Echoes in a Hollow Space

I'm running a little behind due to computer kerfluffles. I spent most of Sunday and a call to the Helpdesk trying to download OS 12.1 Monterey and get it to finish configuring. That should not have happened. It might have been because I didn't bother with OS 11 and there was a lot to plow through. It kept getting stuck at the same point. I'd turn it off and on and it would start running again and get stuck at the same point. "Less than one minute left" turned into an hour, etc. The helpful Helpdesk guy got me unstuck and back to square one and told me to let it run for at least an hour and go have dinner and that's what I did. But my desktop didn't come back up until around 9 p.m. I was very relieved to see it. By that time, however, I was so fried I didn't want to start trying to set up my new HP wireless printer (which prompted the download in the first place). The next day I spent hours trying to make it work. I had to put the IP address into the print window for it to work at all and whenever I tried to print it would print one line of gibberish then start spitting page after page of blank paper. I went through all the online trouble-shooting before I tried to contact the HP Helpdesk. To talk to a live person they required me to input the serial number of my new device so I went to the back of the printer and wrote down the serial number, checking it twice with a magnifying glass, and input it. "That serial number does not appear to be valid." So I checked it a third time, with a magnifying glass. Re-input. Not valid.  My options at this point were emailing them, checking in with the online forum, or go back to the unhelpful chat bot. So I gave up instead. My Epson wireless printer was so easy to configure and I'd still be using it if the black ink cartridge hadn't stopped working. Lots of trouble shooting involved there, too. Since I rarely need anything printed out that has to look official, I think I'll hook it back up and print the few things I need in brown ink or something. See if that works. I would send the HP back but I have this ridiculous habit of letting things sit in the front hall after they're delivered and I missed the 14 day return window. I suck.

 

Day 21

 



 

Day 22

 



 

Day 23

 



 

This analysis from Dear Author makes the iPad sound somewhat less attractive. The lack of e-ink tech wasn't so much a deal killer for me as the "no innovative input, only a large screen keyboard" and the "lacks a USB port or external memory slot." Those items make this seem not much more than a super fancy Neo Alphasmart/Neo Dana. I love my Alphasmart, but I was hoping to replace it with something a bit more...I don't know. Exuberant, I guess.

::sigh::

I guess I've got some thinking to do. Or some waiting until something else comes along. The trade-in deal on my old Alphasmart is looking better and better.

I probably wouldn't have chosen this time to buy one, but I've been longing to upgrade for some time now. And it is beautiful, and I am glad. I can't stand those nasty little keyboards, though, so I bought an extended one. It's still a nasty little keyboard, just a longer nasty little keyboard. I may have to hook my old one up to the new machine. Such is life.

Before going on vacation I needed to change my password here at work and as I was wracking my brain came up with the bright idea--since I was doing research on the Trickster--to use some variation on a trickster  god.  I can tell you that now because my password has nothing to do with Trickster anymore.  I changed it rather quickly this morning.  You see, ever since changing the damned thing I've had nothing but computer glitches, ending today in my Mac going belly up.  It may be a monitor issue, but it's also quite possible it's the harddrive.  The lab is analyzing it. 

Fortunately, I still have my PC, which is why I changed the password right quick.  I knew I was tempting fate using a trickster appellation, but I decided to tempt it anyway.

You don't mess with Trickster.  Ever.  I should have known that from my research.

The day did not begin auspiciously. After a disturbed night, I rolled out of bed with a snatch of Yeats' The Second Coming floating through my head:

WHITEAnd what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
WHITESlouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Off-putting, to say the least.

Wondering if I'd gotten the wording right, I went to see if my Yeats book had been unpacked yet. It had. It's amazing how many books have taken their titles from bits and pieces of that poem.

Then I started thumbing through, settling now and then on an old favorite. Like his poem from the end of his life, The Circus Animals' Desertion, about the reexamination of a life's work. It contains one of my all-time favorite poetic stanzas:

WHITEThose masterful images because complete
WHITEGrew in pure mind, but out of what began?
WHITEA mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
WHITEOld kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
WHITEOld iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
WHITEWho keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
WHITEI must lie down where all the ladders start,
WHITEIn the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Since I've been feeling a bit foul-rag-and-bone-shop-of-the-heartish lately, that one hit home. I went on to similarly cheerful material from the end of his life, about the death of living memory, of people passing away into nothing but history when the people who knew them pass that way, too: The Municipal Gallery Revisited.

WHITEMancini's portrait of Augusta Gregory,
WHITE'Greatest since Rembrandt,' according to John Synge,
WHITEA great ebullient portrait certainly;
WHITEBut where is the brush that could show anything
WHITEOf all that pride and that humility?
WHITEAnd I am in despair that time may bring
WHITEApproved patterns of women or of men
WHITEBut not the selfsame excellence again.

That one, at least, had a rousing conclusion:

WHITEThink where man's glory most begin and ends,
WHITEAnd say my glory was I had such friends.

I read a few more in a similar vein, then decided that unless I wanted this to be the theme of my Saturday, I need to shake myself loose. I also thought eating something might be advantageous because I was showing all the signs of low blood sugar.

It's remarkable how much better I felt after that. Fortified, I decided to get down to business with a joyful heart and finish reviewing that novel I'd promised to get done this weekend! I opened the file, went to the placemarker I'd left in the text and began to read. Wait. Hadn't I read this part before? In fact, hadn't I finished thirty pages further on from that point? Yet my placemaker and all those thirty pages of comments were gone. I realized I'd saved down the wrong version onto my flash drive. I thought maybe there was a chance I'd left a backup copy on my machine at work, like I sometimes do, but was not looking forward to going into the office on the weekend. I grew once more churlish.

Then I remembered I sometimes throw a backup onto my other flash drive! Praises, praises! There it was. I finished my appointed task in gratitude and a patter of happy, dancing feet, thinking myself well and truly blessed.

WHITEAnd pluck till time and times are done
WHITEThe silver apples of the moon,
WHITEThe golden apples of the sun.

(The Song of Wandering Aengus)

I dreamed last night that while I was in the bathroom (no more than 2 minutes) someone snuck into my apartment and stole my new computer. I came out of the bathroom (probably something deeply symbolic there) and looked over at the computer table and there was the Ancient Horror sitting off to the side so I could finish retrieving data from it, but the new one was gone! Arrrrrrrr!

Considering that I went heavily into debt to buy this computer (it's fancy) and I hadn't had a new computer at home in nine years (oh my!) and that I loooooooove my new computer, this is probably just your standard issue anxiety dream. Maybe a reminder to renew the wards at all doors and windows around the apartment, but probably just the standard issue anxiety dream.

Then it seems to have turned into a caper dream...I can't remember exactly how, but I somehow induced/coerced the thieves into returning my computer—maybe made it too hot for them to hold onto it, but I don't know how. So I cleverly hid in the closet while the thief picked his way through the mess of my apartment, trying hard not to trip. In the dream it was much messier, but maybe this was actually a "Now, Pam, don't you think it's time to do a little cleaning around here?" dream. (At any rate, I did get up this morning and immediately set about clearing up. I should have more dreams like this.)

So, back to the thief sneaking through my apartment...He returned the computer all right but instead of my nice shiny white iMac, I got this thing encased in black metal with hideous big bolts. The screen was encased in this metal, too—you could see the screen, but it was framed all around in black and it resembled a microwave more than a computer. Not only that, they'd wiped the hard drive because when I started to make things hot for them they'd been in the process of getting it ready to sell again on the black market (hmm, maybe that's what the black metal meant). Since I'm Ms. Obsessive Backup after a hard drive disaster several years back, that wasn't as catastrophic as it could have been. But it did mean I'd lost everything I'd worked on in the last four days. And since I'm heavily into The Rewrite now that meant I'd lost a lot.

Hmm. Maybe this was a "You haven't been as obsessive about your backups lately and you better be careful" dream.

Anyway, back in dreamland, out leaps me from the closet and pounces on this guy. He's a 20-something, buzz-cut, strapping fellow but I manage to wrestle him to the ground and subdue him. (A female empowerment dream?)

This could harken back to an incident in my youth when My Mother The Valkyrie heard a disturbance in the garage, ran out in her girlie nightgown, captured a teenager trying to steal a lawnmower and sat on him while I called the police. The police didn't believe this young whippersnapper (me) that my mother was sitting on a thief in the garage—perhaps I didn't express myself in quite the proper fashion and maybe I giggled back a little when the person I was reporting the crime to laughed at me. At any rate, it was a Saturday night, the cops were busy, they never showed up. But the thief's older brother did. He was about 18 or 20 and he wrestled his younger brother away from My Mother The Valkyrie, but not before she round-housed him and knocked him on his a!s.

Hmm. Maybe that's why I've never had much problem with the female empowerment thing. With a Valkyrie for a mother, female empowerment is a given. Hmm. Maybe that's why I'm still single. Hmm. It worked for mom, though. Hmm.

Anyway, back to the thief I was sitting on. In my dream. So there I am sitting on this guy and he's very reasonably asking me what the hell I'm doing and I say, "I'm capturing you to turn you over to the police."

"I returned your computer."

"But you wiped it clean and wrecked it. I want it restored to the way it was."

"Can't do that."

"Then I'm calling the police."

"My friends are coming to get me."

And I'd failed to have the phone with me before I sat on the guy. If I got off him, he'd bolt, and I couldn't reach it from where we were on the floor. And while we were down there I couldn't help noticing how cute he was, how well put together, how well spoken, what a rakish look in his big blue eyes... No, it didn't turn into one of those dreams, but I suppose it could have if I'd stayed asleep a bit longer.

I'm afraid there's no end to this story except the worst cop-out of all time: And then I woke up. Hey, it was a dream.

Freud would probably have a field day with this; Jung would undoubtedly find something to maunder on about. Me, I'm sticking with the standard issue anxiety dream and there's no way in hell you're getting me to stop sitting on that position.

Disclaimer: This dream was just a dream. It was not meant to represent any persons, living or dead, and was intended solely for the purposes of entertainment. And I would like to state for the record that I never in real life sat on any man. That's was My Mother The Valkyrie's department. Me, I always preferred to do other things with men. But that's another dream, and best left out of the pages of this journal.

Well, sort of.

I finally got rid of the Ancient Horror at home which refused to let me download a client and now I can do all sorts of swell things. There are just too many new options...