 