Remote control house

I’ve been a huge fan of Amazon since the year I did almost all of my Christmas shopping there. I hate shopping, unless it’s a social event or I’m going to a bead or plant store. Amazon has taken care of most of my shopping needs.

We’ve had an Alexa for over a year and for most of that time I occasionally used it to play music. Lately I’ve been using it as a timer when cooking or a reminder to do something later. Today it was too quiet in the house and I asked her to turn on a radio station and she did. I finally have the voice activated house of the future.

I’m lucky?

I’m lucky.
I’m almost 53 years old and this is the first really important death in my life.

Really. I know I’m lucky.
But nothing prepares you for this. I’ve seen it on the horizon for quite a while now.

But, like watching a train wreck in slow motion, even though you know what’s coming, it just doesn’t prepare you for the awfulness of the situation.

You know it’s coming. You know it’s going to hurt. Sometimes you can see which limb will be torn from limb.

Doesn’t help. Hurts more. You feel like if you knew what was coming, you should have been able to stop it.

You can’t. Life is life. It’s a cycle. It is the way it is. Until our sun burns out, we are part of this planet. That comforts me. It’s not eternal, but it’s a really long time.

And while I’m grateful that life is good here on our wonderful planet, there’s still a Dad-sized hole in my world, impossible to fill.

Squirrel

The squirrel in the back of my head has finally gone to sleep.  The pics have all been transferred to my external drive.  I can breath again.  Now if I can get a working computer again. . .

Sony Vaio, part 3

The third week after I got the Sony, I took up a new hobby.  Swearing.  Granted, I was often swearing at the abomination known as Windows Vista, but I was still sitting in front of the computer at the time.

I don’t know who’s to blame for Vista, but I think torture might be justified.  It tortured me often enough.  I do not want my computer to think for me, or do things I haven’t asked it to do.  I really don’t want it to decide where to put my files.  Especially if it decides that they need to be seven layers down on a different drive than where I would like them to be.  And someplace different from the last time I downloaded files.

More than once I offloaded files from my camera only to have a heart attack because I couldn’t find them afterwards.  Thank the fates for the WonderSpouse.  He was able to find them and I went back to the old select and drag method of moving files.

Add to that random program lock ups or shut downs or just being unable to start a program without turning the computer off and waiting through the 10 minute start-up routine.  Often I couldn’t get it to shut down at all.  That probably should have been a sign that something was likely to go seriously wrong, but it’s not my area of expertise.

In more current news, there is a squirrel running in circles in the back of my head muttering ‘pictures, pictures, where are the pictures?’  I don’t think it’s going to stop until I have my pics safely offloaded and backed up to two separate locations.