Temporarily Macless

Well, this is odd. Yesterday morning I dropped off my 2009 iMac and directed the Geek Squad to transfer its contents to my new-to-me 2015 iMac which sat, still packed in a taped-up box, on their store pick-up shelf. (I haven’t even seen the new computer, but since it should be identical to the old one, I suppose that I’m not missing much.) They’re in the process of doing that work, which should only take a couple of days. However, because I’ll want to get the Grand Tour of the new (so to speak) machine and where my files have been placed on it, I probably won’t be able to pick it up until next Sunday.

This might be the longest time that I’ve been without a computer since before I bought my first Mac in 1987. On the other hand, I’m composing this post on my iPad via my Bluetooth Qwerkywriter keyboard, I’m checking my email on my iPhone, and I’m charging up my iTouch Slim watch that counts my steps, alerts me if I get a phone call, or buzzes if I sit in my chair for more than two hours. I also have a PC to use at work and a PC to use at home for my newsletter layout work. So I’m not off the grid in any way.

The empty space on my writing desk is rather shocking. I have now filled it by displaying a compact Mac (an SE dating from 1986) on the computer stand. I couldn’t resist taking a picture of the arrangement with my iPhone and then uploading the image to my Flickr account. [Update: The iPad already had access to the photos I had taken on the iPhone, so I didn’t have to download anything from the Flickr account. I wonder if that’s another paid service that’s now obsolete….]

Before I filled the empty spot, though, I did spend a few minutes sorting through the detritus of obsolete work emails, sticky notes, and receipts that were cluttering up my writing area. Because I’m also in the process of thinking about how to rework the dining room and Secondborn’s deserted bedroom, I found myself thinking about which items really needed to stay where they were and where the other items would go.

I’m also thinking ahead to my eventual move to a new house. If an item isn’t going to make the cut and move with me it would be better to get rid of it now, when I have time to find some things a proper home instead of just tossing them out. Try as I might, though, I’m not able to trick myself into thinking of the current house as the new house. And I don’t know what my life will look like then, and what I will and won’t need. So for now, everything stays (hooray!) and I’m tripping over everything (boo!) because there isn’t enough space for it all.

The general plan right now is to read the books, then return them to the library, sell them, or give them away. Knit up the yarn and finish the projects, then give the items away. Look at what I’ve [literally] stumbled over, and decide whether or not it needs to stay. Of course, these are not quick processes. But I’ve been making some steady progress with books lately, and I choose to be encouraged by that.

Knitwise, I actually cast on for a project a few days ago. I couldn’t find a WIP that I was in a position to finish, but I found enough leftover yarn in two colors that I should be able to make a simple scarf. After coming up with some elaborate ideas for transitioning between the two colors (and back again), I gave myself a talking to and cast on 26 stitches for a very simple striped scarf. It’s just two ridges of white garter stitch alternating with two ridges of denim blue garter stitch, with the colors carried along the side. While I watched free practice sessions for the Russian Grand Prix I completed 15 stripes.

I also have the One-Row Handspun patterned scarf in progress at work, and I can work on that during the newly designated “Wooly Wednesdays.” The yarny student organization I initiated a few years ago went dormant during the pandemic, and a faculty member who works in my building is joining me to brainstorm about how to get the club relaunched by Fall 2022. Of course, we knit while we brainstorm.

Maybe if I incorporate that quieter time for knitting while I’m on campus and see some progress there, I’ll be better able to set aside time to do the same at home as well. It might also provide a bit of motivation for me to clear out that empty nest and spend some peaceful time there before the next bird takes it over.

While composing this post I received text messages and emails letting me know that my “new” computer was ready for pickup. I used an app on my iPhone to schedule my pickup appointment and consultation for next Sunday afternoon. That will give me more time to move things around, make some new spaces, and be ready to set up the new computer in a way that will make it feel more like…mine.

It still doesn’t have a name. Like a new pet or a new car, it may have to earn the right name somehow.

The last legs

Last week I purchased a new computer. Well, to be honest, it was a new-to-me computer at a very good price. The time has come; my current computer pauses every few words to display the Spinning Rainbow Candy of Death. Every action produces a terrifying pause before the computer’s response.

This iMac, born in 2009, is a hand-me-down from my late former husband Peter. It is filled with irreplaceable photographs and files. Every so often it exposes a long-hidden secret. Most of the files are mine, but it is hard to tell to whom the secrets may belong.

When my children were younger they used this computer to play a lot of games. Over the years they drifted to other computers, none of them Macs, to play. In the last week I have deleted tens of thousands of small files that will not need to be transferred to the newer iMac.

The new Mac won’t arrive at my local Best Buy until next Friday, and tomorrow I’ll set up an appointment at which I will bring in the current computer and have the files transferred.

Meet the new boss…

I never named this computer — I didn’t need to. In every logon, in every Bluetooth linkage, the name was there: Peter Hall’s iMac. He owned it for a year or two; I have owned it for twelve years. But when I get the new computer, this link to the past will finally need to be broken. Every device connected to the old computer will need a fresh connection to the new one. And, whether I wish it or not, some connections may be lost forever.

Peter died ten years ago, and because he died before his birthday I am now the same age that he was when he died. This is rather disconcerting to me, and I don’t know how to resolve that or whether that is possible. I have out-aged Michael, too, and while it is somewhat amusing to think of the two of them bickering with each other on some ethereal plane, I don’t think that’s the truth. It’s not a truth either of them would have believed, anyway.

So, here I am squeezing the last few drops of life out of this computer because I can’t imagine giving anything up while there’s still some use to it. It’s been years since we could keep the operating system current on the Mac, and I suspect that the current slowdown is due to some program having tried to bootstrap itself into a newer OS than the computer can handle.

The new computer is going to look exactly like the old one. I’m not an early adopter any more; I’ve explained to many people over the years that I’m more comfortable with OS 12.5.17.c than OS 13.1.a. The cutting edge is expense and risky, and I’m willing to let others live there. As much as I liked the look of the new iMac (and the thought of its M1 chip) I liked the price of a refurbished iMac a lot better.

…same as the old boss.

I’m trying to honor the spirit of this computer by allowing it to participate in my blog for as long as possible. That now means a lag of a few minutes each time I compose a sentence, scroll up to see what I’ve previously written, or click to open a new tab and search for an appropriate image to illustrate some text. To deal with the lags, I take breaks. I stand up and walk around. I shift the laundry over. I try to be as patient as I can when the computer can’t keep up — which, now, is all the time.

I think that the new iMac deserves a name. If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments. Also, give me some reasons for your name suggestion. In the past some of my computers have had names, but it was more often the hard drive rather than the computer that received the naming.

With that invitation having been issued, I think I’ll publish this post early and give my old friend more time to rest this evening. Thanks, buddy.

How firm a foundation

Last week I got into a dispute with one of my closest friends. I will let my philosopher-friends determine whether the nature of the dispute itself was philosophical, as that is not my area of expertise.

The question is, when you want to relearn old knowledge in order to go forward, how far back should you go? My plan is to regress to the point where I’m the least bit shaky on my knowledge and begin again from there – even if it means reviewing some areas with which I’m already familiar. My friend feels that this is going back further than necessary.

In the context of this dispute, the area of knowledge is mathematics. And to establish the parameters a bit more, my ultimate goal is to replace an F on my UW-Whitewater transcript with a much more respectable grade. To do this, I will have to be a registered student taking the class — Calculus I — for a letter grade. Auditing doesn’t count; life experience (ha!) doesn’t count.

How did I get this F?

Let’s back up a bit to my UWW enrollment ten years ago, as a returning adult student pursuing a second BA in Physics when my first degree was in Creative Writing and English Literature. To do physics, one must first do math. And to do math when one hasn’t done math since the fall of 1985, one backs up a bit. In my case, I backed up to the algebra I had been doing in 1981 or 1983. I didn’t by any stretch of the imagination have the same brain I had in 1981 or 1983, or even the fall of 1985, but I worked hard under subpar circumstances and earned an A in the course. In the next course, precalculus, I also earned an A. Then I enrolled in Calculus I in Fall 2012. I was doing well in the course, and despite some struggles when it came to problems involving problems with dual changes in motion (curse you, ladder sliding down a wall!) I had a B average until the part of the semester in which I filed for divorce, moved myself and my children out of state, and was subsequently taken to court for child endangerment. I was literally opening my calculus textbook to study when the doorbell rang and I received a summons. So calculus took a back seat to everything else, and I didn’t finish the last month of the course. My “B” changed into an “I” for Incomplete, and when I didn’t finish the rest of the course requirements, that “I” converted to an “F.” And there it stays, since I did not continue my studies and I have not re-enrolled.

Why does it matter?

I no longer have fantasies of becoming a physicist, but the F still bugs me. I am better than that F. I do understand calculus better than that. That grade doesn’t represent me. Unfortunately, it’s going to take a lot of work to erase it.

I do have a plan. (I love having a plan.) In this case, the plan involves going back as far as I think I need to go via Khan Academy to refresh my skills, then taking a UW Extended Campus class in calculus, which will give me six months to do the work instead of just one traditional semester, and then applying the credit to my record to replace the previous grade in the equivalent course. If the credit will not transfer, then I’ll have to enroll on my campus to repeat the course.

Where’s the dispute?

In the Khan Academy classes, I’m going back to pre-algebra concepts like negative numbers, which I learned tried to understand in third or fourth grade and again in middle school. My friend thinks I shouldn’t go back so far, and feels that I am opening the door to getting sidetracked by concepts I don’t need to master. And they have a point. My method is going to take more time and allow for much more possibility of distraction. The longer my path is, the more likely it is that I’m going to allow myself to stray from it. After all, none of this work is truly necessary. I can do my job without passing Calc I. I can be an effective parent without passing Calc I. I can be a good person without ever doing calculus in the rest of my life. But they also think that I can do calculus without starting from basic algebra.

The fact remains that I want to pass Calc I, and I feel that I can’t do that by coming out of nowhere — it’s now been nine years since I worked high-level math on a daily basis. I think that I need a good running start, a firm foundation, and I don’t want to just pass a final exam — I want to truly understand the mathematical work that I’m doing.

The Khan Academy classes are teaching me math in the ways I wish I had learned it back in the day — at a deep intuitive level, where I understand the concepts and I’m not just cranking through formulas without understanding what I’m doing. That’s interesting to me, too, as I am also working on some writing about practical mathematicians who strove to adequately educate future teachers of mathematics.

Who is right?

To go forward, do you stand on the highest peak you’ve ascended, recognizing that you may not remember all the steps that led you there? Or do you rappel downwards to where you can get a foothold, where you can retrace your steps? How do you know when — and how — it’s best for you to go forward?

Does forward progress depend more on your personal motivation or on your network of support? And how supportive is your network if they don’t agree with your plan of learning? If you achieve a goal, does it matter how (or why) you achieved it?

Is one of us right? Is one of us wrong? Do my goals have any meaning? Does it matter?

Another round

After we spent more time gently noting our differences of opinion on the topic, I received an email that began:

The struggles
to figure out the path
are part of the path.

And suddenly we were in a Zen moment where each of us could see the other’s perspective and allow for it. I confessed some fears and anxieties, and I received assurances in return.

Then I admitted that I had taken a Khan Academy assessment the previous night that allowed me to skip over the topics with which I was still familiar. So now I’m starting further back than my friend feels is necessary, but I’m making forward progress at a sustainable pace. It feels like a good compromise.

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Knitwise, I still haven’t been knitting. But I did visit the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival this morning to meet up with a friend. I wore a t-shirt with Daleks on it, plus the first Doctor Who scarf I ever knitted. (If you have never been to a fiber festival you might not realize how appropriate this outfit was.) I got several compliments on the scarf, and one sharp-eyed yarn store owner called out the yarn manufacturer of all the yarn in the scarf. First time anyone’s done that, and I was impressed!

It’s hard to go yarn shopping when you don’t knit and you have plenty of yarn already. I saw a lot of fantastic yarn, but every skein I picked up I put back down again. Eventually it came to me that I won’t get any joy out of starting a new project until I complete a couple of old, unfinished projects. I wonder if I have any of those?

Broken summer

The evening air is different now. It does not yet have the crispness of fall, the chill that evokes sweaters and pumpkin-spiced lattes, but you can feel that the crispness is coming. It’s more of a mildness right now, the dense humidity and the high heat having finally collapsed under their own weight.

The local geese are gathering before their long flight; similarly, the cranes are congregating (and croaking at each other all day). The frogs have retreated from the driveway and the sidewalk back to the marsh, to do whatever they do in the colder seasons. I only brought my bicycle out from the basement a couple of weeks ago, and now it feels like time to think about putting it back.

The transition from summer to autumn will have less definition this year; the high temperatures of summer have already killed off many of the leaves that would have waited until next month to change their colors and drop. Even the recently planted young trees have already lost some leaves due to the excessive heat in their youth. Have they received enough rain to help them stretch and anchor their roots, enough to survive whatever kind of winter lies ahead? We’ll know for sure in April or May if they had what it took to persist.

We’ve endured so many events this summer that have strained us to the point of despair. Floods and hurricanes. Power failures and grid failures. COVID surges. The fall of Afghanistan. School-board meetings with battle lines drawn over the use of cloth masks to stem the spread of a deadly disease. Deaths and the commemoration of deaths. Final endings, and long separations with no end in sight.

There have also been new things, happy things. New friends and co-workers, and friends re-met after long absences. A new school year, with new kindergarteners, new middle schoolers, new high schoolers, new college freshmen first-year students, new graduates, and new teachers. Summer weddings! New babies and babies-to-come. New bar and bat mitzvahs taking on new roles in the new year. New recipes to try — and old recipes to use again, now that it feels like time to cook and bake again.

Between the highs and the lows live those things that never change: laundry, dishes, sleep schedules and the management thereof, work, commuting, parenting, grocery shopping, and the walking of the dog.

Well, I suppose that parenting changes. My kidlets are now ages 15 to 22, and their needs are different. Eldest needs direction and support, Secondborn needs space, MiddleSon needs an audience, and Youngest needs as many hugs as he gives (plus a ride home from soccer practice). And the dog, who thinks I am his mama, needs his mama. And, apparently, needs to follow her around the house every time she gets up. Dog is getting older and I’m starting to wonder if there is such a thing as canine dementia; Montmorency Jerome has never possessed the swiftest mind but a few days ago he went into a barking fit because there was a truck on the road. A truck. On the road. The audacity!

Anyway, we’re all looking forward to the trappings of fall that we can just begin to perceive on the far horizon. Summer, we bore you heavily on our shoulders and will be glad to set you down. Autumn? If you can wait a bit before we take you up that would be best. Let us pause, breathe, and make ourselves ready.