October 3, 2009

A Meditative Act




Stuff. 1978.



Himself: Nothing to apply for yesterday. On next to last of the box constructions….then, after the finishing work he will be on to my wood project for Bee.

Herself: Only one donation yesterday. Really bad. There were some books for me to price and shelve so I was busy. One of the books was a 1934 book club edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with illustrations by Rockwell Kent. When priced, I know this will go for more than the usual price of three bucks for a hardbound.

Reading: Finished Bread Alone by Judith Ryan Hendricks. A romance of a different sort that fit me well at the moment.

Balance: Half an hour at Amvets where I found a new-used $85.00 Speedo for $4.98. Heaven, actually.

Life is just little things. Little decisions. Shall I go to work with G or stay home and drag and drop files to the new backup computer? Or….shall I go up to the park with him, and while he works go see the Calder show at the Fine Art Gallery?

A deciding factor is Vista’s intransience. To drag and drop files from a 64 bit Vista computer to a 32 bit XP computer is a bit like attempting to cultivate a garden in baked dry adobe earth. Believe me, I have tried. Reduced to tears more than once during this supposedly simple operation, I kept saying Vista is just like Windows 98 with it’s freezing. If this computer wasn’t brand new, I would have kicked it off the balcony.

“We could have just put the hard drives from the old computer into the new backup and dragged and dropped in the one computer,” he told me several times.

I, not knowing the vagaries of Vista, should have taken his advice.

Suffice it to say if you drag and drop something over to something you already did, and you can’t always see what you have done as the colors are so timid, Vista politely asks if you would like to just copy over the top of the existing files.

Just cancel. You have it once. Yes, I am growling. “Oh, just copy it over the top of the one you have,” he says. Don’t do it. Stop. Rethink. Halt. Alto. Just cancel and move on to the next.

What will happen is that everything freezes and you go nowhere.

Yesterday I dragged and dropped most of my old journals over to the new backup computer. Today I may finish that action. When I get too insane, and I will, I can always move on to the eternally tedious act of ripping off a binding on the red quilt or dealing with that little two drawer file in those shelves up there. It sits here just to my left waiting for my attention.

Now quietly this morning, G told me that the 32 bit computer didn't recognize the network yesterday. That was the problem. Gee, couldn't he have fixed that yesterday she says still waiting to pull more hair out.

By lunch the computers started acting up again, but this time turning off Avast restored communications. From two hours to download a file, now it is taking five minutes. Who knows what the next problem will be.

It’s really all meditative. Right?

2 comments:

  1. Oh, Maggie, I wish I were so competent with computers. My files are a hopeless mess. My pictures are all mixed up.

    That's a sweet little drawing of stuff.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yesterday, I was "chatting" with the pastor I work with in Kenya. We were talking about training material he needs for the up-and-coming workshops. I quickly sent him 20 small (a few hundred KB each) files. I went off downtown and came back a few hours later, only to discover that he was still sitting in the Internet cafe (which he pays a fee per 15 minutes) downloading the files onto his usb stick. I felt so awful having ensued more costs for him than it would have been to copy all the files on an usd stick here and send it to him in the mail. I just forgot how slow modems connections were.

    ReplyDelete

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