Blogging By The Columbus Method*

My desktop computer is ailing. It has a wonky fan in the power supply, and my computer guy has it.  About ten minutes after his pickup (This is TX, remember) pulled out of the driveway with the tower in the back seat**, I started to go into withdrawal.  But then I thought, “I have a tablet . . . with a keyboard . . .!”  But, like the man says, “Nothing is ever simple.”  

In the first place, it’s not much of a tablet.  The only reason I even got it was that it has a bigger screen than my Kindle and, of course, it was on sale — which practically goes without saying.  I can take it to knitting group, and when I access knitting patterns off Ravelry or my knitting blog, you can actually read them, and the Kindle app can display a whole page at a time.  Plus, the case I found that fit it came with a little Bluetooth keyboard.  (N.B., A Bluetooth keyboard versus a touchscreen keyboard is technically the lesser of the two evils, but not by much.)  

So, OK, I can blog from the tablet.  E’ bene.  Pezzo di torta. . . . . Uh, nope. I can get to my blog on the jive brower this thing has, but all I can do once I’m there is look at it.  Wait, maybe there’s a WordPress app. . . yes!  I down load the app, cudgel my brains for my WordPress password, and . . . I’m in!  

I’ve been wearing glasses since the age of 6, but the vision in my right eye (What chart?) is actually very sharp at reading distance, and I typically read without my glasses.  I can read books on the Kindle app on this tablet easily without having to put on my glasses.  I quickly discover that I can’t read text on this stupid WordPress app unaided because my nose is too long.  So, I roll the reader table out of the way, move the fat(boy)cat, get out of bed, get my glasses, get settled back in bed, roll my table back into position.  The fat(boy)cat gives me a dirty look, walks all over my legs lookin for that spot he’s gotten all nice and warm, finally finds it, gets it all schooched back out the way he likes it, finds his place in that nap he was enjoying before he was so rudely interrupted, and picks up where he left off.  Now!

Let me just say that for someone who has been touch typing for 4/5ths of her life on a big girl keyboard, and is used to being able to type pert’ near as fast as I can think up what I want to say, using either of this tablet’s options for text entry (touch screen keyboard or Bluetooth keyboard) is like trying to run a marathon with your pants down around your ankles. It’s not quite as bad as having to revert to Morse code, but it’s as near as dammit.

So, my computer guy can’t access me another power supply until Monday, and it may take a week for him to get one in if he can’t get one locally and has to order it, which is just as swell, actually, as I am in serious snowflake mode at the moment with a Wednesday deadline bearing down on me and I was smart enough not to give away my originals when I made copies of the snowflake patterns I printed out to take to knitting group last week (some of us are ambicraftous).

And that’s why this post only took six hours to do.

*The Columbus Method (going east by sailing west) is a complicated, time-consuming, PITA method which you are forced to use to perform what should be a relatively simple, straightforward task because reasons.

**In TX, if you see a man driving a pickup with a crew cab, it usually means he’s married, and he’s having to drive hers to go get the kids. In this case, they’re both retired, she got tired of having to haul herself all the way up into and down out of her pickup and made him get her a Subaru — which he wouldn’t be caught dead driving.  Since her pickup was newer and got better gas mileage, they sold his, and he’s driving hers.