A Brand New Month!

And this is a beautiful day, too: Sunny and warm (an unseasonal — or is it unseasonable? — 61 degrees in what has been an unseasonally — or is it unseasonably? — warm winter so far). And I am showing my optimistic nature, just a bit, by hoping that this month will be better than last.

And in the midst of that train of thought, I am suddenly struck by the sadness of realizing that no matter how good (or bad) any moment ever was, in the past, that moment is gone forever ... except as a memory. No matter how much you might think you can revisit a time in the past, along with all the thoughts and feelings that went along with it: You can’t.

It’s gone.

Yesterday I said goodbye to my very first e-mail address, which had been my e-mail address the entire time I’ve been online. Which is, what, 10 years? I don’t remember!

I only remember bargaining with The Lovely — “I NEED my own computer so I can do all my writing at home!” I told her, shortly before buying a used 386 from Sandy, one of our fellow tennis players. And I set up a portion of my living room as my “home office,” but the computer was so archaic compared to the Macintosh I used at work that, of course, I hardly ever bothered with it.

And shortly thereafter I flounced into Circuit City in O’Fallon and bought me an IBM ThinkPad laptop computer — “I NEED a laptop so I can take it with me and do my writing anywhere!” I told The Lovely. It was on this computer that I officially ventured online, sometime during the mid-1990s ... until the night I was listening to* Sex and the City and Charlotte said something funny and it made me spew the swig of iced tea in my mouth all over the keyboard of my beloved ThinkPad. (I learned a valuable lesson then: When something like this happens, do NOT sit there and keep turning your computer off and on for the next 45 minutes, thinking you can “fix” the problem; you WILL short out your video card or something equally important. Instead, turn the computer off IMMEDIATELY, towel dry as much of the computer as possible and then leave it the hell alone for the rest of the night ... and if you are lucky, ex-TREME-ly lucky, you might wake up the next morning to find that your computer is completely unharmed.)

(And then again: Monkeys might fly out of your butt.)

: )

The computer tech charged me $56 for 45 minutes of examining my computer to tell me that to fix or replace or whatever they do to the video card would cost $850. Which was more than I paid for the laptop computer in the first place.

My next laptop, a Toshiba Satellite, lasted 14 days — just under the 15-day return period, after which I would have been charged some ungodly amount as a “restocking fee.” The Toshiba just locked up one afternoon, so I exchanged it for an HP Pavilion that lasted me ... well, a few good years, despite requiring a hard-drive transplant sometime during the early 2000s. And when it crashed and burned a couple of years ago, I decided it was time for a “regular” PC. (Mostly ’cause they now made flat-screen monitors that didn’t take up the whole desk.)

Honestly, though, I’m still a laptop computer girl at heart.

: )

Last night, whilst driving home from Auten’s Pizza in McLeansboro about 30 minutes after sunset:

The western sky in front of me was a brilliant mix of yellow, gold, orange, blue and black. Just ahead was a railroad overpass, silhouetted in black, and walking across the overpass, from left to right, was a man, also silhouetted in black.

“That would make an awesome photo,” I said, but as I made the statement, the man had already crossed the overpass that I was just about to drive under.

My camera was in the back seat.

* — Yes, I was only listening to this episode of Sex and the City. I did not have HBO, but for some odd reason, I could hear the dialogue from any show on the network but could not view the show because the images were scrambled.