Kawaii!

Mmm, sushi USB drives. Yum.

My little neighborhood

Oh, sweet internet, hold me closer.

I missed you.

Several days ago, I knocked my laptop off the table, leaving it dangling by its mangled adaptor cord while I keened “Ohnoohnoohnoohno” and a random assortment of sounds usually confined to H.P. Lovecraft stories. Of course, ordering a replacement is a simple matter… although less simple if one’s access to online ordering has just been destroyed.

Now that my new adaptor has arrived and I’m reconnected to my usual web haunts, I am curiously aware of how constrained I felt when denied that access. No library catalog? No email? No Dooce or Mimi Smartypants? Indeed, I had to disrupt my schedule and spend several hours one day in the university computer lab to check my email, write several internet-deprivation addled emails in response, do some writing, some research, and generally catch my breath online. Simply being here in this nowhere that is my online neighborhood, I feel like I’m taking a deep breath after a cooling rainfall. It’s good to be back.

butterfingers…

Only a few hours after the CD player dismantling, I dropped, holy cats, dropped my laptop. I flipped my mattress, throwing (yes, okay: holy cats, _throwing_) aside the laptop I had left unnoticed on the bed, on the other side of the jumble of covers. (Well, it was sleeping.) In the hour or so I had spent earlier that afternoon trying to coax my CD player back to life, I had gradually drawn close to accepting the likelihood of its demise, but this leisurely grieving process was nothing compared to the flashing instant after I heard the sharp THWACKETY THWACK of my six-week-old laptop hitting the floor and, probably, the wall and baseboard heater on its way down. Who knew you could pass through all of the Kubler-Ross stages instantly?

Phew. It seems fine. I am only faintly embarrassed to admit that I kissed it, whether in gratitude or to make it feel better, I don’t know.

…and snickers:

An unrelated matter: I was looking up a book on Jan van Eyck, when I was informed by the thorough folks at Amazon that there were other items that might be of scholarly interest to a student of Northern Renaissance art.