baroque_mongoose

The new laptop did arrive before I left, so I threw it in the laptop bag along with the mouse and a couple of other bits of kit, and took the whole lot up with me. I was meant to be attending a Zoom meeting last night, but there was a network problem so I wasn't able to download Zoom on it at that point; this has been fixed since. I've also been adjusting all the settings and things the way I like them, so I have my Girl Genius desktop wallpaper again, have installed Linux Biolinum because that is my default font (plus all the software I use regularly that didn't come pre-installed; I was delighted to see that GIMP actually did), logged back into most of the main sites I use (except I can't remember what e-mail address I used for Mastodon, so am not back there yet), and generally fettled the thing. It is very much faster than the old one; it pulled all the files off the memory sticks in less than half the time it took for the old one to put them there.

Mum is not in such a dire state as I'd been led to understand, but apparently she has perked up a fair bit since earlier in the week. Not being in hospital is doing her good. Granted, she still can't get out of bed because her blood pressure is so low, and she's still having trouble eating and drinking; but she's getting more down than she was in hospital, and she's a lot more comfortable (plus she can sleep, since there's nobody bustling about in the night, or anything beeping, or anyone waking her up at 2 am to take her blood pressure). She's still very much all there mentally, and she can hold a coherent conversation, but can't speak either very loudly or very clearly so it can be hard to understand what she says. She also has a tendency to nod off suddenly in the middle.

So that's the way of things at the moment. I'll be back on Tuesday (or earlier if Sibyl misbehaves, but I'm aiming for Tuesday); I may not be posting every day while I'm up here. I'll just have to see how it goes.

This laptop has been ailing for a little while. To be honest it's never been great; it's a Friday afternoon job that has been kept going by my amazing computer guru for far longer than anyone would have expected. (My amazing computer guru is Leah Rowe of Minifree Ltd: https://minifree.org/ I know, the website looks like pants, but it doesn't matter - if you want a good Linux machine that doesn't have a load of bloatware or privacy invasion software, Leah is your bod.)

So I have been trying to explain to Leah by e-mail that I need a new laptop. Leah, however, while an absolute whiz with computers, is also the most absent-minded person I know bar none. Did I mention that d'Artagnan is absent-minded? He has nothing on Leah. Consequently, the message was not getting through. Leah had somehow got it through their head that I wanted a repair. (I do want a repair, because I'm hoping that this thing can at least be fettled up enough to use as emergency back-up; but the main thing is the new laptop.)

This morning, it crashed, and I could not get it started again. I'd been expecting that, but it was still about the worst possible timing. Fortunately I have Leah's number written down on a piece of paper (not stored in the laptop!), so I rang them up and explained the situation. When I told them what was on the screen, they didn't even bother trying to talk me through trying to get it booted again - that was dead, short of a professional fix.

So I ordered a new laptop and said I'd pay as soon as I could get onto another machine to do it, and rang some friends and arranged to go round and borrow a laptop later. I then had to go and have my annual blood test, which is usually a fraught affair, because I am so hard to get blood from that I should probably change my name to Stone. I was really not looking forward to it. Usually it takes several attempts, and I'm one of those people whose blood pressure tanks under stress, so then I feel faint and it's all fairly awful. But this time it went miraculously right; I was straight in and out like a normal person. It worked first time and I didn't feel a thing. On the way to my friends' house I passed my own house, and it just so happened that our regular postie was outside it in her van. She saw me coming, got out of the van, and said, "Oh, I've got a couple of things for you I couldn't deliver because you weren't in." So I had her pop them into the bag on the back of my scooter for me; and I was so glad about that, because one of them was my new calligraphy stuff, and I am finding calligraphy extremely good for de-stressing at the moment.

I went round to my friends' house, where they'd got the laptop set up for me. It was Windows, and I'm not used to that, but what I mainly needed to do was get into my e-mail and my bank account. I paid for the new laptop, sorted out Ocado, did the last food record in that food survey, e-mailed everyone who needed e-mailing, and noted down the phone number for the taxi company. When I got home, I had lunch, booked the taxi, and rang my sister, who wanted me to text her something so she had it in writing. So I looked at my mobile phone, which I rarely use, and discovered the battery was extremely low. It charges using a USB connection through the laptop (I don't have one straight to the wall socket), and of course the power was now off so I couldn't charge it.

My sister eventually wrote down the thing she needed me to tell her, and later I thought that perhaps if I powered up the laptop again, the mobile might still charge even though the laptop didn't work. So I did. And, to my absolute astonishment, the laptop booted.

I'm not expecting this state of affairs to last very long; but it will, at the very least, give me time to back up those files that are in constant use and which therefore haven't been backed up since I did the full back-up maybe a week or two ago. For that I'm deeply grateful. (Oddly enough, our pastor's wife has an exactly similar story about an apparently dead laptop.) But at least if I don't post tomorrow, you'll know that I Aten't Ded. It's just the laptop!