LETTING GO!

We all face that day when we have to let go. Death is not a pleasant thing, and our attachments make it that way. And so it goes with TLW (The Little Woman).

Recently her laptop died, and I am in mourning. Oh, we knew it was coming, but how do you really prepare for that? At first, we tried to baby the laptop, but it even knew it was time to go. We tried to ‘pull the plug’, but it still had a few hours of battery life in it, and then one morning, it came up lifeless.

Needless to say, there was some complaining by TLW, and some painful realization that she would now be intruding on my time on my computer.

“Oh, just once a day” is the promise. But I know better.

“Joe, could you look up on your computer…” or “Joe, I need to find…” or “Joe, go on Zillow and…”

There ought to be a law that frees husbands from the extra duties of a computer-less woman!

When I started out PC (Pre computer) with TLW, it was chore to get her on the darn thing, so I bought her a laptop, showed her how to use it and prayed for peace. Once she learned how to turn it on, the little things started to happen like: “Joe, there’s a window that says ‘go to file to open”! What should I do? Joe, there’s a clock running!” or the best yet: “Joe, there’s a thingy on the screen, what should I do?”

“Thingies” are the last straw, so I started to hide in the basement, attic and backyard, hoping not to hear her call me so she could learn to figure it out. That didn’t work, because she would find me, and I had to figure it out. Then after many years of this, she finally learned! I was sailing along, napping in my chair, while she surfed. Then it died.

“Joe, I can’t start it up anymore!”

Me: “Ok, shut down, then reboot and do exactly as it says, type it in word for word.

She does that and the machine says: type “Reboot-return”.
She types: (with all the unnecessary quotes) “Reboot-return”. TLW then tells me: “I did EXACTLY like it said on the screen!”
I look and sure enough there are the quotes in the language.
Me: “Toots, you don’t put in the quotes!”
“I did just like you told me, after all, you are the expert.” (All of a sudden!)

And so it died, and with it my peace!