You'd think I'd be used to change by now, after sixty-six years on the planet. Nope. Still not used to it. Still cranky when things change. Is it masochistic that I keep putting myself into situations that produce massive change? Maybe it's not masochistic. Maybe it's courageous. Did you ever think of that?
Picture Manager came installed with MS Office 2010, which is what my desktop system was running, up until yesterday when the graphics card fizzled from dust, decay, cat hair, and old age. In fact, pretty much what has happened to me the past fifteen years just happened to my desktop computer system. Kaput.
I'm grieving today for my desktop system. I'm also really grateful to the computer gods who kept the graphics card running long enough to finish a massive editing job with a serious deadline. I finished the job at 1:00 a.m. last night, went to bed, and woke up to a dead computer. Talk about miraculous timing. Bummer, my computer is dead, but hallelujah, it picked the right moment to die. Maybe there is a god.
I went to Dr. Google, who has all the explanations for everything, including the answer to the question What are these weird splotches on my arms and legs? and discovered that 2010 Sharepoint has Picture Manager, and I can download it for free. The kind people on the internet showed me what to do, and it worked, and now I have Picture Manager on my laptop. Yay. My laptop is to my desktop as the tortoise is to the hare, so it took quite a while to download (yes, yes, I agree, take my first born), install, customize just for Picture Manager, search for the folders with pictures in them, and then find the image I wanted to use. You can see I didn't get all the blue lines out, but I never do. Now that my desktop system is gunnysack, my printer/scanner will no longer work either. That means no more scanning of my drawings. Now I must use my smartphone to photograph my drawings. No more easy peasy. Everything creativity related now is slower, harder, and grimmer.
Change. You'd think after all this time.
Speaking of aching backs, car camping! When E called it a shakedown cruise, truer words never spilled over the epiglottis. My bed platform was sturdy but hard as only a plastic shelf with a one-inch camping pad and a pile of fleece blankets can be. That is to say, many long moments of wondering, what weird kind of frozen hell is this? Sleeping in a minivan in the middle of a freezing desert? I win the Amana Freezer for insane choices. I was saved by technology in the form of a dinky powerbank, my new boyfriend, Jackery, a 240 watt battery that powered my 70 watt heating pad that kept my feet warm during the night. I would not have made it without that heating pad. I would have been crying long before dawn.
As it was, dawn was a long time coming. Do you know how dark and cold the desert gets when the sun goes down in the winter? Yeah, you probably do. You probably do your research before you go camping and wisely decide not to camp in the desert during the winter. Not me. I have to learn it all the long dark stupid cold hard way. Darkness comes fast and goes away reluctantly. Those three nights seemed to last forever, with a little bit of daylight in between. A watched sunrise never rises, isn't that how it goes? Something like that. You would make sure you have proper lighting in your car after dark, wouldn't you, you expert camper you. So you could do something productive, like, I don't know, blow on your freezing fingers or something.
I was shaken up good and proper on this shakedown cruise, and now I know I can survive in my car if I have to. I hope I don't have to live a long time in my car, but now I know I can do it. I can sleep (fitfully), cook, eat, bathe (sort of), poop in a bucket (an experience you should not miss for yourself), and stay warm (more or less, with my Jackery) in my car. And it requires much less paraphernalia than I thought. It was strange to wake up, fix coffee, and wonder, where the hell am I? And keep on drinking my coffee.
I understand the difference between low desert and high desert, but I guess I have to experience the difference in order to really get it, if you know what I mean. I whined last week about elevation. I kept trying to pay attention to my head during my road trip around Southern Arizona and into California. My head wasn't perfectly balanced in the low desert, but it went crazy when I got back to the high desert. That should tell me something.
Okay, enough palaver. My head is reeling, my ear is crackling. That means we are expecting snow flurries tomorrow.
