Today’s post was going to be all about the best thing I knit last year, but this morning when I sat down to do it there was a complication.

Joe objects to the state of my laptop. He has a passionate belief that I have too many photos on my computer, he also believes that this number of pictures slows down my computer, and that I would be happier without these pictures. I disagreed, but the man, who has not a single photo on his computer, believes that when one has a great many images of yarn and knitting, that there is no real reason to keep any but the most current. I’ve tried to explain to him that he’s dead wrong. That a knitblogger has excellent cause to have a great many pictures of yarn and sweaters and socks, and I tried to explain that a few years worth wasn’t too much at all. I told him I liked my pictures, and even if I did have too many, I liked having too many…and that it wasn’t slowing down the computer, and even if it was, that was perfectly okay with me because I think I even like my computer running sort of slow.

Joe, in his infinite and annoying wisdom, pointed out that actually he has seen me throw myself face-first into the unyielding surface of my desk several times a day, fists clenched and knuckles white with fury while screaming “THIS FOUL COMPUTER SLOWNESS IS SUCKING UP MY LIFE FORCE”, and that he had actually taken this to mean that maybe I did mind the slowness a little, and moreover, that when I had followed the daily screeching about the slowness with “YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SOME KIND OF GEEK WHY DON’T YOU DO SOMETHING” – that he had assumed, for some reason…that I was requesting assistance with correcting the slowness.

“No.” I said. “I like things the way they are.”

Now, that was a total lie, but the thing is that every time Joe decides there’s a problem with the way the technology works around here, we all enter a terrible phase on the path to correction. Like when he decided Amanda didn’t have a good wireless signal in her room. Amanda thought her signal was fine, but Joe had to go improving it, and he did too… After a two week learning phase in which almost everything to do with wireless in the house was disassembled and non-functional….the wireless signal was better. Admittedly, this would have meant more to Amanda if she had been bothered by the signal in the first place, but that’s not the way things roll around here. Same thing with the backup system or the routers or….I don’t know. A hundred things. Joe’s a brilliant man and he can figure anything out….but it can take a while, and the process of the improvements and upgrades are hard to take, especially if you’re sort of an idiot like me. I can barely work things the way they are now, never mind if they are changed. I hate learning new tech-stuff, I respond bitterly and viciously to having to learn a new system, and most of the time this means that I’ll use a terrible system that totally sucks for years rather than learn a new one. I think I’ve got software on this computer that cavemen had installed on their macs. It’s practically Pong.

So I lied, but Joe saw right through me, and the next thing I knew he had taken all of my pictures and put them onto some thingie drive that he swore, SWORE would be the perfect place to keep them because I could still get one of them if I wanted to, but they wouldn’t be taking up room on my computer, and the computer would go faster. It would be, he said…perfect. So I agreed (which seemed like the best thing to do considering that he had already done it) and my computer did go faster (which I think is because he put in a faster drive thingie, but he says it’s because he took all my pictures away. I think he is just anti-picture, but that’s an argument for another day.)

Today, I got up, and just as I predicted, I needed a picture that was gone. I tactfully reminded Joe that this day would come, and asked him to please ask the drive thingie to cough up said photos. Joe asked the drive thingie to do just that, and what happened? What? NOTHING. The drive thingie won’t talk to my computer, because Joe fixed some network thing with a router, and then he was talking about the DNS whatsit, and renewing a lease dhcp guy something happened with the home network, and then he told me that my IP was static (which doesn’t sound like a problem to me) and that I shouldn’t have taken an icon of of my desktop (which I didn’t, it was under another file because he didn’t look right) and then he said he had to leave and he would have to spend some time later figuring out “What I had done to it.”

What I have done to it? You know what I have done to it? NOTHING. I don’t even know what the *&^%$#@!! it is, so I don’t know how I could have possibly broken it? I didn’t move his stinking icon either, he just looked for it the way that he looks for everything else. That icon thing is just like when he’s all “have you seen my blue book” and then I say “It’s on your dresser” and he says “no it’s not” and I say “JUST LOOK” and he says “I did look” and then I go all the way upstairs and go over to his dresser and pick up a magazine and the blue book is right there. Right on the dresser like I said it was, and then I give him the book and he says “Where the hell did you find that?” and I say “right on the dresser” and he says. “No. I looked” and then I think “Holy Crap. All I want is a jury of my peers when this assault goes in front of a judge” and instead I say “Well. I don’t know what to tell you. It was on your dresser” and he looks at me suspiciously like for some insane reasons based on revenge and indecency and a plot to drive both of us mad I have snuck the blue book onto the dresser after he looked there….

…and the icon was just like that, because it was right there. Right on my desktop where he left it, and even when I found it he still couldn’t get me my picture, even though he told me that the reason I couldn’t have the picture was because I had lost the icon, and if only I hadn’t taken things off my desktop…then he would be able to help me, which was a total lie…because, well. Do you see a picture here?

NO YOU DON’T. This super easy system that was going to solve all of the problems and be just fantastic won’t give me my picture and now Joe has gone out and the super easy system has screwed me over and I just can’t help myself. I am a bright woman. I know I said I would be flexible. I know I said I would try. I know I said that I understood that I can be a little inflexible sometimes and that I would entertain the possibility that I don’t relate well to change, but here I am, exactly where I told him we would be if he took my pictures away….and I can only think one thing.

This is why I like knitting. It’s never like this. It never has a new system, you’re never blocked from all your knitting because of a network problem, and you never, never need to wait for someone who can’t find an icon to come home and figure out 24 insane things before you are able to get to your rightful wool.