Back from a week away

I'm back from a week in North Carolina helping take care of my Mom, who fell and broke her ankle in three places. She and my Dad were already scheduled to move into a cottage at a nursing home in early July, so we also had to do lots of packing up of things and trying to convince them not to take more than will fit into a smaller place. Fortunately, she's made good progress already, but now we've got home health aides coming for 24 hour care because my Dad is pretty seriously disabled and does well just to take care of himself.Needless to say, I'm a bit tired and didn't get much work on the novel done, though I've certainly thought about it. I did take some critiques along and made progress on that. Now that I've gotten used to Scrivener for the novel, I wanted to install it on the antique macbook of Stephan's that I use when I need a laptop, which is, fortunately, not often. But the operating system is too old, and it's probably not worth upgrading on this machine. I did a compile draft of everything I have so far, including scenes that are just sketched out or barely written, and the draft comes to 23,000 words. Unfortunately, this is such a big file in Word that I can't even open it without crashing the laptop. I'm coming to the conclusion I need a less antiquated macbook of my own but I haven't budgeted for it and know I can't possibly afford a new one. I'm checking Ebay for used ones but even that is probably a stretch with some other recent purchases (hello, kayak and roof rack!). For now I hope to be able to clean up this old laptop some, get rid of stuff, and see if I can get it to run a bit faster, then make sure to break things down into smaller files instead of big ones.In other news, Stephan and I are going to Costa Rica soon and I'm really looking forward to that! I need a vacation. I'm slightly behind on critiques but am way ahead on the novel as far as having a submission ready by my next workshop due date. I also hope to get the kayak out on the Blue River sometime over Memorial Day weekend.