Slightly Off the Grid

I haven’t written a blog post since June when I was still on narcotics after hip-replacement surgery.  Surgery is not the reason for the blog famine.  There are oodles of topics that have been crashing around in my feeble little brain.  No…the real reason I haven’t written is because of my Ipad.  I am going to blame Wi-Fi.

It’s like this: I spent the summer recuperating and thoroughly enjoying my bed and my screened in porch with Ipad in hand. Facebook, emails, Dopplar radar–it was great.  What was not so great was losing a lengthy blog post that I drafted on the tablet.  Who knows what I did or didn’t do, but it was gone.  This baby-boomer brain needs to sit at a real computer and type on a real keyboard.  But the computer was not on the delightful screened porch and my agility at climbing stairs, while getting better, is still not my forte.

But now it is back-to-school time.  Back to textbooks and lessons plans and, yes, the real computer.  In my classroom, our IT guy examined my set-up and told me that I could not have the desktop, the laptop AND the school-purchased Ipad.  Since we are heading toward teaching by tablet, either the laptop or the desktop had to go.  This presented a dilemma that my screened porch soothed brain was ill-equipped to handle.  I use the laptop for teaching applications: the Smartboard, internet, showing films, etc.  The desktop is where I access email, enter grades, and create documents.  The fact that they sit practically side my side in my work corner does not make one of them redundant.  Ah, but now that I can check grades and  email on the Ipad, the IT guy tells me that one of the devices is redundant.  I choose the brand-new desktop over the antiquated laptop and immediately find my computer freezing up with too many open applications.

Speaking of redundant, do I dare mention the smartphone?  Having washed my previous phone in a wish-I-could-blame-it-on-narcotics act of stupidity on the day my daughter decided to have her baby, I upgraded to an Iphone.  It had to be an Iphone because I have an Ipad and there’s no way my brain can handle both Apple and Android.  But now I get email alerts on a gazillion different devices and if I read mail on one device it doesn’t note that on another device and so all my devices are constantly telling me I have 173 unread emails.  Plus, the new devices required me to get Gmail and Icloud accounts so I now have four different email user names and passwords to forget.  And I get really confused as to when to use which.

Maybe someone is reading this and thinking, “This woman is a techno-idiot.”  Yes, I am.  The world was a simpler…if slower…place with land-lines and snail-mail.  It  was also cheaper.  But that’s another topic.