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My parents wanted to buy me a laptop for Christmas and birthday, so I took Danny shopping on Saturday. He helped pick out a Toshiba Satellite. I've missed WordPerfect, and chose to purchase the Corel office suite rather than the more obvious altnerative. With this week off work I have time to play and familiarize myself with the new toy.
In 1994 I purchased a rebuilt IBM PS/Note through work. It's portability fueled a burst of creativity. I hadn't written any poetry since high school, but during the subsequent three bleak and confusing years I wrote more than 500 poems. While still married, I used to sit with that laptop under a tree behind the house with rolling meadows behind. The peaceful landscape offered solace and inspiration.
By the time I moved into an apartment in town in January 1996 the battery had given up, the machine became obsolete, and I couldn't afford to replace it. Since then I've relied on PCs and handwritten notebooks. I kept writing, of course, but can't help feeling I lost a tap into a powerful source.
The hard drive was incredibly small, barely enough to store WordPerfect 5.1. Occasionally over the past decade I would plug it in for the sake of reminiscence, but when I tried on Sunday it failed to turn on, for the first time. Maybe it knew it had finally been replaced. It is only a little thicker and heavier than the new one, but smaller in the other dimensions, a primordial notebook.
I need to review how I use the internet. Some arcane psychological baggage has been getting in the way of me using it effectively as a resource. I spent this afternoon overhauling my reading list. I've chosen blogs and RSS feeds related mostly to science news and the business and craft of writing.
Instead of the computer table, which faces a wall, I've been sitting at the oak desk facing the street below. A work crew spent the entire afternoon swearing and jackhammering a square of concrete around the telephone pole below my window. It didn't bother me at all. But the keyboard and touchpad will take some getting used to.
