Life suddenly gets busy again

For over a year, I was a mere housewife, with no more responsibility to deal with than writing a couple thousand words a day and then coming home and cooking dinner.

That ended when I suddenly landed a "dream job" - only it's not what many people would call a dream job, but it is what I really wanted to do all along (besides be a writer and/or work for NASA.) I'm now a network technician for a small IT company, and my days are busy busy busy with unfortunately no more morning writing sessions.

Add to this the fact that my beloved Wuffi, my Acer Aspire One netbook, developed a sudden allergy to Windows. Multiple attempts to resuscitate it failed, and although it is happily swimming along with an Ubuntu Linux Netbook installation, I'm certain it's living on borrowed time. And the software I use to write on with, yWriter, is still fairly buggy in its Linux environment, making actual writing nearly impossible.

So! New job means less time to write. Dead netbook means nothing to write on outside my main PC, which is fine but which also entails all the distractions of home.

My writing hasn't completely ground to a halt, but I'm finding myself facing days where writing 100-200 words is a challenge.

Things will change soon, though. Since I have a job again, I have disposable income of my own again as well. A new laptop will be mine in short order! And no mere netbook this time. While it was nice to stuff a laptop into my purse, I'll take a large, fully featured 17" monitor this next go round.

Additionally, for my job, I had to upgrade my phone. All those query letters sent out with my old phone number... *sigh* Oh well, all the more reason to start hammering out new query letters with my NEW telephone number on them! My new phone also has a qwerty keyboard on it, so when I'm incredibly bored I can pop off those 100-200 words.

Maybe.

The dying screams of an aging computer

A few weeks ago, my fuzzy little cat-child Weaver decided to leap onto my desk, directly onto a freshly made giant mug of hot tea. The tea spilled all over the computer desk, the computer, the wall behind the computer, a video game controller, and my external hard drive. Fortunately, the only permanently destroyed piece of electronics was the controller, but the computer itself has been on the fritz on and off ever since.

What started with some skips and freezes eventually cascaded into blue screens of death. I'm no slouch when it comes to computers (having worked in IT for several years), and while I managed to stem the flow of blood from the motherboard by doing a clean installation of Windows 7, I've been having a hard time with the card readers.

I keep all my writing on an 8 gig SDHC card. This allows me to transfer it back and forth from my desktop computer to my laptop (a tiny little Acer Aspire netbook) instantly.

When the tea spilled, several events happened in a rapid sequence. I yanked out the external hard drive, ran to the kitchen for paper towels, and tried to keep the mess from getting into the inner workings of the computer case. The latter effort succeeded, but the act of tearing out the USB external caused me to actually pull out the little black plastic stub that is enclosed in the USB port itself. This means that port is now completely dead and has a tendency to short out the rest of the ports on the front of the PC.

I believe I've got everything working, and under control again. I hope so. The netbook is unable to handle anything that requires more memory than Open Office or Google Chrome!

The time has perhaps come for me to replace the desktop. I will probably build my own to save money, but it's a pity - this computer is only two and a half years old.

Nothing lasts forever.