Back to the future, sort of

Microsoft Office Word 3.  Yep, that’s what it’s come to as I write this. 

It started a few weeks ago while we were vacationing with family on a mountain in Utah ten thousand feet up, give or take a football field.  Take home lesson: always know where the nearest ER is located, and/or have daughters go with you carrying their very smart phones with GPS.  As the old song goes, “I left my heart inSan Francisco”…but my appendix forever belongs to Utah.

I was the first thing to “break”.

We finally made it back home to southern Missouri, and not too long thereafter, when I could F-I-N-A-L-L-Y take a nice soothing bath, the water was a bit tepid.  Hmmm.  Sure enough, the water heater had sprung a leak.

Of course, we didn’t notice this until 6PM on a Friday evening…in our very small town.

But I need to back up, since just prior to that, the laptop also decided to get sick.  Off we went to the experts in a nearby city (have to drive an hour to get there), thinking it was just a virus, and that with some of their special IT-ing I’d be back in business.  Until I was informed it was the hard drive.

Sigh. 

I’m not a mental health expert, but surely one of the things that counts seriously in our favor, if we are to successfully navigate through life, is Resiliency, or as one of my daughters says (the one in the back seat with her GPS), the ability to “pivot well.”  Which, in my book, also speaks articulately of our perception of circumstances.   

• People used to die from appendicitis, and undoubtedly still do on some places of the globe. I made a similar comment to my surgeon.  In response, he told me of a woman who had griped at him after surgery, maybe something about a bikini line??  (I don’t remember exactly; I had drugs coursing through my veins, and was glad to be alive ….) 

• We would do just fine without hot water for a weekend. The basement valve we could turn on and off as needed, and reminded ourselves (spoiled as we are, c’mon, I admit it) that we were blessed just to have clean water.  Again, something many, many, many people cannot say.

• Then there’s the computer issue. It’s been interesting finding out how much my little cheap-o reading tablet can do when I need it to.  And, of course, this old 2005 dino-computo-saurus allows me type away, (even though it’s not connected to our household Wi-Fi), until our newer laptop recovers from its heart transplant.

So here’s the question I always want to keep in my frontal lobe: Is this a problem, or merely an inconvenience?  I would say that 99.99% of what I experience is inconvenience, and should be adroitly “pivoted” around. 

Next time the computer goes on the blink, I may just pick up a book.