Thursday, October 16, 2008

Kicking the Habit

Nope, not the smoking one, or the drinking one......the COMPUTER one. An addiction I didn't even know I had till about 4 weeks ago. Like all good addictions, it sort of crept up on me. (The smoking one I gave up long ago. The drinking one I'm still holding on to a little bit.)

Our computer crashed.....and I mean CRASHED AND BURNED.... in mid-September. I'd always heard people talk about this disaster, but it had never happened to me. Here's the one thing I've learned: get an external hard drive and save everything you might ever want again on it. Which I intend to do as soon as I can. Not that I know what one is, how to hook it up, or anything about it. But my computer savvy sister informs me it's what I need. I can't believe all the stuff that I've lost. Most of it was trivial or easily replaced. (Isn't almost everything we "file away"?) But some of it, I really, really wish I had gotten to keep. Alas, never to be recovered now.

In the last four weeks, I have paid many a visit to the library to use their computers. Mind you, only for one hour at the time. Then they kick you off and you have to wait another 30 minutes before they'll let you sign back on. I thought I could just go once a week and delete all the rubbish and sit on the rest till the computer came back from Computer Doc-in-the-Box. Not a chance. Every couple of days I was ITCHING to get over there and find out what was going on. (Except for last week when I had to have a little outpatient surgery. I didn't much care about anything except being still then.) Invariably, it was nothing, but I just felt so left out. The world was turning and I wasn't. I hated it.

Last weekend, we got our computer back. It's not back to "normal" yet. I'm still trying to get things back to the way they were. But at least I can check email. I can research stuff. I can SHOP. It was nice to take a little break from being so connected, but I was very definitely ready to get back to the World Wide Web/Universe.