Ahh, finally: my laptop is back, repaired, in my hands, on its dock, feeling fine. The motherboard came in on Friday afternoon, but the repair guy wasn’t around so I spent the WHOLE WEEKEND not working on stuff that I thought I would be working on. The whole weekend. A three-day weekend.
Instead I spent a lot of time on the desktop machine at home. I even considered migrating some of the photo stuff to it because I did upgrade its graphic card last year or the year before (I can’t remember which right now and it doesn’t matter) but then I realized that the whole main harddrive on that computer is 27GB. 27 gig! I can run through 27 gig in a day with my camera. There’s no way that would work for processing. It’ll stay the game machine.
So after a whole three-day weekend of puzzling and puzzling, I finally bought myself a home laptop. This is my work laptop, and I shouldn’t be using it for home stuff, anyway, right? So I spec’d myself out a nice Dell XPS, heavy on the processor and RAM and not so heavy on the harddrive, because I just need space to process but I’m using external harddrives for storage now.
I’m very excited about this, when you dig through my guilt of spending more money, because I haven’t bought a new computer for myself in five and a half years. I did upgrade the desktop machine three years ago, but clearly it wasn’t much of an upgrade. I obviously didn’t upgrade the harddrive!
It was a weird kind of weekend without any pictures to process. I might have procrastinated if I had had access to the machine, but I might not have because I was kind of on a roll. And I had a stack of X-Files to plow through, and my brother lent me Band of Brothers last week, and I’m just started on Carnivale… it could have been an epic processing weekend.
Instead, I didn’t do none of that.
We had a great New Year’s Eve at my parents’ house on Wednesday night. I’m not sure how I managed to go thirty years in my family without ever playing Risk or thirty-one years without ever playing Phase 10, but I learned Phase 10 for the first time on Wednesday night and we played it and Encore (a music game) at the same time. So as we’re playing each hand of Phase 10, my mother is calling out words and we had to come up with songs that had that word in the lyrics. It was fun.
My sister also begifted me a cheap Dance Dance Revolution knockoff, and made me open it early so that we could try it out. For some reason, she and her notboyfriend love watching me do Dance Dance Revolution. Only none of us owns a video game machine with the DDR mat, so really they just like watching me do it at this arcade version of the game down at the Lake of the Ozarks. Well, we’ve done it twice that way. So they’ve decided to make it a permanent part of our lives. The knockoff version had a big mat and attached directly to the television with pre-1990s style graphics, and had a couple of other games (track and field, baseball, maybe something else) with it. We played with that for awhile. It succeeded in getting a cheap midi version of Don’t Cha by the Pussycat Dolls stuck in my head for hours, until I had 1999 by Prince stuck in my head. Actually, I’ve had a series of songs stuck in my head for the past few days. Today I think I put It Takes Two in the heads of every one of my Facebook friends, who should all thank me.
I stayed the night up at my parents’ house and then we all did Christmas on New Year’s Day, which took hours and hours. I think we were all exhausted when we left around 5pm. I was glad that I was not the one driving home to Kansas City, like my brother and sister-in-law.
It was clear by Friday that my computer wasn’t going to work for me, so I did some cleaning and some laundry, and mostly did not much except finish Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. When Tracy came home, I thought we were going to go grocery shopping, but she sold me out by agreeing to the first alternate plans that came her way, and we ended up eating okay pizza with my sister and her notboyfriend, getting some Blockbuster rentals, trying that late-night cookie place downtown, and checking on various cats that some of us had agreed to cat-sit while other, cooler people were out of town.
We thought about going to the movies and decided against that, purely by inaction alone. Also, indecision about what actually to watch, I think. We did watch all the movie rentals and I got through two of my three X-Files discs, so clearly there was a lot of sitting around this weekend, but in my head it wasn’t that lazy.
I think one of the other big things from the weekend was that we played and finished a game of Scrabble last night, with multiple five- and six-letter words. I think this might have been my first-ever game of Scrabble, which seems ridiculous, but it was never a game that was around our house or a staple of these game-playing family parties. I’ve always wanted to play it, but never really have.
So there was a lot of game-playing this weekend. I also tried a first-person shooter game for PlayStation last night, and I pretty much sucked at that.
It was a good, fun, hugely long weekend. I guess I’m grudgingly glad I didn’t spend all of it glued to a computer monitor, though I am very happy to have my real laptop back.
Hey! I want to try that DDR (or, as some know it BBR…).