An ode to computers

While Bill was out of town a couple weeks ago my computer suddenly died. And I do mean suddenly. It cut out in the middle of a movie the kids were watching never to start again. It's been a bit of a whirlwind trying to get that taken care of. A great friend let me borrow her laptop for a few days while Bill was still gone. For the last week I've used Bill's laptop, which is fine but looking at the screen for too long makes my eyes hurt.

I had an iMac and I dearly loved it. It's six years old and until the moment it died it was in perfectly good working shape. Unfortunately, replacing it with a new one was just a bit out of a price range that made me feel comfortable to drop money on right now, unplanned. We are so close to the end of grad school and a move across the country and saving for a house and paying off student loans and all sorts of things I want to put money towards more than a new computer. Yet my computer is my main work device so I have to have one that works. I've been in a pickle for a while trying to find the best solution.

We finally decided to get a new PC instead of a Mac and shopped around to find one with similar specs that I wanted. We ended up getting a normal desktop computer with tower, monitor, keyboard, mouse. I got it today and started setting it up only to discover that there is no way to adjust the screen brightness except through a horrible menu accessed directly on the monitor. I use that feature multiple times a day, so as weird as it sounds, that ended up being a deal breaker.

Bill is a super savvy shopper though and lo and behold he came up with a solution. We found another computer that had virtually the same specs but is an all-in-one just like my iMac was, but just a PC.

So after just hours with my new computer I'm packing it up and shipping it back and the new one is ordered and will arrive in a couple days. Hopefully the computer buying saga will end and it will be back to business as usual.

All through this process I've felt super blessed. Bill got a paycheck we hadn't planned on for some previous work done. I've upped my hours of work the last few weeks and am seeing a significant increase in my paychecks. I was able to sell the broken iMac for $145. Talk about holding its value. I appreciated that. We have been really blessed so that even though it wasn't in the plan to replace a computer just now, the money is there. It's lovely.