Flashes of Panic

A few months ago, I was reading a blog in which the poster wrote, “Love what’s in front of you.”

I responded in a comment, “I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop. Aside from some furniture, that leaves me with my laptop and the fridge, and much as I may love either of them, I doubt they’ll love me back.”

I don’t really love the fridge, but I think over the past year and a half I’ve spent more of my waking hours with that laptop, a 12” G4 Powerbook, than with any single sentient being. (Iz tries to tip the balance by waking me up when I’m sleeping, but he sleeps so much himself that he’s not really pulling it off.) I’ve been using it for a bit more than three and a half years, and in that time I’ve stuck a few CDs in it, taken it apart, put it back together, replaced the optical drive, the keyboard, and the RAM, crammed the HDD full with photos, music, and recorded interviews, flown and driven all over this country plus Canada and Japan, done enough freelance writing to pay for the computer, hacked together several web apps, and installed more software than I care to think about, to handle more tasks than I could have conceived of when I bought it. If I get sappy about a pair of spikes I’ve raced in four times, imagine how I feel about this computer.

With that much use, you can imagine that it’s getting a bit beat up. The keyboard—the second keyboard—has some loose keys. There are scratches around the case, and in a few places the contours are not quite what they were originally milled to be. And there’s a CD stuck in the optical drive. (I’ve still got to figure out how to get that out.)

The MacBook arrived yesterday. It has a lot to recommend it, including a working optical drive, but it’s not love (yet).

(Where’s the old one going? Check back here and look under “increasing interest.” Then remember that I have nieces, and their father is an engineer, too.)

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