Not So Talkative Lately

As anyone can see who happens to glance at my blog, I haven't been very chatty lately.  I haven't been doing a lot of writing, in general.  There's a reason for that, but I'll get to that in a minute.  I did finally submit an article on my usual site (wrytestuff.com), and the biggest surprise was that this particular article was twice as popular as my other highest-popularity pieces.  It was just a small piece about Thanksgiving in Canada and the ways in which Canadians differ from Americans, so I don't know the reason it was comparatively such a big hit.

I touched on something in the piece that one day I'll write about in further detail, though.  Those differences between Canadians and Americans are rather interesting.  One reader pointed out to me that he's always being reminded by a friend of his that we are not at all the same.  Ain't that the truth!  I can think of a few ways in which we're completely different up here.

I did another piece at one time about Canadian weather.  Of course, I barely scratched the surface there.  Canada is gigantic compared to the US, and there's a huge different in latitude between our southernmost regions and our northernmost.  There are no generalizations that can be made about Canadian weather.  I live in a area that barely gets any snow most years.  This would be one of them.  I haven't seen a single flake this year, and it's almost the last week of November.

Now, as to the reason I haven't been writing, and that's the belligerent behaviour of my laptop.  It decided to have power-supply issues.  Not only is the adapter shot, but the internal power jack is, too.  I've spliced an old adapter to the male end of my adapter, checking the voltage/amperage/ohms of course, so I have power again. but the internal jack will have to be replaced.  The great thing is, I can get both a new adapter and a new jack for about $30, including shipping.  In the meantime I'm having to keep my laptop on power-saver mode in order to keep it from switching over to the battery.  It's simply not pulling enough juice from the AC supply, and as soon as it switches to battery I have maybe an hour before I'm shut down - depending on what I'm running.

The funny thing is, in order to jury-rig a fix for my laptop, I had to delve into my "I'll probably need those later" box of electronics crap.  Stuff people will pick up from the box, handling it like it's a dead fish or something, voicing the typical query, "Why on earth would you keep this?"  The adapter I used came from an IBM Pentium laptop.  Yes, a Pentium.  Not Pentium II or III.  Can you guess how many years I've had that adapter in that box?  I tell you, though, it was an absolute lifesaver.  I'm lost without my laptop.  I can't take it.  Everything I do is on my computer.  Music, games, movies, business, paperwork, communicating with other people, writing (obviously), and pretty much anything else you can think of that doesn't involve plumbing in some way.  I don't watch actual TV shows, except The Big Bang Theory, and I watch that on my laptop.  I also watch basketball games live streaming on my computer.  Pretty handy little device.

I've had the machine back up for a little while, but didn't actually trust it to run properly, so I've been avoiding doing any writing.  One of the worst feelings in the world for me is to lose my writing.  I back up my work, and my recent stuff is all online right away, so I can't really lose that stuff once it's been published.  If I happen to be in the middle of something, however, and my computer goes down, or I'm working on my novel and haven't done a backup in a while, I lose whatever I was inspired to write, and it's like being gut-kicked for me.  I've lost my work a few times, and when I've had to do re-writes I never felt like I wrote it as well the second time around.  There just wasn't any passion for the work itself, only the anger from the loss.

So, I haven't been saying a whole lot.  It's kind of like not wanting to repeat myself, I guess.  Once I've written/said something, I really don't want to have to say it again.  I'm just now getting back into writing, tentatively, trusting that my computer will hold on until I can get the part I need to fix it properly.  I desperately need to have a backup computer, with an external, redundant hard drive.  Redundant, so that I never have to be again.