Stircrazy wrote:

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steven wrote:

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What, I've been away from the forum for three days and I missed the return of StirCrazy? So lovely to have you back, and judging from this thread and others, it's already as if you had never been away 

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Cheers, Steven.  As I think I said in one of my first posts on this thread, the illness which resulted in my spending over a month in the Whittington Hospital in Archway (N19) knocked the stuffing out of me physically & mentally.  When I was first discharged at the beginning of February & found myself housebound until late March because I could barely put one foot in front of the other without using a walking stick & was reliant on neighbours to bring in food until I registered with Tesco for home deliveries (still do for heavy stuff), I wasn't really interested in doing anything other than watch the TV, read, shuffle to the kitchen to get myself something to eat & go to bed earlier than I was used to doing (I initially had carers provided three times a day by Barnet Council, but quickly discovered that I was capable of doing everything for myself that they would have done for someone more incapacitated - except wash my hair - so they were quite quickly withdrawn, being better deployed looking after more needy souls).

Curiosity eventually led me to lurk occasionally on the board, but I felt no great urge to jump back in & post a comment until I noticed that the details of Neal's & Wesley's last 16 encounter in Madrid hadn't been mentioned on this thread just under a week ago.  That kind of opened the floodgates. 

The situation might have been different, had I not managed to resolve the problem arising from the fact that, when I returned home from hospital, I realised that I'd forgotten the password for my laptop (& didn't have a note of it anywhere), so was unable to gain access to the internet & either of my e-mail accounts, which was very, very frustrating.  I wasn't completely cut off, as I had my work laptop at home with me & was given the greenlight to use it for limited personal purposes such as food shopping with Tesco & Amazon.  Without it a couple of weeks or so ago, I wouldn't have been able to crack the password problem on my own laptop (completely separate net access to my web mail in order to be able to receive a message from Microsoft with the password reset code).  Since I did, however, I haven't looked back.  

I'll always be grateful to you for your AO updates, which gave me something to look forward to towards the end of my stay in hospital, when I was starting to snap out of the mental fog that had descended earlier in the month, so thank you once again. 

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Thanks for the update. I was aware of at least some of this, as you know. I'm glad the AO updates helped ease the boredom of hospital and sorry I wasn't able to keep them up for that long after - though I knew you had some Internet access by then, I should have kept in touch more but by then things had started to go a bit awry here and time kept passing too quickly. I'm glad you were able to come on here and read stuff - I wasn't sure because your last access date didn't change for a long time, but of course, you don't need to be logged in if you just want to read.

Anyway, I'm really happy that you're feeling a bit more like your old self now and that a missing update spurred you into action , though actually people seemed to step up and cover for you really well while you were away.