Underwater Blogging Returns!!!

You may have noticed that the volume of posts took an abrupt dive shortly after I started working; this happened for three almost simultaneously-occurring reasons.

One, I went back to work, which inexplicably limited the amount of time available to me for such things. Go figure.

Two, my personal laptop died. It was a pretty boss machine, in its day; but that day was many days ago. It took approximately four years to boot up, the stand-by mode no longer worked, it locked up when asked to multi-task (you know, like, “please have Outlook and Word open at the same time”) and so forth and so on.

And then three, The Powers That Be at MegaBank said, No using the Internet for stuff like blogs.

Well, crud.

They are actually very generous with their policies at MegaBank. You’re allowed to jump onto Amazon to buy that birthday present you forgot to get for your charming daughter, due DAY AFTER TOMORROW, ACK! those little sundry things you just don’t have time to trot down to CVS Pharmacy to pick up, seeing as how you’re so busy working and all. And you can check your personal webmail and stuff like that (but no attaching files because, duh: It’s a bank, dude!

And by the way, yes, they are logging every.single.keystroke in on that machine.

But the kibosh was officially laid down on posting to blogs. Feh.

This essentially shut me down, blog-wise. I have a million and one fascinating things to share every day of course (quit laughing), but my methods of getting them out there to you now consist of my Treo – which I still find astonishing because I am using my PHONE to POST THINGS to the INTERNET - or, waiting until I get home after a fourteen hour day of working, commuting, child-wrangling, cooking, cleaning, updating, bill paying, gardening, canning and I’m sorry, but what was that other thing I meant to do today…?

So for the past year, I’ve been dithering around about getting myself a new, portable method of computing.

You know, like, all mobile and some junk. It has been…well, really annoying for my husband, I suspect.

I started with netbooks. All I really need, I said to myself (and my long-suffering spouse, who had to listen to this waffling), is something that can handle Word, Excel, and Internet. That’s all I need. Those three things, and I can handle 95% of our household business, and my favorite forms of entertainment, to wit, reading your blogs and writing for mine.

Well. 80%, anyway.

Maybe 75%.

And they’re relatively inexpensive, and they’re light, they boot fast and have super-long battery life and hey, it would get the job done.

Mostly.

Except…well There’s no onboard optical drive. Which I use a lot, so I know I’d end up buying an external drive and lugging it around with me everywhere.

…there goes the ‘relatively light and inexpensive’ part, and the long battery life…

And then there’s the small matter of all the software I would inevitably want to load onto the thing. Quicken, a full version of Office including Microsoft Acess, SQL Server and Management Studios, maybe Expressions for web development, definitely I’d need the tool packs I’ve gotten through the years for Excel, the statistical add ins and ow, I just bonked my head on the RAM limitations…

Soooooo, now we’re looking at laptops.

…and hence the cost starts to spiral up, because I want this and that and that and this and it must be able to blah blah blah, and for only fifty dollars MORE, I can have…

Pretty soon, I’ve built myself a $2,200 laptop that can handle the computing needs of NASA and play the Really Boss Video Games, it weighs as much as a hippo and requires a case that cannot fit under any train seat (and might just break the luggage rack if I tried to use it) and then I get all pissy and snarl something like, “Oh, I! GIVE!! UP!!!!!”

(Keep in mind that I don’t do this quietly inside my own head. Ooooooh no. I involve my husband in every last thought along the way.) (FOR OVER A YEAR.) (It’s a wonder I’m not divorced, y’all. Seriously.)

These last couple months have been particularly brutal on me, free-time-wise. While I seriously doubt anybody else really keeps tabs on these sorts of things, my available writing time has plummeted to about half of none at all. I’ve also had increasing trouble keeping up with paying bills in a timely fashion (oops), returning emails, and all that other home-business kind of stuff; we’ve been in the middle of a fairly significant project at work, which is a large part of the abrupt removal of free time, but it’s also a matter of not being able to put off other domestic chores any longer.

So I’ve been looking even harder.

But still not buying anything.

Because when it comes to spending money on something I want, but can’t prove to myself that I need, and/or can’t pinpoint a quantifiable, concrete return on investment for, I freeze up.

And then I talk it to death. And weigh options. And network about it (“What do you think of these? Here, look at these technical specs…whaddya think? This, or that? I mean, this has more RAM, but that has less storage, BUT!, this one has onboard wireless, except I don’t need that really since I already have this other thing and will want to use it instead, soooooooooooo…?”). And so forth, and so on.

…and so on, and so on, and so on…

Until finally, someone (*cough-husband-cough*) says, “Right, that’s it. The end. I’m done listening to this.”

And then comes home with a laptop.

Which he quite nobly did not chuck at my head.

Which is why I am back on the blog this morning, from under the San Francisco Bay!

Woo hoo, underwater blogging!

...now with more knitting…


remember this? Still working on it…on the second sleeve now, so only about 2,700 hours remain…ought to be done right about the time the recipient and I are entering a nursing home together…memo to me: fingering weight yarn + twisted seed stitch + adult sweater = 12-layer Crazy cake…