another Sunday

  Well.  The computer is back up and running, both monitors are on, and the room is completely different than it has been for 11 years.  The room still has some details to sort out, but the computer is back up and running like new.

It gets easier the fourth or fifth time you’ve done it, to reformat your only computer’s hard drive.  The computer might be from 2005, but I bought the solid-state drive this year and changed out the old one (well, it needed to be reformatted too) and installed and formatted the new, quiet drive.

Luckily, or by experience, either way, I had backups, and after updating the XP operating system with more than 209 updates/downloads from Microsoft, I could reload the sound-card software ( I love XP – it finds that stuff for you, even without install discs) and the printer and scanner software. Once I had that up and running, I felt like it was ok to put the AGP video card back in.  It’s nice to have two monitors to look at.

It’s kind of hard to believe how much the computer has crept into daily life – I use it to do a lot of things, and read online a lot, so it was disorienting to not have the computer at all.  It seemed like a long time, although, in retrospect, it wasn’t but a couple of days that I was unsure about this machine.

The updates took some time to download and install, so once I had the computer and associated furniture – desks and cabinets in place, I had time to move the other stuff into their new places.  It’s a studio apartment, pretty much perfect for one guy, and so I don’t have a lot of stuff or a lot of space to fill with stuff.  It looks really different now – new, in a way.

Looks like I’m going out to The Gorge on Tuesday.  There’s a new clerk at Plaid Pantry up the street who is from Michigan and has not seen the Gorge, at all.  I get to be the first one to show her.  I think there is a very interesting story there to learn – finally talked her into taking a Gorge tour with me.

Ah, the middle of November already.  This 50th year has gone by in a haze.  I passed 50,000 miles on my car last month too.

Onwards, I guess.  You don’t really have much choice about that anyway.

 *****