Laptop at the Quilt Shop.

Yesterday was my day to watch the quilt shop and I had this great idea of bringing Laurie’s faithful old laptop with me along with my thumb drive in hopes that I could use the time normal spent reading and dealing with customers, writing and dealing with customers instead.

So, with (armor clad) laptop case in hand and thumb drive around neck, off I went with my head whirling with ideas of bloggish type literary wonders that I would write while whiling away the time between customers. At least that was the grand plan anyway.

It was mid-afternoon before I actually found the time to bring out the laptop, connect it to the power supply and set the whole thing on my lap. This isn’t quite as simple as you might think. The laptop in question was manufactured around 2003, one of those HP/Compaq affairs that weighed in around eight pounds or so, had a 15″ wide screen display and every possible connector, slot, media reader, optical drive, input and output you could possibly hope for adorning all 3 out of four sides not to mention the various buttons thrown in for good measure. In short, the laptop was a real monster. Once I got myself, the laptop and the armor plated biasfree that the laptop had to sit upon all situated in one of the 3 hammock chairs she sells at the shop, it was time to begin.

And my legs immediately went to sleep. I said the thing was heavy.

So up comes the briefcase on which the laptop was sitting*, set the whole assembly on floor (my back starts cursing at me), dance the tingling away, sit back down, pick up the whole affair from the floor and lift once more into my lap (screams, more cursing from the nether regions) and make sure bulk of weight is away from any major arteries and so…

*There is an inherent design flaw in the laptop that effectively removes any possibility of actually using one’s lap to put said laptop upon and that’s the position of the cooling fans and the intake vents thereof. This placement, being on the bottom right side of the machine, effectively blocks off any possible airflow into the machine once it is actually placed on one’s lap. Suffice it to say that if I don’t use the (armor clad) briefcase (about 3 lbs added weight) to set the laptop upon it doesn’t take long before the internal workings begin making small screeching sounds and smoke starts curling up from the exhaust vent located on the side. But I digress…

…now we’re ready to go.

So there sits the login in screen with two accounts present–Laurie’s and mine. At this point it occurs to me that I haven’t logged into my user account since the summer of 2005 so I wasn’t too sure what might greet me once I logged in but gathering my courage about me, log in I did.

First, the “Security Center” threw a red alert in my face stating my antivirus database was out of date, that my firewall was late in arriving and why the hell am I not doing something abut this? Since there’s no internet connection available at the quilt shop the ultimate answer to this was, for all purposes, not much. So I told the thing to stop worrying and shut up.

Next it was the “Unused Icon Wizard” popping up on the scene wanting to remove all my little icons from my desktop which I promptly told to go join his buddy the “Security Center”, have a couple beers and to stop bothering me, there was writing to do.

It was at this point I realized that my legs had ceased, once again, to exist. Repeated above routine except this time I had to beg my back’s forgiveness and then walk around the building twice before my legs finally rejoined my body.

Back at the laptop I soon discovered that either my eyesight had deteriorated far beyond any ability to clearly make out the text on the screen or that the fonts were actually too small. It turned out to be a combination of both.

Once in awhile in the course of using your computer, either at home or at work, you will run across some simple OS function you need to perform, the last performance being a year or two ago, that you simply can’t remember how it’s done. When’s the last time you actually changed you display properties? No, not the Desktop wallpaper or the screen saver, I mean things like the font size and not only the size but where various text might reside in and about your OS? That plus the title bar size, message text size, windows text size and…well, you get the point. Twenty minutes and two themes later I finally had things where I could actually read them and the title bars of a sufficient size where you could hit the “Close”, “Restore” and “Minimize” buttons on the first try.

Now it was around 4:00 PM (I began this grand adventure nearly 2 hours before) and much to my dismay I discovered yet another obstacle in my path to yet more blogging greatness…

…I had completely forgotten what I had wanted to write in the first place.

So in order to keep the entire project from becoming an complete and utter failure, I wrote this instead. And I had to move the draft from the laptop to my trusty old PC at home before I could finish it. In essence, what was supposed to be a churning out of at least 3 fine pieces of writing in a single afternoon turned out to be a single piece of literary dribble hacked out in two days time.

Best laid plans of mice and bloggers and all that.