Me and my babies

I'm something of a Renaissance Woman. I have a lot of hobbies, a lot of skills. I play musical instruments, have a flair for foreign languages. I can steal a base and ballroom dance passably. My parents raised me in a suburb of culture-rich Boston and I say that I'm from Boston because when even when I wasn't at school, I was in rehearsals at New England Conservatory's youth orchestras. I have traveled the world and can both admire myself for being the unofficial tour guide when we visited places I'd only read about in Greece and laugh at myself for not having learned how to use chopsticks until four years after I went to Taiwan with VIP Strings. I draw well and appreciate fine fashion. I'd like to think that Jane Austen wouldn't always turn her nose up at me.

In spite of all this, I am a complete disaster when it comes to communication devices, yea, even normal electronics. No matter that I type 75 wpm and handwrite 15 wpm. I invariably kill everything from my cell phone to my laptop. The only exceptions are the following: the typewriter that I used for the last half of my time as a missionary because my handwriting was too small for President Bennett to read and my iPods.

Case in point. This morning, I saved the latest version of my novel onto the 4 GB flash drive that my friend gave me for Christmas. I have made this a habit because of my propensity for wrecking things. I then put my flash drive in the adorable little carrying case and put it in my backpack for safe keeping. I later packed up my laptop to bring to a friend's house. I never got around to using it while there, but left it out of the way on the couch where neither her mixed-lab nor her children nor her husband nor my friends could trample it underfoot.

So then I got home, ran choir practice, did the dishes and then decided to do some more writing. I pulled out the carrying case for my flash drive and promptly discovered that somehow, while out of the way of harm, it had been snapped. It is in a couple of pieces because part of the motherboard so to speak snapped off and then it broke in two as well.

Then I went to my computer and decided to turn it on. It would not respond to the power button. At all. It was clearly charging according to indicator lights, but I could not get it to work. I nearly cried because usually I'm not THIS disastrous! Yes, I have had a VCR that only worked when a fork was stuck into it and a laptop that turned off in protest every time the Indians scored in the 2007 ALCS vs. the Red Sox.

So, I left it to its own devices, but came back to nurse it (the laptop) back to health. It took a pencil eraser, removing the battery and re-placing it and several repositionings of the screen, but then the CD drive started clicking and flashing a happy little green light and then it just turned on.

So I am back in command of my semi-faithful laptop. Thank goodness!

In other notes, I thought I was done learning about dysfunctional boyfriends, but just found a new variety. I've decided that I've got a knack for dating Darwinian men--who are, as William Schwenk Gilbert put it, "though well-behaved...at best [are] only a monkey shaved."