My favorite story in this collection was called "The House on Sunflower Street." In it, an old man lived in a house that took care of him, although he didn't realize it. One night, he left his cigar (this is before all the non-smoking hoopla) lit on an end table, and it sparked a fire. So the house opened its faucets and put out the blaze before it could harm the house or the old man. Another night, a burglar tried to enter the home through a slightly opened window, and the house slammed the window down on the burglar's fingers, which encouraged him to find another house to break into instead.
The problem was, the old man was unaware of all the house had done for him. At some point, he realized it was too much house for him, and he decided to sell it and move to a smaller place. The house was so distraught that it up and left. How, we're not sure. But it just left!
The old man finally was able to track it down, and realized somehow all the house had done for him over the years. So he promised the house he would never sell it to anyone else, and he rented a big truck to bring the house back to its plot of land. And everyone lived happily ever after.
How does this relate to my life now???
See, I'm getting a new computer. We put the order in last weekend, and it should be here next week. Since then, I've had nothing but problems from my current computer. If it's trying to convince me not to put it out to pasture, it's doing a terrible job!!
Yesterday I sat down at the computer in the afternoon while Grace was napping. Somehow I didn't have sound. I also don't have the volume button in my taskbar like you're supposed to, but that's because the volume button is part of Windows XP, just like Outlook Express and Internet Explorer and a host of other things. For some reason, when I go to install various XP components under Add/Remove Windows Components, I always lose things I don't particularly want to lose. When I'm adding things, I make sure I only have that item checked. But I end up losing something else I need, like Outlook Express, IE, the calculator, or the volume button.
I've learned to live without the volume button, and I have another program supplying my calculator.
Back to the sound issue. After fussing around with settings for a while, I just decided to restart. And voila! Sound!!!
This morning I went to print out some photos of my adorable daughter for my work "mother" in Virginia Beach. But I kept getting a printer error that I didn't know how to resolve. Again, I restarted (which seems to be the fix for virtually every problem I've had), only this time it didn't work. So I restarted the printer, and was successful in printing the photos.
I'm tired of living with a jerry-rigged system. I know what I should do is reformat the whole dang thing, but at the same time, we need a more powerful machine. Kurt and I aren't hard-core gamers, but we do enjoy a good computer game once in a while. And the games are getting way too large and way too graphics-intense to run on our meager computer. We have 40GB on this machine, and it's nearly full. Our new one will have 250GB, which is just mind-blowing. One of Kurt's computer games is so graphics-intense that while he's playing it, the ground in the game flickers on and off because it's too much for our pitiful graphics card.
When we bought this computer back in 2001, we didn't get the top-of-the-line system like we should have. Instead, we went with a good basic system. This is why it hasn't lasted us as long as it should have; we didn't start out with a good enough machine.
Our new machine comes from the top-of-the-line group of computers from Dell, the XPS. But we didn't go with the absolute top-of-the-line because it came with stuff we just won't ever need. We did get a pretty good machine for our money, especially with all the free upgrades Dell was running at the time. So I think this next one will last us longer than the four years this one has lasted.
I just can't wait for it to get here!!!