Cleolinda everywhere

TONNER 2010 SUMMER LINE





( I DO NOT LIKE THE ALICE )

So let me tell you what happened last night. As much as I appreciate all the coupons and deals and offers to build me a computer (seriously, thank you so much), I didn't even see those comments until it was too late, because I went and picked out what I wanted last night. And no, I pretty much didn't do any comparison pricing at all. You may not fully grasp how incredibly... I don't even know what... I am at this point. Of which I am not proud. Because normally, I'm the one who stays calm when other people have problems--often even when I have problems myself--and just sort of choke it down and logic it out and go, "Well, feeling things isn't really going to help, so let's figure out what actually needs to be done." It's an Elinor Dashwood way of life, really.

Which means that the not-feeling of things tends to build up over the years until you finally have a psychotic break.

Yeah.

I think most of it is that everything, everything, is really stressful right now. Because I didn't pitch this kind of bitch or fall to pieces when Betsy 1.0 died. My sister's moved back home so the house is just fuller than it used to be, we had two months of planning and cleaning for that family reunion, and pretty much everyone I'm talking to, all of y'all, seems to be dealing with life suck right now, so I don't know if Mercury's in retrograde or what, but things seem to be kind of bad all over. My point, which I am ever so gradually getting around to, is that I am not being smart and looking for the best bargain. I am pointing at things and going "MAKE IT GO AWAY NOW."

I think part of it is also that I can't afford any of this anyway, and since the Bank of Mama de Cleo doesn't charge interest, I might as well be in for a pound as well as a penny. I've got a new agent, I'm hoping to sell something, anything, pretty soon, and either the sale of the American 15M rights or the children's book would cover $750 just as well as it would cover $500. My sister keeps telling me that you never get a laptop from a store, you custom-order it, you should do that with any computer anyway, I'll regret spending money I didn't have to later, and she's probably right. It's just that my brain is completely fried and I am incapable of caring at the moment.

(Although all of this is starting to sound a lot like--well, having no computer of my own to work on, I spent the weekend rereading the collected works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I'm starting to sound a lot like Pa in the Plum Creek book: "When the wheat crop comes in, Caroline, we'll live like kings! KINGS! I'll just go ahead and build an entire house on credit." And by the fifteenth time he says this, you know, you KNOW, that there will not be any wheat crop. The fact that it's eaten by a Biblical plague of locusts is just icing on the cake of fail at that point, really. "It doesn't matter if I waste money! I can pay it all off once I sell a book!" Yeah, Pa, you just go on saying that.)

So what I'm trying to tell you is that I went to Best Buy (and saw the cute salesguy again) and looked at a couple of Dell laptops and ended up going with the Studio 17 something or other, the one with the full-sized keyboard and number pad, a 17" screen, 4GB of RAM (expandable to 8GB, I think), a duo core processor, 500 GB storage, whatever, I don't care. It's big enough to use as a more portable desktop, I can hook it up to other keyboards/mice/monitors/whatever, I can move it around for Oscar liveblog season, I'll get used to Vista eventually, free upgrade to Windows 7, whatever, I don't care.

Salesguy With a Resemblance to James McAvoy goes back in the back to get it.

Best Buy is completely out of Dell Studio 17 laptops.

The nearest one is in Alabaster.

They can get it here by Monday.

When the guy at the customer service desk told me this, I just started laughing. I mean, of course. Of course they don't have it. It wouldn't be my life if they had it in stock. I just said whatever, I've been without a computer of my own, unable to do anything but check email and news, for ten days now. Five more won't matter. Maybe I can figure out which outlets were installed by Satan by then, so as not to fry the new laptop (whose name I have already picked out, although it might jinx her to tell you what it is). So... in conclusion, I'm going to go clean for the electrician now. Whenever he gets here. Next week, probably.

Okay, people: I have decided to definitely buy an external (a one-terabyte MyBook, as recommended by the salesguy, and I might even splurge for the 2TB instead), cart my two dead hard drives over (one of them is the computer PREVIOUS to this one; I never did get all my files off) to Best Buy and have THEM transfer the files rather than me screw up my current computer any worse. THEY can initiate the recovery process if they want, IDGAF.

I'm also going to get an uninterrupted power source thingy, but all in good time. I mean, not that I like tossing around money like this, but there's no point in blowing money on a computer if it could get killed the next time we have a thunderstorm (which should be... oh... about five minutes from now).

Here's the thing: my sister's boyfriend warned me in April that my hard drive was "slowly dying." (We will discuss what a dumbass I am for not taking adequate precautions later.) I am pretty sure this computer is done for; all we're doing right now is looting the corpse. I'm going to need a new one. I don't have the money this red hot second, but my mother will front it. It hurts me in the thriftal plexus, but what're you gonna do.

So. I started looking at computers at Best Buy and kind of liked a Gateway (model SX2800-01) and got home with the specs and Sister Girl was like NO NO NO DON'T EVER BUY STRAIGHT OUT OF THE STORE HAVE THEM CUSTOMIZE IT FOR YOU OMFG. ALSO GATEWAY NO. I was like, "Well, my last two Dells DIED," but she pointed out that I had them for about five years each, and why did they die? One got hit by a horrific virus (not Dell's fault), and something happened to this last one but we're not sure what, after five years of me cramming God knows what onto it, and also, it gave up the ghost on Saturday after two power outages in short succession. So: in that light, we might view Dells as pretty hardy, I don't know.

("DO NOT GET HP. EVER.")

So. Here's my thing: I want lots of storage, but let's be realistic: if you've got one or more terabytes of external storage sitting around, you don't need to be a huge size queen about what's on your primary drive (although I tend to be). What I really want is a LOT of memory, and this quad-core processor I hear about... that's hot. I mean, no, I don't play video games, but I tend to multitask like whoa with programs that eat a lot of memory (TWEETDECK, I'M LOOKING AT YOU). I want a computer that will do things I haven't even told it to do yet. Besides, I figure that the tech improves so quickly that you have to buy more than you need just to keep up (five years ago, I was informed that my new 150GB drive was ridiculously oversized). I would like to pay $500 or less for all of this. I also want a money tree, a cabana boy and a pony, and I think we know what the odds of any of that happening are. So basically, I want someone to just come in and wave their hand and make this happen and I will find a way to pay for it, because "you get what you pay for," as my sister has been saying this whole time. Yes, I should have someone around here build it. No, I don't know who. Yes, there are friends of friends of my sister's who probably can do it. All I know is, this whole thing has reduced me to a jellified pile of flail and all I want is to wake up in the morning and find that elves came in the night and MADE IT BETTER.