Ode to a Fallen Comrade

My trusty 'puter died this weekend after spending many months in decline. We did our best to save her, but in the end it became apparent that continuing efforts to keep her alive were going to be expensive and ultimately futile.

It's been a little sad for me, and I'm wondering if it's bad to be so attached to an inanimate thing? But maybe it's not the actual object so much as it is the marking of time that's passed. It seems like I was a completely different person when I got that computer.

It was the summer before I started law school. I was working insane hours and living with my Mom. I was so incredibly optimistic (not that I'm not optimistic now, just also a little more realistic as well). I got the green cover because I thought I was going to school at Tulane. When Sweet Husband (who was then just barely Sweet Fiance) and I changed our minds and ended up in Lawrence, I was the only person with a green cover in a sea of KU red and blue.

I remember sometime during my first semester of law school, someone asked me to name five things I couldn't live without. I listed Sweet Husband, my family, Porter House, my computer, and my Harry Potter collection. Yup, that's right, my computer beat out Harry--that's no small achievement!

She was a source of entertainment when class was boring. She carried all of my notes, and despite my potentially catastrophic habit of not backing them up, I never lost anything important. She was a champ through more all-nighters than I want to remember. And the abuse, oh the abuse! She even picked a reasonably good time to die--a month after my last round o' finals.

The need for reliable access to certain bar review software meant that as soon as the old computer was officially pronounced dead, earlier this evening, we has to find a new one. I think I've finally gotten rid of most of the pre-loaded junk I don't need, and I've found a few new bits of software that pretty soon I won't be able to live without. I'm also so, SO incredibly glad to be back online--the first day of no internet I was like a little lost soul wandering around blind. No email, no tracking things, no being able to come up with answers to completely random questions in a matter of seconds. It was awful!

But the new computer isn't "home" yet. I think it will take me awhile to get used to not having to pick stray fluff and dog hairs out from between the keys...the basic navy blue, where my "Bamboo green" once was. But, the dust bunnies will come, and as Sweet Husband said when he was trying to console me earlier--there's always spray paint.