Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Odds & ends

  • I am typing this on my brand new laptop! As I wrote a while back, my 8-year-old Toshiba laptop has been crashing with increasingly alarming frequency.  I asked my sister's boyfriend K. to keep an eye out for a good deal on a new one, and last weekend, my sister sent me the links to two models on sale at Best Buy.  Dh & I went there on Monday & picked one out. It happened to cost just $50 more than I paid for my previous laptop, 8 years ago...! I've spent the past few afternoons/evenings on the phone & on screen with K., setting it up, transferring over programs & files from my old laptop, etc.  I still have a few more things on my to-do list, but am happy to have my new toy mostly operational! ;)  
    • The new laptop will take a little getting used to. For one thing, it runs on Windows 10 (my old laptop uses Windows 7). 
    • It is a "slim" laptop and weighs considerably less than my old one -- just 4.4 pounds (much to dh's relief, since he usually winds up carrying it when we travel...!). 
    • The power cord outlet is on the left side of the laptop;  it's on the right on my old model. 
    • My old laptop had ports on both sides;  on the new one, they're all on the left. 
    • The new one doesn't have a CD/DVD player (although I didn't really use that feature much on the old one anyway). 
    • The keyboard includes a number pad on the right side, which my old laptop does not have (but the computer I used at work did, so I am somewhat used to that).  
    • The "delete" key on my old laptop is in the upper right-hand corner of the keyboard. On my new laptop, that particular key happens to be the power (on/off) button. (Just guess how I figured THAT one out...!)
  • I've been sad that the odds of me getting "home" to visit my family this summer are not that great, because of FIL's failing health. But -- I had said to my parents that maybe we might come for (Canadian) Thanksgiving (in early October), and that's increasingly looking like it might happen. I was dreaming of/drooling over my mom's turkey, gravy & stuffing anyway... and then my sister called me with an additional reason to come home then: Paul McCartney. He is NOT scheduled to do a show in Toronto on his upcoming tour (yet), but he IS appearing in Winnipeg in late September -- and my sister managed to snag a pair of tickets.  She has already seen Paul twice;  I haven't, nor have I been to a rock concert since Bruce Springsteen in about 1992. Given that the man recently turned 76 years old (!), how many more opportunities am I going to get to see one of the two remaining Beatles??  This will be the most expensive concert ticket I've ever paid for ($300, when you factor in taxes, fees, etc. -- plus my airfare!), but I think it will be well worth the price. :)  And in the event that I'm not able to go (because of FIL or other reasons), she should have no problem getting someone else to take the extra ticket. 
  • Louise Brown -- the first "test tube" (IVF) baby -- will celebrate her 40th birthday later this month. And a group of childless-not-by-choice bloggers & activists (including yours truly) have something special in the works to mark the occasion. More to come on this soon!  :) 

2 comments:

  1. That concert sounds so awesome! I hope you get to go - I know you'll have a great time.

    RE: new computers with no CD/DVD - I keep encountering this at work, which is problematic, because we sometimes need a DVD player. In fact, one of our vendors had to send me a peripheral DVD player, because I couldn't load the software I needed. Today, Windows 10 was taunting me as I was trying to connect a printer - it didn't have the driver I needed, so it gave me the "Have Disk" option. Sure - I have a disk somewhere, but no place to put said disk!

    Congrats on the new computer - everything seems so much faster for a while!

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  2. Eek. I read this a while ago on my iPad, but never popped in to comment. (Sooo much easier to comment from my laptop.)
    Yay to Paul McCartney! Lucky you.

    My five year old laptop is pretty full (I have all my photos on here), and has been threatening failure. So I'm backing up more regularly, including to the cloud, to ensure that I'm covered if the worst happens. Glad you got a new one, and hope the adjustments go smoothly! (I use a separate keyboard, so I don't have to adjust to moving delete buttons. That sounds treacherous!)

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