This week we’ve been talking so much about winning the lottery that I thought about writing about what people say they’d do with a bazillion dollars and calling this installment “On Hookers and Cocaine.”

Then I wondered about what type of web traffic that would bring to my little blog, and decided I’m just not that edgy.

This is what things come down to people, creativity undermined by SEO once again.

Although, I have to admit, it’s not like I’m overly precise about stuff like that. If I was, I might have decided upon an actual niche for this blog. Then the whole Manic Mumbling moniker wouldn’t work, would it?

Anyway, that’s not even what this post is about. On Saturday my computer froze, and THAT’s what this post is about.

It froze. And, after cursing it and then making all kinds of threats and promises and bribes, then crossing myself and throwing salt, I restarted it.

I got this: 

I took the computer into the shop closest to me, which was ten minutes away and fifteen minutes from closing, and where I learned a flashing folder with the question mark usually means something is wrong with the hard drive.

It turned out not to be the hard drive, thank God. But the cable connecting the hard drive to the motherboard had taken a powder. The guy said I could leave it with him and have my machine back in five days (five full days?!?), or I could take it out to their store in Meridian where they had the actual part, and probably have it back in 30 minutes.

On Monday. I could take it to Meridian on Monday. Both the location I was in and the Meridian store were closing in five minutes and are closed Sundays.

So I took the thing home with a plan to hoof it out to the neighboring town as early as possible the following week for a new cable, thankful I didn’t have to replace my hard drive, and sad because I was facing about 40 hours without my precious laptop.

Jack tried to be helpful. You’ll remember he’s built his own computer, and since then has tinkered with all kinds of hardware. For a second when he said he probably had the proper cable in his salvage yard of a room, I was tempted to believe.

Except I forgot he has a computer that looks like the Death Star with hard edges, and I have a sleek, little MacBook with worn keys. Apples and oranges, kiddos. Like halfway literally, even.

Jack brought down a cable that looked like it could cart a gondola up the side of a ski hill, took the back off my computer, and one look at all the dainty little pieces of nonsense tucked in together with wisps of elven back hair and unicorn tears and declared he didn’t know what in actual hell he’d been thinking.

So Sunday was an exercise in not reaching for my computer every time I sat down. I tamped down the techno shakes by upgrading the operating system on my phone, and finally figuring out why my calendar app wasn’t working properly.

I also:

• Sorted a huge pile of junk mail on the kitchen counter,
• Cleaned the bathrooms,
• Suggested one of the exchange students we’re counseling start a gratitude journal,
• Started a gratitude journal of my own. Walking the talk, you know,
• Contemplated the inside front cover of my new gratitude journal that has a line on which to write my name and address and the amount of the reward if the thing is found and wondered why my phone doesn’t have something like that on it,
• Thought up and outlined a short story based on what someone unsavory like my ex from college would do if he found a journal with a reward written on the inside front cover with someone’s name and address,
• After five minutes of writing, longhand, realized I no longer have that callus on my middle finger I used to have from writing with an actual pen,
• Bemoaned the fact that writing in longhand doesn’t give me access to autocorrect and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to remember whether it was callus (as in: a thickening of the skin) or callous (as in: hard and unfeeling),
• Giggled because the word callus (or callous) makes me think of phallus, and that’s just a funny word,
• Giggled harder because my 13 year-old asked why I was giggling and I told him, and then he asked me what phallus meant and I told him that too,
• Calmed down by reading an article on my phone about meditation for beginners,
• Thought up a blog post about how I’m never going to able to learn to meditate because I fall asleep if I sit still for longer than five minutes.

In a lot of ways my Sunday looked way more productive than it normally does, and in other ways it looked a lot like it would have anyway, especially with the contemplation of a single word leading me down a rabbit hole and eventually to a place that was probably funny only to me.

Considering all of this happened before noon, though, and we still had time to load up the car and head up the hill for an afternoon skiing, I’d say it might be good to consider giving up my computer every Sunday.

Still haven’t figured out when fit in that meditation thing I’m supposed to be doing. Maybe computer free Saturday, too?

Stop laughing. It’s not like I said phallus or anything.

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