Everyone around me was coughing and I have joined in. It’s that change-of-weather cold that hits when you’ve let down your guard and have been doing too much. Sometimes doing too much is the same as thinking too much. But that is nothing new.

I feel like a fish out-of-water. I don’t have a computer, and won’t for a couple of weeks. I have my iPad in front of my sniffly face along with a keyboard, without which I’d never be able to function.

My Mac was purchased in January 2012, a 2011 version, but it was always up-to-date. I barely used it for a couple of years; I just couldn’t make the transition from a PC. I would stare at it and admire it, closed. It was a pristine piece of sculpture. I’d turn it on and off and attempt to retrain my brain but I was never serious about it until perhaps 2013.

I had a lot of software that wouldn’t translate, and I wasn’t used to using a browser for email—I was stuck in the aol “desktop” mindset.

Eventually it was the PC that sat on the desk, unused, and the Mac became the star. Gradually, my files built up but were scattered between two machines and remain that way. The Mac became a good friend that never complained, that was faithful, but, gradually, it began to weaken, to falter and sputter, it became inconsistent in performance and very, very slow.

I spent hours on the phone with tech support, which, with apple is a virtual pleasure compared to what I went through with my PCs. What I find incredible is that apple supports its products and their users and doesn’t charge. Always and forever.

Strangely, luckily, and serendipitously, I had been making sure my back-ups had back-ups, I had just moved 12,000 photos to a new drive and had just gotten off the phone with one of many technicians over two days during marathon hours of support. I had just finished my data-saving and was assuming that the next step was that we were going to reinstall the operating system and start clean.

But, by yesterday, nothing worked, nothing responded, nothing felt right and then … the … screen … went green.

Dying computer

I had been exposed to blue screens of death with DOS announcements about PCs being in deep doo-doo, but green? It looked more like the felt on a pool table. An empty pool table. It the background to one of those solitaire games that are built-into the computer. But this green was nothing like I had ever seen before. Little did I know that it was the color of grass when a machine begins to push-up daisies.

A quick appointment at the apple store Genius Bar and my fate was sealed: the mother board was failing and the video card was gone. This would be about a $600 repair at an outside repair place, it could not be under apple warranty; this computer was no longer supported.

I opted for new but wasn’t all that happy. EXCEPT that now I would have a more powerful machine that costs the same as my old one in 2012. A lot! It would be lighter. It would ZIP! But, did I mention that in order to get something similar to what I had before, I had to opt for last years’s model which still had a semblance of ports? That I will have a machine without a CD drive? That I opted to upgrade the drive from 256 gbs to 1T and that this will likely be the last time this would be available? Possible?

I grabbed and settled and have to wait for this configuration to be built. About two weeks. What? Yes. I will live without a computer for two weeks. Hopefully all the Time Machine back-ups will suffice to get me somewhat back to where I was. This is a test of adaptability. I am using my iPad and a keyboard—that is indispensable. But I am a bit spun around about finding, accessing and saving some graphics for illustrations.

We have become such creatures of habit, so stuck to devices, so married to electronics. I think I might take my coughing head back to bed and read a book. And after, ponder how good it feels to clean out the electronic closet and move ahead.