My nearly 48-year-old daughter, Kelly, is currently facing a rough spell. I know she’ll cope and bounce back, but her life is currently filled with challenges. Kelly lives in California, in the Monterey area (a town called Seaside). She left Michigan about 25 years ago. We’re in Florida and Michigan. She’s across the country.

About four or five months ago Dave, her husband was “laid off.” He’s a highly skilled construction foreman and has never had a problem getting a job but it was a scare to have him “out of work.” Actually it didn’t last long. The Monterey aquarium heard he was available and hired him to work independently for them. (The construction company he worked for had some jobs at the aquarium so they were already familiar with Dave’s skills and work-ethic.) It’s a temporary job, but he’s hoping that the economy will turn around and he’ll continue to be employed.

A week or two ago Kelly was notified that her long-time at the YMCA would end as a result of total reorganization. She’s been working there for over a dozen years and has been responsible for several sites and school-age programs. She has about a month of employment left.

As if that’s not tough enough, she’s been quite ill for a couple of weeks with a bronchitis. Her cough hasn’t gone but she’s feeling somewhat better.

In an attempt to be helpful, we volunteered to get her a laptop computer. She hasn’t had one for some time and has just used her work computer for all work of that nature.

I found a HP laptop which looked perfect and bought it on line from Office Depot, but I didn’t realize that it didn’t have a DVD or CD drive. So I dealt with the local store and got an external one for her.

But now she needs to get Microsoft Office installed. There’s a 60-day trial on line, but it requires the use of high speed internet which she doesn’t have.

She was ready to get hooked up to AT&T high speed, but it required the purchase of about $100 worth of equipment. Costs just seemed to add up and she needs to watch her expenses.

I have the ability to set up a computer but Kelly’s not a techie. Her son (my grandson) Jeremy has inherited my love of computers. He’ll be home on leave for the next three days before he “ships out” with the Marines to Japan. Kelly is hoping he can make sure everything is purring on her computer while he’s home.

I’m anxious for her to get hooked up because then we’ll be able to use Snype (which is a free video phone system).

Today she’s going through the interview process for a different job and she’s concerned about that. I want to support her in every way. It’s tough try to fix things when I’m so far away.