Windows and Doors and Adapting

My early Christmas present this year was a new (actually used and refurbished) HP Pavilion laptop which replaced a dilapidated old Dell I’d been using for the last two years.

For years, I insisted I would never use a laptop. I’m one who likes to sit in a comfortable, ergonomically correct office chair, at a nice wood desk, in front of an oversized monitor, adjusted to exactly the right height. But the fact is, we live in two houses in two different towns, 85 miles apart. Grabbing my laptop as I dash out the door to go from one place to the other is infinitely easier than having to transfer files from one computer to the other via email or a memory stick, and remembering which file is the most recent so I don’t end up with wildly jumbled word files, each with segments of a book that the other doesn’t have.

So, I adapted. My old Dell wouldn’t hold a charge, and still ran on Windows XP, and crashed nearly every time I went on Facebook. (But at least I knew what to expect. I was used to it.)

I’ve always preferred well-worn and broken in to shiny and new. I just took some blueberry muffins from the oven, baked in a pan from the 1940s that used to be my Grandma Victoria’s. I spend part of my time in a Victorian built in 1895, part in a circa 1920’s foursquare farmhouse, and the rest in a “new” bungalow built in 1951. When I hear people on House Hunters whining because a house built in the last decade or two is “so dated” that they will have to strip it down to bare walls and gut everything, I want to scream.

So my new laptop has a different keyboard than any other computer I’ve ever owned. The delete, end, up, down and over arrow keys are all in different places than I’m used to. When I type, I hit weird keys that are where the right keys used to be, which does crazy bad things to my words and formatting and documents.  Well, I’m sure you can see where this is going. I’m not one to cuss, but if I were, I’d be using some choice expressions.

It’s shiny, lightweight, runs on Windows 8.1, navigates the internet with ease, and keeps its charge. It was a gift from my nice husband who loves me and beggars can’t be choosers and it’s past the time when it can be returned and I should be thankful for what I have instead of griping about a few silly, misplaced keys that I will never get used to.

And while we’re at it, I’d like to say that the expression “When God closes a door, He opens a window” irks me no end. I like my nice, tall, easy-to-open door. And I don’t want to have to start climbing up on some rickety stepstool so I can climb out some silly window that was never intended to be used as a door.

That’s all I have to say except that my third grade teacher ever so kindly suggested, on my report card, that I needed to be more flexible and learn how to adapt. I can’t imagine what made her think so.

In Shy Violet, the novel I’m working on, Violet’s entire life it turned upside down when she makes a bad choice, doesn’t realize it until it’s too late, and loses everything that is dear and familiar to her. Watching her start over from scratch, trying to build a new life in the middle of a new country on a different continent with people she doesn’t know from Adam, has been painful for me. Thank goodness she’s doing better with it than I am. You’ll see what I mean, hopefully sometime this spring.

In the meantime. I did finish this blog – on my new laptop – without strangling anyone. Oh, and please don’t tell God what I said about the window / door thing. Merry Christmas.