"Mulder, if you had to do without a cell phone for two minutes you'd lapse into catatonic schizophrenia."
          - Agent Dana Scully, The X-Files

Change "Mulder" to "Jenn" and "cell phone" to "laptop computer" and that's probably a fair description of yours truly. The extent to which I depend on the techno gadgets in my life has been proven to me over the last several weeks, which is part of why I've been so quiet on the blog as of late! The other part is winter. Laugh if you'd like -- I know it isn't really "winter" here at all! -- but there's something about the shorter days that tends to cut my verbosity in half. If you can believe that.

So, a couple of weeks ago, my four-year-old laptop bit it. And I mean BIG TIME. It's not all that surprising considering it started chucking files last spring when I was still living in Canadialand, and that I've spent the last four years abusing it like it was a Mac. The programs I use on a regular basis -- Photoshop, Image Ready, Illustrator, In Design, Dreamweaver, Flash, Swish (and on and on and on, complete with extended brush, filter and plug-in packages) -- are what Macs are designed for. So the fact that I got four good years out of my Compaq before it pitched the mother of all Windows-loading temper tantrums is kind of miraculous, really. A gazillion or so different recovery attempts and a lot of phone calls to my dad later, and we're pretty sure that the hard drive is toast.

"Well," I said to myself, "I still have my work laptop!" Now, when you so brilliantly say these things to yourself, knock on wood just to be safe. Yup, you guessed it. Last week my work laptop started having some, uh, power issues. Explaining the whole thing is long and boring but Friday morning saw my hard drive being swapped into a new machine, after a couple of nights of bringing my laptop home and not being able to power it up from either the battery or the power adapter!

Pico, for his part, was thrilled. Computers to him are the archenemy.

So that's the scoop. It's enough to get one back into reading actual books and talking with people face-to-face instead of IM'ing. (Okay, so maybe I went the text message route in lieu of IM... shhhhhh!) Crazy stuff.