Readjustment

December 23, 2007

It's been a week without any school and in some ways I feel like I've been transported back and forth between the late 50's and the computer age.

The feeling of "what do I do now" was really quite strong all this week, especially in the days after graduation. Occasionally I'll yell out "I DON'T HAVE ANY MORE SCHOOL"

The family humors me.

And then there have been the technology issues.

A week before my final exam, my main home computer just up and died. It had been giving me some fits and starts for a couple of weeks, first with this part crashing, then another.

Finally it just rolled over and died.

The good news was that the hard disks were able to be saved. The bad news was that it too me too attempts to get a new machine working. The weekend before the final I went and purchased a replacement machine from one of the big box stores and spend most of two days getting it up and working again.

Then it decided to start freaking out and I decided to toss it into the return item heap. I waited till the day after the final and returned it to the store. The way their policy worked was that if I took something else I saved a 15% restocking fee.

I poked around and removed the covers from a couple of different machines to see if they had room inside for the hard drives I wanted to add and finally found one that looked like it would get by.

Thus started round two of the computer rebuild. I immediately took it apart, replaced the power supply, the video card and added three hard drives to the inside of the box.

It all worked, except for the DVD - which one kind of needs to load software. It was either use the old one from the dead machine or take the thing back apart and reassemble it so it could be returned. I opted for Gateway to ship out a new drive.

It takes about a day to reload a machine - and in my case, close to two days. But then, what the heck, if it's computer repair week, why not go whole hog and rebuild the upstairs office machine that is sounding like it is going to die. And while you are at it, why not reformat the hard drive on your laptop. It's getting slow and it's been 4 years since it was band spanking new.

In between computer repairs I cooked lunches and dinners, and finally by Friday afternoon all the machines were put back together. I celebrated by doing a couple of loads of laundry.

Tonight the Christmas music is playing and I really decided to do the 50's thing whole hog. I made cookies from scratch.

Ok, so I've had the recipe since December 19, 1998, but better late than never right?

Talk about new and old, I yelled up to the boy that I had hot cookies. The door was shut, the music was playing and he never heard a word I said. So I walked over to my computer and popped up the AOL instant messanger and sent him an IM...

YO BOY..

YO Dad...

I got hot cookies and cold milk down here...

Door opened immediately.

The boy said "Wow" after eating one of them.

I though they were awesome too.

Check out Annie Taintor's web site. She's been making the fridge magnets and such since 1985. And she lives in middle of freaking nowhere in New Mexico of all places.