Welp, I Ordered Me a Chromebook

A surprisingly hard act to follow!

Some personal history: although I've traditionally written a goodly portion of first drafts by hand (speaking primarily of fiction here), once I get the ball rolling it's nice to have the speed of a keyboard--not to mention it's nice not to have to do quite as much double work, reentering all the text.

On the other hand, I have the attention span of a gnat, and a fully capable large screened computer offers many distractions. Also, having my text all spread out on a big screen a) makes it feel like I'm filling a water tower one drop at a time and b) makes me inclined to endless editing, since I can scan back through bunches of text at once and find fault with it. I compose most of my blog posts in a small Notepad window on my big screen, but that's not really practical for longer work.

Several years back, I discovered and fell in love with Renaissance Learning's Alphasmart word processors, specifically the Neo. They were rugged, their battery life could be measured in months or even years, they displayed just a few lines of text at a time, and they had a great keyboard. Basically, they were a miniature portable typewriter that saved to memory instead of paper. They only did one thing, but they did it well. I've loved mine. However, there are a few caveats: first of all, getting text from the device to the computer can be fairly time consuming and requires cables. I loathe cables. I lose cables. Secondly, the thing looks like a business class Speak and Spell. I never got truly comfortable with using it out in the public eye.

For some time, I've been longing for an Alphasmart successor: a simple, highly portable, unpretentious device which would allow me to create documents and sync them wirelessly.

I briefly owned a lipstick pink Samsung netbook and still remember it with fondness--I wrote a ridiculous number of short stories on that thing--but it was so slow, especially when booting up, and backing up my documents or syncing the between computers took a bit of thought. It was close, but no cigar.

A few years ago, Chromebooks began to pop up. I was mildly intrigued. Google has been a friend of mine since the days of invite-only G-mail and I already had quite a few documents in the Google eco-system. However, at the time, Chromebooks didn't really have any off-line capability (though I'm usually connected, I'd like that now and again), and were almost a public beta. I liked the concept, but didn't feel like they were ready for prime time.

The current crop feels a lot more polished to me, and I've decided to take the leap. I ordered an Asus Flip C100. This device is part tablet as well as part mini-laptop. The keyboard is small, but actually a bit bigger than the netbook of old, so I'm not too worried. It only has a 10.1 inch screen (tablet sized), but it's a nice bright IPS panel, and although 1200x800 is low for a tablet, it's better than the old netbook. I think it'll be very comfortable.

On top of all that, it has a touch screen, and if you flip the keyboard back, you can use it as a tablet. Granted, Chrome OS isn't really optimized for touch right now, and the screen is no iPad Retina thing, but my primary use case would be browsing or looking at PDFs, and I think it will be just fine for that.

You can also stand it up tent style, or flip the keyboard back far enough to use as a stand for watching movies (Netflix and Amazon Prime should both work) or displaying recipes. That covers just about everything I'd like to be able to do with a small portable device. Document editing comes above all, but I've never owned a tablet and, while I'm not expecting anything like iPad performance, I'm intrigued by the possibilities.

It should be here sometime in the next week. More thoughts once I've had a chance to incorporate it into my workflow. It could be the perfect first draft machine--if I can avoid the siren call of other Chrome tabs. The little guy only weighs about two pounds and will fit easily in my writing bag for coffee shop trips and lunch breaks. Best of all, whatever I type will instantly be available from my other computers.

A bonus: this is childish, but I've always kind of wanted to put stickers all over a computer, but have never had one I felt I could decorate like that. I am *so* gonna sticker this little thing once the brand new wears off.

Anyway, I'm tentatively excited.

Kaput

This is apparently Kaput Week around here.

This weekend I bought new sneakers. Because I am a knucklehead, Monday morning I went for a three mile walk in said sneakers, without having worn them around the house long enough for them to get used to me and I to them. Gave myself a blister.

I limped in to work that day to find that one co-worker had messed up his back and another had pulled a muscle in her calf and was also limping. And one of the uninjured had to leave early because her furnace broke down. Also, Comcast throughout the region had network glitches and intermittent outages most of the day. Not fun.

Well, I chalked it up to "Monday" and figured it was over. Bought blister bandages on the way home, and was able to walk as usual on Tuesday (albeit in old shoes). The work day was hectic, but without major outages. Everything seemed to be looking up.

Then this morning I stepped out the door onto the waterlogged front steps (which, I might add, I've traversed hundreds of times in far worse conditions) and my feet went out from under me. Came down HARD on my tailbone, wrenched my shoulder. It. Hurt. One of those moments where you can't decide whether to curse, cry, or maybe both.

So I'm back to limping.

Is there a lesson in all this? Not really.

Except that, maybe, though we've escaped the Polar Vortex, we in the Pacific Northwest are in the grip of a Vortex of Kaput.

Be careful out there, folks.

Bzzzzzz

Around here, they call them white faced hornets. Sounds pretty innocuous, no? Doesn't that name make them sound like delightful minstrel show or pantomime characters? All jolly and comical and innocent.

Or not.

I've had to deal with a steady plague of the things ever since I moved to my current home. I hate them with a burning passion hitherto reserved for things like spiders hiding under the sheets in my bed. I, to put it mildly, loathe them. Fortunately I'm not terribly allergic to hornets or bees, but nevertheless, hearing a nearby buzz is enough to make me freeze, skin crawling, blood roaring in my ears.

And it's as if they can sense my fear and are drawn to it. Last year they ended up practically IN THE HOUSE. There's a little tip-out portion to my house (an added on section where the washer and dryer go) with its own roof. Last year hornets found a way into into the space between the ceiling of that section and the roof and built themselves a giant hornet castle. They didn't make it into the house proper, but I could hear them buzzing as though they were just in the next room, and making chewing sounds, and tufts of the papery stuff of the GIANT NEST UP THERE poked out of the ceiling. I couldn't get to them well enough to do anything about them with my little wasp spray cans. Plus, they were very, very angry if anyone approached their front door, which happened to be just above my front door. It was...horrifying, actually.

Luckily my landlady has a friend who works with bees and who is also equipped to deal with nasty hornets. He took care of them once and for all and did a bunch of sealing things up. But oh man...there were a few weeks there where every evening as they all settled in for the night, I sat there listening with my heart in my throat, imagining them breaking through, imagining being swarmed by the things--in the house where I couldn't get away from them. Talk about your worst nightmare...

This year, they took up residence in the shed. They do this every year to some extent, but I guess last year more of them congregated in the hornet castle (and most of my fears centered around it), so the shed wasn't (or didn't seem) such a big deal. I sprayed a few nests and was done. This year was another matter. There were nests EVERYWHERE in there. It was a whole wasp metropolis. There were small bungalows by the door, a Grande Hornet Hotel under the eaves, clusters of hornet condos deep in the dim corners of the shed. And the more there were, the more I was afraid to tackle them.

This weekend, after much psyching myself up, I finally took 'em on. I waited until dusk, when they were mostly all in the nests and inactive, and then I busted in there, spray can blazing, holding a flashlight above the can as if I was some sort of anti-hornet SWAT unit. I went absolutely ballistic on the nasty critters, as only a fear-crazed woman can do.

The next day, when the foam had cleared and I waltzed in blithely to have a look around, I nearly walked right into an ambush. There were still more nests I'd not seen the day before, complete with glistening, buzzing, cranky hornets. *shudder*

So I bided my time until dusk and then repeated the commando routine. And when I poked my head in the next day, the place looked like a hornet ghost town. Mwuahahahah! I win.

For now.

*sigh*