Offline – My Alternative Universe

Despite my best intentions to write, blog and tackle some projects close to my heart, I have been offline for the last few days as my poor laptop died. It survived missing keys, a built-in mouse that stopped working, the kids dropping food on the keyboard (okay that was me) and Darling trying to wrestle it off me at every opportunity. The final straw came when the charger exploded and I replaced it with a universal one that kept switching off and then I managed to drop it.

I did try and re-boot it but I think I might have managed to wipe the hard drive in the process. I thought I would have been heart-broken at losing about five years of work and thousands of images of my family and crafts and places I have been going back a few years. But I wasn’t. It was my own fault for buying an expensive external drive AFTER I had killed the laptop not before. Also, luckily lots, although not all, of the pictures and documents are in my e-mail account and I can spend some time downloading and sorting it all.

Hubby has asked a friend to replace the hard drive and try and retrieve the data, but the new version of my laptop is very slow and there is no Word, Excel etc so it is as good as unusable at the moment.

I am writing this on our family computer which looks fine but when you type, the letters appear a few second after you type them, so it's anyone’s guess where the typo’s are going to appear. That should be enough to tell you about the state of the computer. I avoided it for days until I realised that the laptop isn't going to be much use anytime soon. So I have steeled myself against how annoyingly slow it is and decided to use it for now. Probably this is a good time to take up doodling in between waiting after each click of the mouse for something to happen.

It’s not all bad. Although I am still online via my phone, meaning I can use the internet and check my e-mails, I spend much less time on the phone and don’t answer e-mail as it feels very unwieldy and cumbersome (I often have to paste links or send attachments). That means I am filling my time up with housework, cooking big meals (which still all seems to disappear in one day) and trying to get firm routines down for the kids.

It made me think how my life would be if there was no internet – would I spend all my time running an immaculate house and have clean kids and cook amazing food? Somehow I don’t think so. I’d probably spend every minute reading and pay even less attention to the world around me.

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