Technical Difficulties & Longing for Analog

It's a lazy Sunday. I slept in a little, which is hard for me, because I am still on Daylight Savings Time, having trouble sleeping past 5 am, and ready for bed by 9:30 pm. For brunch, I baked a sweet potato, the way Uncle Bill told me to and cooked one of his Jamaican Jerk sausages. Bill makes some of the best sausage I have ever tasted. I bought these at the final Saturday market.

Kitchenpoet has been battling technical difficulties all week, the biggest being the crash of the desktop computer. I preferred working on it, rather than my laptop, for many reasons, starting with still liking XP over Vista and its having twice as many USB ports to allow everything to be connected. Down it went, taking my current work with it, declaring the system32 folder missing or corrupted, and instructing me how to repair it using the original set-up cd-rom. Said cd is in storage, in Arkansas, and there's no way I can get there before spring.

All the online experts I consulted agreed the original disk was necessary, and I responded accordingly. The first step was to rearrange computers, putting the laptop in the center of the connections for printer, portable HD, external HD, and card reader with a wireless mouse taking one of the three ports. Like I said, the other computer had enough ports to have everything hooked up. Then I began sorting, deleting, because the laptop HD had less than 2GB available. One card full of photos would overflow it. So far, I've opened up another 10GB, and the other drives have been carefully rid of debris and duplication. The palm-sized drive has 140+ available, and that will be my main working area for a while.

My laptop was a first edition Vista, and has been a pain in the ass from the beginning. I went to the stores looking for XP, but they had all been updated. Some smart sellers, in other places than Arkansas, kept some XP machines and sold all they had immediately. A cottage industry sprang up among hackers of restoring Vista machined to XP. My laptop has a little hiccup, when it loses contact with the USB ports. My warning is a bubble onscreen, which says the built-in thumb-reader, which I've never used, is disconnected and must be plugged into a USB port.

I long ago learned the simple procedure of going to the most recent restore point, and was ready, when it burped that bubble in the lower left corner. I checked my ports and found them dead as doornails. Wireless mouse won't work, along with all peripherals. Did I mention before how much I hate this little pressure pad, too? Now, all is restored, and I can get back to business.

Thinking about the cd-rom in storage, made me remember with longing my books stashed in a climate-controlled space, also in Arkansas. Those are the pictures I just found. Did I mention I've been a bookworm most of my life? I wish I could curl up next to my wood stove with some of those books, now.