The Ink-Pot and the Palette

As desperately as I believed I wanted an oh-so-shiny, thin, sleek, sexy ASUS Zenbook, as imminent the failure of my beat-up old Dell Studio, and notwithstanding my having saved up for a fancy new laptop, the universe said, "Whoa, Nelly."

( 'Listen to your heart and what it has to say.' )

And bingo, I'm back in business. Total cost: $100 and an afternoon. I feel like I've saved a failing marriage or something.

Moral of the story? You tell me.

Okay.

I just reformatted my whole hard disk, got rid of Windows altogether, and installed Ubuntu as the sole operating system.

Staring at the Blue Screen of Geeky Diagnostics was not how I'd planned to spend my Saturday, but I'm back in business (knock on wood) as Sunday tiptoes in. I'm restoring about 20 gigabytes of My Documents right now. So far so good.

I hate computer problems, but I'll say this: deciding at 10:00 p.m. on a frustrating Saturday to just chuck the whole damn operating system (which, by the way, accounted for something like $200 of the cost of this computer...grrr...piece of crap...) had a damn-the-torpedoes feeling to it that was kind of exciting.

serenity_valley hath nudged me.

::waves at serenity_valley::

She noticed that my last post was eight weeks ago. Here's why:

1. Deadlines
2. Another hard drive crash, this one unrecoverable
3. Economy
4. Leg-warmers
5. His Dark Materials

1. Three weeks of deadline-meeting work on the project, involving evenings and weekends--I mean, evenings and weekends actually spent in the office. Working. It throws a person off, you know?

2. It's amazing how oddly floaty and cut-off I feel, having lost all my email and about a year's writing. Fifty bucks' worth of backup software and an hour's attention could have prevented this. Again. But no. Denial is a powerful force. I have finally established a regular backup procedure.

3. I'm starting to understand what "fixed income" means. The spending power of my salary has stagnated for years and is starting to creep backwards. So I'm eschewing both driving and restaurants. I've been spending a lot more time cooking and not-driving than I used to. Given number 1, above, there have been days when I've brought my breakfast, lunch, and dinner to work with me in a bag. On the bus.

4. My dancer niece tells me that leg-warmers are back in style. Oh yay. So I started knitting her a pair of stripey wool ones. And now I'm back on an obsessive knitting bender.

5. I've been listening to the marvelous audiobook version of Phillip Pullman's fantasy trilogy for the last few weeks. It's a challenging story that takes up a lot of mind-space. I want a daemon of my own!

And also? Dumbledore is gay. How cool is that?