Low Tech Girl In A High Tech World

Juggling has never been my strong suit but right now I feel like I am trying to keep a hundred things in the air all at the same time. It's not a good situation, really. I feel like I'm going to drop something, or forget something.... and that gives me a headache right from the get go. Part of the problem is that so many things are depending on OTHER things... One thing that has me worried is housing. My landlords are selling our house. We don't know when the closing date will be. We also don't know when we can get a new place in Halifax. I meet with the real estate agent tomorrow but have to try and make sure that the closing date of this house matches up with the move date to get us out there. With luck, there won't be a couple of weeks where we have no home. I also need to get my youngest registered for school out east. Which is fine. Except that if we don't know WHERE we are living, I don't know WHICH  school to register her at. Then, there are t...

I think my GPS hates me. I really, really do. I think that it's doing it's best to drive me crazy. I don't know if it's mad at me because I haven't used or updated it in so long, or if it's just always felt that way. It doesn't really matter. I've been trying to update it for a while now and it's not going well. What's WORSE is that my phone and my GPS are in cahoots. It's been a while since I updated my GPS and I've switched computers in the meantime, so that means I get to install ALL of the things again and that just isn't fun. But my daughter has a dance competition tomorrow and it's someplace I don't know how to get to, so I decided to dust off the old TomTom and get that bad boy up to speed. Back when I was on the road as a sales rep, my amazing husband got me a GPS so that I would be able to navigate around Ontario. It was wonderful. I got to see parts of the province that I never thought I would see. I didn't t...

I haven't really left anything here for people to read in about a week or so. Often, I end up letting this blog go for extended periods of time but THIS time there is a good reason for that. Life has been pretty overwhelming for the last week or so. We're moving. It's not a little move, either. It's a long one. We're moving from Ontario to Nova Scotia. That's like almost 1600 km and that is a bit terrifying to me. Ta-dahhh... see the big move? We have to pack up a large-ish house, a whole circus of animals and three humans PLUS arrange where the fourth human member of our family is going to be living and get her things there all in a few months.... and did I mention that right now, the other adult who is able to help arrange things is several provinces in the OTHER direction? I've dealt with moves before but in the past, when there were bureaucratic hoops to jump through it was only about three hours away AND we were moving back to family AND my (no...

So, the weather where I am living sucks a lot of the time. Oh, sure, the summers are great. The winters are awful. Spring and Fall are largely nonexistent. They USED to be separate seasons but now we kind of get summer with snow the next day and snow with +18 temperatures the next day. That does manage to accomplish two things: It gives me plenty of weather-related material to bitch about It gives me head colds. Lots of head colds.  As you can see, while #1 is entertaining, neither it, nor #2 are actually all that wonderful. Last week, before my current head cold set in, I was slogging through a snow bank when I realized that my allergies were acting up. My feet were cold and my hay fever was in full swing. Which, really, is pretty unfair when you think about it. Allergies. Snow. Together. FML. In the past, when I was freezing my ass off, I was able to breathe through my nose most of the time (illness notwithstanding). Then, by the time my eyes and nose started to leak and...

So, if you've been following this blog (and/or if you know me in real life) you know just how much I suck at organizing things. I'm even WORSE at keeping said things organized. I mean, to the point where I suspect that had a part in my first husband divorcing me.... although that's a theory best left until the second bottle of wine to discuss..... I've tried a hell of a lot of different apps on my phone. They suck. Or, at least, for me they do. I just don't DO digital stuff very well. I mean, yeah, I type blog entries digitally pretty darn well and I write and email and participate in social media and all that jazz just fine. I'm not a troll. I don't live under a rock. But when it comes to organizing my stuff, I just can't seem to translate it to a digital medium very well at all. I do have a wall calendar and that's been amazing. The only problem is that it is large and attached to a wall. The size makes it impractical to bring in a bag or purse...

So, recently, my old computer died. In the past, when switching computers, I've followed the same procedure. I would stare sadly at it and lament about what secrets may have been held within the murky depths of its hard drive. If it yet contained some further spark of life, often I took out the important info like some sort of nefarious future dystopian government picking over the brain of a rebel leader. Then, I would wipe it clean and send it on down the line. One child or the other would have said computer bestowed upon them and it would live out the remainder of its sad, uncomfortable life playing YouTube videos and Minecraft parodies until it simply couldn't take it anymore. It would then be consigned to the great electronic garbage heap (because hey, I recycle electronics... I'm not a monster). This time, though, that wasn't even a possibility. It just wouldn't freaking turn on. So, after hitting it a few times and being told not to by my eminently sensibl...

So, I have to admit, after working as a freelancer for several years now, I still am not a fan of technology. I still don't understand it as well as I should, given the fact that I use a computer for all of my freelance work and so when it goes kerflooey (that's a technical term), I tend to lose my shit. Quickly. I can be a fairly patient person unless what I need to be patient about is computer related. Then, I get feeling kind of smashy and have a definite urge to pick up a hammer or any other solid object with a handle. I've worked with a few different computers in my day. My first laptop was a silver one (Dell? maybe?) that I got rid of when the keyboard broke and it was no longer functional. That took a while. Like, as in years. It took years. Next was the navy blue model that was the topic of several of the posts on this blog. I went through multiple batteries with that one and, again, had to put up with a keyboard that slowly lost keys like an old man losing teeth....