can you tell the difference?

My computer died a couple of weeks ago.  I know, I know.  It's sad.  But, mostly, it's pretty friggin' inconvenient.  And really kind of unexpected and sudden.  Here's what happened.  I did my normal late night surfing one night, then went to bed.  The next morning I sat down to see what was new, but what was new was that my computer wouldn't boot up.  It wouldn't do anything, really, except sit and spin.  I shut it down.  I turned it on.  Nothing. 

Fortunately, we have a laptop, so I was able to do pretty much everything I needed to do from there.  But all my bookmarks were gone.  And I couldn't access my é.doc, which I always keep right on my desktop.  The é.doc is where I keep all my frequently-used symbols that I hate to look up all the time.  Here is the entire content of that document, if you are interested:

"¡       ü      é    °  ©   ½  ⅓  ¼   ¾   ë

In knitting, "pm" stands for "place marker" and "sm" stands for "slip marker".  The markers are there to help you remember to do the seed stitch border. 

 Hope that helps!

Anne"

 

 

Yeah, that last part is what I mail to the dozens of people who email me about a section of a knitting pattern I wrote that they don't understand.  It is confusing, I guess, but hundreds of other people have successfully navigated the pattern.  But I digress.

 

As soon as Ben got home from work, he was on my computer problem.  He tried all the things I had already tried.  I know he has to do this, but it is maddening, all the same.  After doing many other things that I didn't do, he reported that my hard drive was dying.  Now, I know virtually nothing about computers, but I know that my hard drive is essentially my computer.  So that sounded bad. 

 

Ben went right to work, backing up everything on the dying hard drive as best he could.  He went online (on another computer, of course) and ordered me a new hard drive, which arrived in good time.  Then came the real work.  And I know it was a shit-ton of work even though I don't have the slightest idea what it all was.  If you are computer savvy, you understand all about re-formatting and installing and recovering.  If, like me, you aren't, you still probably know It takes a lot of time and effort.  Not to exaggerate, but hours of time and effort.

Day  by day, I got more and more of my computer back.  And I was delighted to have it back, as I was learning to hate the laptop, with its very touchy and surprising touch pad.  Instead of moving the cursor, it would suddenly enlarge the image I was looking at ten or twelve times.  It would abruptly shut down what I was reading and offer me something else.  I don't like that.

So here I am today, with my brand new computer.  Oh, it looks all the same from here.  Ben even found the image I have always used for my desktop - a photo of Julie reading on the glider on our patio in Kent, with Bobo and Lucie on either side of her.  I tell you, it brought tears to my eyes the day I logged on and noticed them all sitting there as they always have. 

So, yes, it looks the same, but it works so much better.  For example, I am using my normal browser to write this blog post, where I used to have to switch to Chrome to access it.  I lost all the photos that were on my desktop, it's true, but I chose to use that as an opportunity to clean off my desk, as it were.  All the documents I had scattered there were placed in folders named "recipes" or "patterns".  It just makes sense. 

I am very, very happy to have my computer back, needless to say.  But what does need to be said is THANK YOU, BEN.  I appreciate it more than you can know.  And now I have the opportunity to tell you so.