technological difficulties

I got my current netbook in November. I wasn't completely pleased with it at the time--despite 10x the memory of my last one and many other upgrades, it doesn't seem to function as smoothly--and now I'm rather displeased with it.

The keyboard works intermittently. Well, not the entire keyboard quits on me, just the letters A S D F and L. And the shift key. Other than that, it is Perfectly Good* so I have changed all my passwords to require none of these things. I cut and paste letters from other places on a page when it really need to type something in for a moment. I perform internet activities that rely heavily on point-and-click. Oh, and sometimes, to compensate for all those times that I push A and no A appears, I will push it once and get AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Aaaah!

Blogging is a bit of a sticky point, however, since I'm too verbose for all that cut and paste nonsense and I primarily blog about my children and all three of their names have at least one of those letters. I could resort to Thing 1, Thing 2 and Thing 3, but they'd just fight over who got to be first.

So this week's neglect was not entirely my fault. Blame Compaq. I could have blogged from work, I suppose, but since the district's looking for ways to save money, I should avoid any undue attention.

Speaking of technology, Dixie has her heart set on a touch phone. She really, really wants an iPhone. I snorted and said, "Get in line."

You're seven years old. Not iChance, kid, not iChance.

And, while on the subject of my Luddite lifestyle, the garden is halfway planted. We have red onions, green onions, potatoes, asparagus, bell peppers, poblano peppers, carrots, tomatoes, rosemary and beets in the ground. Still to plant are corn, strawberries, green beans, sugar snap peas, cucumbers, zucchini, yellow squash, acorn squash, spaghetti squash, spinach and various lettuces.

After all that is done, we're going to clear out the space around the barn and plant a little fruit tree orchard. There's room for six or eight trees. I'm still bummed that we moved from our old place just as the fruit trees were producing and the garden was starting to resemble dirt.

Still, the yard on our new house is so much better than I ever thought I'd have and we're excited to see what will grow in this new space! Having moved from a big city, I never imagined a half acre yard with fenced in growing areas and all these wonderful trees. The girls are doing a great job of helping and Charlie just jumps up and down on the trampoline, yelling at us for being boring.

Heck, if the technology keeps not functioning, I could get a lot done this year.

*My mother once had a Perfectly Good television. The old faux-wooden console type that could sit directly on the floor. The sound went out and had to be route through speakers, but other than that it was Perfectly Good. Then, the rest of the cable-watching universe upgraded beyond its capacities, so all programming had to be routed through the VCR, but other than no channels or sound, it was Perfectly Good. And, periodically, you would turn it on and, instead of a large rectangle of viewing space, all of the light and images would be concentrated into a very bright quarter-inch horizontal stripe across the screen and you had to leave it on for a few hours to 'warm up' because there was no external device one could plug into it to compensate for a lack of picture.

But it was a Perfectly Good television.