Can You See Me Now

Just before Christmas, my trusty but very beat-up five year old macbookpro decided it wasn’t really a macbookpro anymore.  It wasn’t even really a macbookamateur, which is the direction that I would go if I were retiring as a macbook, but I guess the thing made its own choices.  It had been dying by degrees for a while.  First the CD drive didn’t work, and that was okay with me once I got used to it.  (I was more concerned that it had  Lucy Neatby DVD in it when it quit and wouldn’t give it back, but Joe got it out.) Then it forgot it had a camera, and that wasn’t a really big deal either, because I only used if for doing video chat/meetings, and really, I didn’t like that. I feel like people being able to see me while I’m on the phone is something my world just isn’t ready for yet. It would mean my hair has to look okay a lot more of the time, and that’s just pressure I’m not built for.

So like I said, the camera was broken and the CD drive was broken, but it was still mostly a good computer, except that it didn’t really close, because the week after the first Sock Summit, Tina had accidentally thrown it on the floor.  (I’ve never blamed her. She threw her own on the floor accidentally a few weeks later, probably out of guilt.)  In any case, the drive, camera and closing thingie were broken, and then something went wrong with the video card (I don’t know what that does, but it was a problem with seeing stuff) and we got that fixed, but then it broke again. About the same time as that, the computer started moving about as fast as glaciers do, and I decided to overlook that too.  Yay verily, I was a fountain of laptop quirk tolerance, until it started with the do-overs. 

I’d be writing along, working on something, and whammo. The computer – without any warning whatsoever, would restart.  I’d look up at the screen, for two seconds the spinning-rainbow-beachball-of-doom would appear, be almost immediately replaced by the blue-screen-of-death, then all would go quiet, and I’d hear the macbook "I’m starting up now" chime-of-cheerfulness, and there I’d be.  All my programs shut down, all my work gone (except if I’d been saving regularly, which towards the end was starting to be about 80% of my typing time) and there would be my desktop, sitting there looking exactly like it hadn’t just totally shafted me,  ready to allegedly do what I wanted (as long as it wasn’t anything it had already quit doing, and as long as I didn’t want it done with any degree of speed.)

It was when these global electronic seizures were happening about eight times a day that I decided I needed a new strategy.  Joe and I went over the budget, and decided that a computer would be a business write-off, and a well timed one.  We went outside and looked at the roof to make sure that there wasn’t a squirrel ripping a hole in it that was just about to cost the same as a macbook (that’s what happened to the computer budget last year)  and then I bought one.   All of this is a long way of saying that my new computer is very nice, although we’re still in the getting to know each other phase.  The new laptop munched up my photo library, and Joe worked some magic to get it back, and now I’ve had to learn eighty-seven new things to replace the things that I used to be able to do really simply.  It’s that first part of an upgrade that feels like a downgrade.  You know everything will be better if you can just hang in there, but right now, in the name of all wool everywhere can’t I just post a picture to the blog? Just one? Please?

It took me an hour, and some very unladylike language, and I believe Natalie may never recover from the fact that I wanted to fist-bump her when I figured it out, but I’m pretty sure that there’s a picture right there. 
If there isn’t, just pretend you see something. Just make it up. I can’t handle the truth.

(PS.  I don’t know what was so confusing about the yardage thing yesterday, but let’s clarify.  The pattern calls for 5 balls of Rowan Pure wool.  Added up, that’s 850m.  I am using a different yarn, and it has more metres per skein.  I have three balls of that, but together, they add up to 834m.  Everybody who thinks I’m trying to make three balls be five balls needs to chill out.  I am trying to make three be five, but my balls are bigger than those balls and so my fewer balls are really quite similar to the other balls, even though numerically speaking, three and five are quite different, in this case we are dealing in total wool mass, which is unrelated to individual unit size of said wool units.   Simple really.)