Becalmed

In many ways, it needed to happen. Something not so good needed to happen on my recent Costa Rica trip. It was all going too well. Here, if I could, I would insert a killer photo of, oh, say, a quetzal. But I can't. Read on...

So there was this moment in a steamy hot eco-lodge called Las Esquinas on the southern Pacific coast of Costa Rica when I opened my little optics suitcase, and lifted up the 4" pad of soft clothing atop my laptop, and noticed that its protective high-impact plastic case had cracked and sprung off of it. Hmm. How did that happen, inside all that padding? Musta been dropped, or had the corner of another suitcase applied fast and hard.

And then when I went to use it, the mouse didn't click right. Over the next few days, it got funkier and funkier, until things ground to a halt on the plane home, coming into Columbus, and the mouse quit working altogether.

Years of work as a wildlife rehabber has made me pretty fast on my feet. Nothing like a phone call saying there are, oh, say, four orphaned baby hummingbirds coming in within the hour to make a person quick at reshuffling her life.  So as the plane was taxiing to the gate at CMH, I hatched a plan to get that sucker fixed.

You see, where I live, two hours from my nearest airport or metropolitan center, there is no repair facility that will touch a Mac computer. Not even with a ten-foot pole. The nearest place used to be in Newark, 1 3/4 hr. away. But then we broke up. So now I take my busted laptops to Elan Technologies in Columbus. I love the guys at Elan. They'll take your hacking, coughing Mac out of your trembling hands, ask for your top secret spy password, and open 'er right up in front of you. They'll even pull out some loops of intestine. And they'll say, "Yep, just what I thought, fried logic board, needs a media card too, gonna be a couple days, but we'll get it back to you good as new!" Then they'll stick the guts back in, transfer all your schtuff to an external hard drive and save it just in case something blows up, and fix that sucker.

In this case, whatever bump the laptop took on the bus apparently made the battery swell. And that's a problem, because the battery lies right beneath the mousepad on a MacBook Pro. So when the battery pushes up against the mouse, the mouse stops clicking. And when the mouse stops clicking,

nothing

happens

at

all.

You can look at things, but you can't open them or touch them. Or write. Or edit. Or access your calendar. Or your photos. Here, pause to rend clothes and beat breast. Here, do not insert photo of howler monkey going ape. Because you can't.

Because all your photos are in Columbus, and you're here working on your old laptop, off which you purged all your stuff so your son could play Minecraft on it by the hour.  Ha. ha. ha. ha. Ha. Joke's on you. But hey. You can get your email, and play The Facebook. And that's something.

So here I am at a Columbus hotel, where I've gone to retrieve my parked car. I'm dog tired, having gotten up at 3:50 AM in San Jose to start my 18 hour-trip home. It's 6:30 pm, getting dark. I do NOT want to spend the night in Columbus just so I can take the durn computer in to Elan at 9 the next morning. So I start texting friends. No answer from Option 1. I text another friend. No can do--in a crunch at work, can't get away. I'm sitting in the lobby of the hotel where I've parked my car for the ten-day duration, scratching my head, thinking about Option 3, which has yet to occur to me, when I hear a friendly halloo! And there are Jim and Nancy, with whom I've just spent a perfectly lovely trip to Costa Rica. And miracle of miracles, they're still happy to see me! Smiling at me! Not running away! Musta done something right!

They're going to spend a leisurely night in that very hotel before starting home to south-central Ohio. Much as I would love to do that, I can't afford it. And there is a little family in Whipple, very anxious to see me, even saving dinner for me. So I ask Nancy and Jim if they would mind my laptop joining them for a pajama party and breakfast at Elan. On the descent to CMH, I've already written a most detailed note to my friends at the repair shop, outlining various things needing fixage, on the only paper available to me, which turned out to be a plastic-lined air sickness bag from the plane.  I've included my contact info and top secret Apple password, too. Told you I was fast on my feet. All my sweet friends will have to do is drop it and run.

That was Wednesday, March 2. I hope to pick it up March 7 or 8. I'll spend a total of four hours in the car to go get it. And enjoy every minute. Because on that laptop are all my photos. And all my schtuff. I need my schtuff. And if I've learned anything with this little adventure, it's

1. Don't put your laptop in a suitcase when traveling. Carry it in your backpack, where, if it's going to     get thumped, you're going to be the one who thumps it. I do that on the plane, of course, but let           down my guard on the bus once in Costa Rica. Don't let down your guard.

2. Get AppleCare. Because if you live large and take your laptop along like I do, somebody's fer             shure going to thump it good. Or, as happened to me several laptops ago in Guyana, the Hottest,        Wettest Place on Earth,  it will simply stop working because it's waterlogged. And you will set it        out in the sun to dry out, and tiny pharoah ants will POUR out of the keyboard, where they've been    working overtime to eat all the cookie crumbs you've dropped into it over the years. And isn't it          nice to have Apple cover that repair? Yes. It is. There is nothing like seeing hundreds of  tiny              pharoah ants pour out of your keyboard.

3. When deprived of your laptop and all your stuff for a week, a good distraction is to clean                     your hellhole house. You may even get it done in less time, because you aren't twiddling away on       your, um, laptop. There. It's all done. And it only took 1 1/2 days. Well, the boys helped some.

4. When deprived of your photos, it's a good time to reflect on how utterly, pathetically dependent           you've become on photos to fuel your blogging. This is neither good nor bad; it just is. You should     be able to give a talk off the cuff if the projector breaks. And you should be able to write an                 engaging blogpost without pictures of quetzals and howler monkeys. Yes, you should. Not to say       you will want to. Waaaah. Here, pause to whine. moooonkkkeeeeyyssss noooooooo

So that's the deal, and this is my blogpost about it. See you maybe Tuesday, maybe Thursday.

This Is Not a Rant. It's Just an Update.

Those of you who keep in touch with me via email and Facebook know that I've been AWOL for awhile. First, the whole family was touring through North Dakota and Montana for two weeks. We returned to calf-high grass and two nonfunctional mowers. So there was grass management. The pond was half drained due to a malfunctioning pump filter. So there was fish and muck management. My aunt and cousin and family came for a couple of days. So there was beloved relative management. The Swinging Orangutangs had two gigs. So there was music and sleep management.

After the trip, which was fun but emphatically not a vacation (we were working at two different bird events), my two Canon cameras had about 2,000 exposures on them. Real nice ones. Birds, wild hosses, bison and the like. I was afraid to touch either one of them, because I knew I didn't have the memory on my laptop to handle it, and I wasn't ready to delete a few thousand photos, to make room, because I haven't even blogged about Honduras yet. Why can't they make a laptop with a 90 terabyte memory? They can send a man to the moon.

In the end, it took me a full 24 hours of cussing and deleting files and starting over and backing up and cussing some more and trying again to stuff those fabulous trip photos down an overloaded, smoking laptop's unwilling little throat.

And the grass was still growing outside while we figured out how to get a broken lawn tractor to the repairman without a pickup truck. That same day, June 18, my furnace peed all over the basement floor, and oh, I forgot...the kitchen sink was stopped up for three days upon our return, and the plumbers fixed it, but also spilled 21 years worth of drainglunk on our basement floor. That was really cool. They dumped the compacted stinky grease right next to our driveway and Chet rolled in it. I have pictures of that shamefaced doggeh, but I can't show them to you. I'll get to that in a minute.

I will tell you that laptops don't like having 25,000 photos in their library. They act plumb weird when you get that many in 'em. And a laptop hates talking to a camera with a full memory card of 1,863 photos; it doesn't want to talk to it at all. The laptop hides and pulls the covers over its head and waits for the constipated camera to go away and drop its damn photos somewhere else.

And somewhere in that 24 hours of pure blasphemous fun, during which my children would come into the studio, wordlessly hug me and then creep back out, my laptop's power cord flat out melted, which, upon research, appears to be a Known Problem for the MacBook Pro. A week and $49 later I had someone splice the durn thing and I was briefly back in business, albeit awkwardly swaddled with black electrician's tape. MacBooks and heat, they go together like Polish sausage and grainy brown mustard.

So this morning, June 29, I got up and fired up the Laptop Which Has My Entire Life On It, and it had no sooner booted up than an inky black Curtain of Doom dropped down over the desktop display. Hmm. Restart. Five minutes of tenuous joy. Curtain of Doom. I got on the phone with Apple, thanking the iGods my AppleCare Protection Plan has three more months of good in it, and spent the next four hours troubleshooting. Installing the operating system again. Resetting. Bla bla bla. But the Canadian technician on the phone sounded cute, so that helped. It's hard to flirt when you're freaking out, but I managed. Long, boring story short: it has to go to the doctor. Or the coroner. Or something. Maybe it just needs an autopsy. So before it died for the tenth and final time I transferred a few vital things onto my Old Slow iMac (which has some shutdown issues of its own) so I could function. That was just today.

Oh my. I seem to have let a rant slip out.

sunshineflowerswrenbabiessunshineflowerswrenbabiessunshineflowerswrenbabiessunshine
sunshineflowerswrenbabiessunshineflowerswrenbabiessunshineflowerswrenbabiessunshine

That's what's coming, if I can drag the photos off my external hard drive. Yes, Jesus saves, and so do I. I back up like a scalded ape. I'm just sayin' that there is so much busted stuff coming down I want to wear a hat.

Now. Something good did happen today, and that's that I found out that my commentary about the ferocity of a mother's love ("This Mama Will Protect Every Hair on her Cub!") will air this afternoon, Monday, June 29, on All Things Considered in the second hour. For those of you on Eastern Time, that'd be sometime after 5 pm. So tune in. And if you miss it, you can find it at the link above.

In the meantime, I am going to take the kids to pick some blueberries, because that I can do without paying a repairman.