New Kid In Town

Some things escalate quickly. At some point last week, I was doing my normal chat thing with H, who mentioned she was getting new furniture. This meant the old furniture, still in good condition, had to go somewhere, and it was free for the taking. A quick consult with the rest of the family, and Google Maps, and Saturday turned into Road Trip Day, as we crossed three states, to bring home two coffee tables, a kitchen table, one floor lamp, and the big surprise, a laptop.

Well then. Game changer. My back and eyeballs both thank H, profusely, and fears that meeting in person would be one of those things where chatting with an internet buddy doesn’t translate so well into face to face in the really real world. That did not happen in this case. Two meals, a walking tour of H’s lovely town, and one glass of homemade strawberry mint lemonade later, we loaded up Housemate’s car, plans for future visits, both ways, bandied about, and headed for home.

The day after was pretty much useless, because we were all tired puppies, and generally lazed about, tossed a frozen pizza in the oven, and made some attempts at computer games. Mine were on my existing desktop, because A) that’s where my saves were, B) I didn’t have to move from my comfy corner, and C) the same “this person I have been chatting with daily, for a year and a half, will obviously hate me, within five minutes of meeting in real life” (again, this did not happen) nervousness shows up when one is gifted a pretty darned nice computer. Forget stomach butterflies. This is stomach vampire bats.

Which is why I pushed myself (distinctly hearing H’s voice in my head, instructing. me to do so) and opened the darned thing. I found what looked like the closest thing to Word (once again, my first Mac, so whole new language going on there) and put fingers to keys. There was some uninteresting blabbering as I threw random words onto the blank white screen, and then two very important words appeared. What if, when I wiped this computer, and made it mine, I made it a writing only computer? No distractions. I do not count Sims 4 as a distraction, because it’s a great way to let actual, for-monies, stories do their thing on the back burner, while I play with my pixel people. I have other devices that can handle everyday things, so this one…this one can be where my imaginary friends come and do their thing.

I blinked at the screen for a moment, because that felt…sneaky. No bells and whistles, only fiction and blogs (and Sims, let’s be real.) What if this is part of life taking a new turn, this time, in a good direction. So far, so good, two days into this whole Mac thing. I don’t think I’ve launched missiles at Norway, or shut down the power grid, at least not yet. So far, it’s basically what I do on any other computer, with the addition of a blessedly empty document folder. Keeping things streamlined and classy; I think I could get used to that.

In a way, it’s fitting to add a new device to the family right about now. The new planner is also going the streamlined and classy route, so this makes sense. Writing planner, writing outer; it’s a natural pairing. Trio, really, because by themselves planner and keyboard are only objects. It’s when the human element comes into play, when I carve out the time for writing (and having deadlines written down is a huge, huge help in not-losing things in all the mind-clutter) and then saying a firm “no” to everything that is not writing, for that time, that’s when the magic happens.

Is a new computer going to be a magic wand that suddenly makes everything better? No, but my. back and my eyes are sure happy, and the chance to start fresh, on a machine that has seen no miscarried stories (of mine; H may tell a different tale, pun intended) is …”nice” doesn’t feel like the right word to use here. Too pat. Too expected. More like it’s one of the pieces of the puzzle, clicking into place. As my favorite Dutch proverb has been saying for hundreds of years, “pray to God, and row to shore.”

 

 

 

 

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