I did it! I did go back to Minnesota and it was a wonderful trip. We were gone 3 weeks and many good things happened and there is much to tell. But that will come later.

Mostly, one of the reasons I hadn’t updated things and shared pictures and told you banal stories (I often use the word banal instead of inane because I worry that people will think I just misspelled insane and am being lame. You can trust that most of the time, when I use banal, I probably also mean inane) is that we had a spate of computer deaths, one after another. Our desktop pc had died in the spring. It wasn’t any sort of emergency or anything, mostly we used it for playing games. It was dead so I couldn’t play Sims 3 which is a minor emergency, but easily triaged to the waiting room.

I had 2 secondhand Mac Books that had been hobbling along, screen cables and keyboards slowly malfunctioning. One died right before the trip and the other died upon our return. The second one had a lovely and dramatic hard disk death and just as that was happening, just as I started swearing about the hard drive not being recognized I spilled coffee into the keyboard. More swearing. Lots of swearing. But it didn’t really matter. The keyboard was malfunctioning anyway, I’d had to connect a keyboard to be able to type certain letters and symbols and the hard drive was most assuredly dead before the coffee spill.

This left us with David’s little netbook (which is cute and good and small and portable). Since I could not waste my days reloading npr and tut-tutting about the news I managed to get a ton of reading and cooking and crocheting done. Five quarts of chicken stock pressure canned, 7 or 8 pints of salsa verde canned, 2 pints of pickled jalapenos, I wound my way through much of the Discworld series, I recalculated and restarted a purse pattern I made, went to the library, kept the kitchen clean, drank a lot of beer. Good stuff.

But, all unintentional productivity must come to an end and we got a new computer.

I have owned only Macs since 1995, since I started working at MCAD in 2000 I used only Macs at work with a few pc side projects. I love Macs, they are easy to use and nifty and awesome and I don’t think I will ever buy another one. I love the Macs but we got a pc.

When we sort of mapped out what we needed the new laptop to do we found that there was just no way in hell we were going to be able to justify buying a Mac with our budget. Not at all. So, do you whittle away your expectations and get a weaker computer or do you look elsewhere and find what you need? I have other issues with Apple, like the fact their products are less and less user serviceable, you can’t get into them to upgrade or make repairs. You have to bring them in and repairs are expensive as hell and there’s always the ‘you should probably just upgrade’ culture. I’m just not doing it anymore. No more Apple stuff.

Instead we got a Lenovo IdeaPad. Windows sucks, Windows 8 moreso, but I’m willing to slog through it to have a computer that is awesome enough to allow me to play Sims 3 with all the settings on high! Seriously, this damned thing has 2 graphics card-something-or-other and a butt of RAM and a terabyte hard drive and in 5 or 6 years it will be obsolete and need to be replaced but it was a 3rd of the price of a similarly powered Mac laptop. There are FOUR separate control panels relating to the mouse and track pad. Four. That is a giant waste of resources and incredibly inelegant, but I don’t care. The track pad is going to take a lot of getting used to, but I don’t care. I know all of butt about Windows and I have a hell of a time navigating and Windows 8 is truly perplexing, but I don’t care. All of these things can be learned and dealt with and I can spend my time with these guys…

I am a 40 year old woman and this is what I like to do in my spare time and finally, I have a reasonably priced computer that allows me to do it to the extreme!

More of my Sims 3 photos can be found on Flickr. And if you play you can download them from my studio.

Other marginally more interesting stuff will be posted soon, now that I can post again.