Frankenstein's Laptop

I've been working with a series of stop-gap computers over the course of the last week after the untimely death of my laptop. The computer in question came to me second hand and quickly evidenced a couple of display issues. (How minor they were is really more a question of when they presented and what I was trying to do at the time.) I learned a measure of self-control and patience as a result of working with my flakey display.

In addition to the display issues, we quickly learned that toddler fingers are particularly well suited to pulling the wings off butterflies the keys off laptop keyboards. All told, whether it was the insanity producing effort involved in typing blog entries without using the letter "B" or never knowing when my display was suddenly and irevocably going to white out, I knew that the laptop was not long for this world.

The final flicker happened last week, and I suddenly found myself in a complete panic about the website backups, writing, and other things on the hard drive. Email I could manage, but what would I do without the graphics that I'd been working on for the altered book project, or the notes for my wires article?

I am very fortunate that my husband had access to a laptop carcass from a roughly contemporary machine. The carcass had been stripped of drives and ram, but my beloved was able to cobble together from the two machines a perfectly serviceable piece of hardware. I've lost some screen acreage and the hybrid machine has little or no battery life, but I'm online, I can write, and I'm making progress on the altered book.

Now, it's off to bed. We've got a busy day in front of us tomorrow.