Pilates and Computers

These are two skill sets that have thus far eluded my mom.

Momma Huh has been working fewer hours lately, so she made a list of new activities, and she decided that I should help her.  The first thing on her list is to incorporate some sort of exercise into her daily routine.  To this end, one of her good friends bought her a Pilates DVD from borders so we decide to give it a shot.

Let me preface this exercise debacle by saying that FIRST off, my mom is a 95lb korean ahjumma, with impossibly thin arms and legs... so the bulk of that 95 lbs is her 파마머리 (rockin' perm) and the little buddha belly she's been sporting since giving the gift of life to three perfect children ^_~  Second, for about 10 years now she has done the majority of the shopping for the store that my family runs... this means lifting whole cases of water/soda on a daily basis plus she was averaging a 13 hour work day.  We are talkin' some major stamina here.

But the woman can't do a crunch to save her life.  Now I have definitely gone soft over the years (it hurts to do stairs), so I do not purport to be a master of all things fitness, but what I CAN do is lift my head off the ground for more than two seconds.  As the DVD progressed, I had to modify the modified movements for her, so essentially, at one point, her head was just propped up on a pillow/block and she was just watching the DVD from that position.

So since she decided pilates wasn't her thing, she wanted to try the inflatable ball workout that she bought... did I mention her balance isn't so great either?  It's definitely tricky... but watching the ball slide out from underneath her, seeing her body hurled to the floor as she miscalculated a bounce off of the ball... it was like watching a cartoon.

In the end, she decided that she would just go for walks around the neighborhood.  (This has not actually happened yet).

The next thing on my mom's list was to re-learn the computer (checking e-mail, surfing the net etc)... this was much more difficult to explain that I had anticipated.  I set up my netbook next to her computer (which has not been touched since the last time she asked me to teach her 14 months ago) so we could go through the process together step by step.  Some of the main stumbling blocks were:

1) The power button.  When I turned my computer on I pushed a little rectangular button... she couldn't find hers because hers was round and situated in a different place on her laptop.  She thought that was stupid.

2) Single clicking versus Double clicking.     Mom:  "what, am I not doing it right?  I clicked it two times!  what?  I have to do it faster? last time I didn't have to do it so fast and it still opened the internet"

3) Logging in to her email.   She didn't realize that you don't need to log-on to the internet, just to her e-mail if she wants to read it.  Me:  "No mom, if you just want to read the safeway supermarket sale paper, you can just go to the safeway website, you don't have to log-in to yahoo first"     Mom:  "Then how come safeway knows my e-mail, you saw they sent me messages."  Me:  "I don't know.  You probably gave it to them when you signed up for a club card"  Mom:  "I don't even know my own e-mail, how would I give it to safeway.... maybe your dad gave it to them"   Me:  'sigh'

Amazing... she's actually a pretty quick study though, and a lot of the complaints/questions she has I can't argue with other than to say, that's just how Bill Gates made it... I can't wait for lesson #2.