LAKE MACBRIDE— When I returned to my computer after breakfast yesterday it crashed, disrupting the balance of the day.
It was a good, not great breakfast, and a familiar, but unwanted technical glitch in a life on the prairie.
Breakfast was in four layers: a mixture of cooked summer squash, onions, garlic scapes, salt and pepper on the bottom. Next, kale cooked after deglazing the pan with the juice of a lime, followed by scrambled eggs, and topped with grated cheddar cheese and chopped Italian parsley. It wasn’t my best work, but it served. I write about breakfast to avoid thinking about the work ahead today.
Luckily, I backed up in the early morning of July 8, my email resides in the cloud, and my photos and sound recordings are on my devices. There is about one week’s work on documents and spreadsheets that will have to be reconstructed. It could be worse.
After a shift at the warehouse, I stopped at our local technology store and sent the laptop off to be serviced. The prognosis is not good, with talk about the motherboard. I turned from the counter, walked over a few rows, and bought a new desktop CPU for $370.
Laptops seem to last about two years, and each of the last three of them was convenient to have, but crashed at an inconvenient time. Since 2012, when we got smartphones, having a laptop no longer seems necessary as I can check email and news stories on the go without one.
Like it or not, today will be struggling to get paying work done on the computer, and re-engineering this technology dependent life on the Iowa prairie. Having been through this twice previously, I know, but hate the drill.
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