News From Hawkhill Acres

Just because I’ve been a little irritable lately, what with having the flu for over a week, a couple of family members have accused me of being cranky. Me? Cranky? No way. I defy anyone to show one instance of crankiness that wasn’t justified by what I’ve gone through lately.

First of all, it’s not easy to be Susy Sunshine when you’ve been coughing almost constantly for two weeks. Add in a fever, sore throat, body aches so bad that my earlobes hurt and my eyelashes are numb, and it’s obvious that any slight hint of irritation that I exhibited was absolutely understandable.

But on top of all that, I’ve had to cope with some major changes like having my PC die yet again in spite of the geek’s best attempts at hi-tech hoodoo. While I’m lucky enough to have a laptop, its keyboard is so funky and hard to type on that I end up gnashing my teeth and hitting the keys so hard that they start to shed their caps. Of course, it’s always the keys I use the most, so I can’t just substitute another key like I did when my manual typewriter’s “L” key got mangled back in the 70’s. For a while, I signed my name 1i1, hoping that my readers would think it was an affectation. (That was back before I added another L to my name, so I spelled it One-i-One. Nowadays, I’d have to spell it One-i-One-One. But I d1gress.)

In order to avoid the stroke I felt coming on, I took advantage of a rare break between two of the storms we seem to be having on an almost daily basis and went to Staples and bought a really nifty keyboard. It’s called The Wave and it has so many programmable buttons on it that it looks like something NASA would use to launch the space shuttle. (Actually, there’s a button with something that looks like the symbol for one of the lesser radioactive elements, but I’m sure that can’t be right. Probably just downloads links to science sites or something.)

So I plugged this futuristic keyboard into my laptop, installed it with the software and prepared to enjoy typing again. I have to tell you that it was everything I’d hoped it would be, except that when I went to use my mouse, the pointer just sat there like it had gotten stuck in the screen. Somehow, by installing the keyboard, I’d uninstalled the mouse or done something to scramble its little mousie brain.

I uninstalled the keyboard, reinstalled the mouse and then reinstalled the keyboard again. The mouse worked fine, but the keyboard was completely unresponsive. So, yes, maybe I was a little cranky when Son came over and asked how I liked my new keyboard, but who wouldn’t be? I swear I only growled once when he suggested that I move the mouse’s USB connection to another port and you could hardly hear it over the banging of the mouse on the table as I uninstalled it yet again, reinstalled the keyboard, and -just to humor Son - moved the USB connection for the mouse to another port, although I knew that wouldn’t have any effect, except that it did.

There’s absolutely no reason why it should have made a difference, but I decided not to delve into the “why” of it. I just answered my email and hoped that both devices would continue to work long enough for me to write a post and get some work done. They did and my blood pressure settled down into the high normal range again, which is as good as it gets for me when I’m irritated livid not completely ecstatic.

It would have stayed out of the danger zone too, if Geekdaddy hadn’t chosen that time to come over and observe that I might want to consider why I have so much trouble dealing with change. I believe his exact words were “I don’t know why you can’t take change in your stride, like I do, Lill. You have to learn to roll with the punches.” Right!

Now, if I was a cranky person, I would have bellowed at him that it’s a lot easier to deal with change if you’re completely oblivious to what’s going on around you anyway, like he is. The man spends 90% of his time at home with his nose in a book and his mind in a galaxy far, far away. The only changes he has to deal with are plot changes, like when they kill off one of his favorite characters. “I don’t believe it,” he’ll yell from the bathtub where he’s soaking and reading, “How in the world can they have nice-guy Hissvernia fall for his archenemy Shteptall’s corny ambush in the grabdibb mines? It’s so obvious a saurian litterling could see through it.”

I have a theory about people - well, lizard people, I guess - like ol’ Hissvernia. They’d be a lot better off if they were a little crankier. Trust me. No way would an archenemy get me to go down into a grabdibb mine. I’d just take a blood pressure pill and tell them to take a hike.