Author: Sharon

So, the Win7 machine is up and running.  I still haven’t solved the HDMI conundrum; but I have all of my files, and, after a little bit of noodling ’round the web, all of my programs, including my Firefox bookmarks.  Ten years’ of old wires have been (by Steve’s good offices) cleaned out from beneath my desk and the old Oki printer has been cleared off the top of my desk, thereby opening Vistas Untold.

So, yanno; It’s All Good.

Advertent readers will have noticed that the new computer’s name is Illisidi; in part due to the fact that she is smaller, lighter, and much more powerful than Jack the Giant Killer.  And if you have No Clue who Illisidi, the Aiji-Dowager is, start here and go through to here.  You can thank me later.

Next up, is the re-ordering of my office, which had to be Completely Torn Apart in order to swap out the computers, and do all the rest of the things that needed doing.  After that, it’s date night, and a fitting end of a week that was, um, more vigorous than predicted.

Hope everybody is having a lovely Saturday.

Today, I’m shifting virtual house from Jack the Giant Killer, to the newly arrived Windows7 machine, at present nameless.  This means that I will not much be around the internets today.

Everybody wish me luck for a smooth and easy migration.

I’m going in.

Here at the Cat Farm, it has been a Week of Parts.

We had the exploding computer part, and the going to the dentist part, and the Steve’s eye exam has been rescheduled for the third time since January part, and the delivery of various boxes of used books from geographically distant parts of the country part, and the arrival this morning of a bitchy headache, of which I Do Not Approve, and the arrival of the Win7 machine, of which I Do Approve, at least in theory, since I’m not going to undertake to transfer programs and files from one computer to another computer while I have a headache.

Into this week of Parts have come emails — two, one from Kimpton Hotels, and one from Starwood — tempting me to take a winter break.  Surprisingly, I find myself most tempted by Kimpton, which offers me a quirky Kimpton-y room in a hotel built inside of an historic building in downtown Philly, walking distance to museums and The Shopping.  It’s been a long, long time since I just hung out at a museum for a day, never mind a couple of museums over three days.  It would, my brain says, Be Nice.

Mind you, it’s still winter in Philadelphia, too — in fact, at last report, Philadelphia was having more winter than we here in Central Maine are currently enjoying — and I’m not a fan of walking in the slush and the wind be it city or country — but the idea of a little museum-touring mini-vacation is. . .awfully attractive.

So, if you could drop everything and take a winter break — where would you go, and what would you do?

I went to the dentist this morning.  This is monumental, because as a rule, I Don’t Do Dentists.  However, I promised Steve that I would go for a checkup and a cleaning, and I made the appointment, for March 17, and told the office that the only way this would work was if there was valium, which the dentist prescribed, so I had it on hand when the call came in yesterday, saying that they had a cancellation and could I come in this morning at 7:30.  Steve being willing to act as driver, I agreed.

Mostly it went OK, though I made a tactical error in not fetching along a teddy bear or other stuffie, and so had to borrow the House Wolf.  You’ve gotta give points to a dentist’s office that has a stuffed wolf on-call.

The good news is, no cavities.  The bad news is a low-grade infection, which I sorta knew, but was ignoring, also, there are a couple teeth that need to be capped, because I’ve dern near ground them down to nothing.  So — another appointment in four months to take care of business and I will be taking a bear along.

This is the point where you wonder why the heck I’m telling you this stuff, and this is why. . .

Over the course of my life I’ve lost at least six friends and colleagues to complications of dental issues; cases of that low-grade infection that was just ignored, or higher-grade problems that needed Serious Money to fix, when there wasn’t even Non-Serious Money in the checkbook, so it was just let go, for a while, and a while longer — until it had gone too far.

Dentists are expensive, dentists are scary, but seriously people, take care of your teeth.  If you Don’t Do Dentists, figure out what you need to do to make the experience liveable.  Valium, music and earphones, stuffed animal, a friend to sit next to the chair and hold your hand — whatever it takes, right?

Promise me.

So this morning, with a snap! heard through the house, Jack the Giant Killer, the venerable Windows XP desktop, left this mortal realm.  I’m hoping this is a temporary death and that Jack can be revived with the installation of a new power supply, and that the neutrinos escaping from the explosion of what is now certainly the Former Power Supply didn’t nuke the hard drive.

It would be. . .mildly inconvenient if I lost the hard drive, most of the important stuff is backed up.  And the Book is Safe — I apologize to the writers reading here, I should have said that first.

If Jack is truly lost to us, I’ll be hooking Ox up to the big screen and the Funny Looking Keyboard.  I do NOT have the budget for a new desktop this year.  Gah.

For now, I’m writing on the Mencken Table via Ox, from which I will be sporadically available to the internets.

In the meantime, having done the day’s murder, I have chores to do.

Everybody stay safe.

(The heading comes from Rachel’s Song, by James McMurtry.  Here’s your link.)