Farewell, Bennu

I kill electronic devices.  No computer, phone, or watch battery has ever stood a long-term chance against my bad machine mojo.  My computers are named so they can be identified on our home server, and not just because I'm odd.

Bennu was declared terminal and Fawkes fell into a coma on the same day.  I haven't had such bad luck since the great Mac and SEM implosion of 2004.  Fawkes (my desktop) refused to boot up after a restart and became nothing but a blinking cursor.  My husband the computer guru still hasn't fixed it, so I've been without a desktop for a month.

Poor Bennu decided to hang on just a little bit longer.  My son has an electronics fetish and yanked on the power cord a few too many times.  My little first generation netbook just gave up on me.  Its power connection had loose and the battery would not charge properly.  It died a long, drawn out, agonizing death.  The last weeks with Bennu were tedious.  I never knew when I would lose power and be shut off suddenly.  I could not work on my book or anything else of importance.  The end had come for poor Bennu.  It finally died completely and I was stuck using my husband's laptop to check email and not much else.

Bennu was a good little netbook.  On its tiny keyboard, I wrote three and a half books.  I used it to play Diablo 2 while I was in labor.  Its screen was tiny and its SD card only 8Gb, but I had become attached to my useful little device.  It is sitting on my desk right now, a corpse of a machine, awaiting removal of its useful files to be transplanted into a living device.

Adarna arrived yesterday and I am still getting used to the larger screen and keyboard.  It's a pretty little thing, and I think it cost me half of what I paid for Bennu.  The keys are noisy and it has an actual hard drive so it runs a bit hot.  Of course, we immediately wiped Windows XP from it's existence and installed Ubuntu.  I'm unapologetic when I say that Microsoft is just not right for our family.  We run Window's partitions on the two desktops, but those OS's are only there in case of a dire gaming emergency.

Adarna still needs essential files pulled from the server before I can really get to work on it.  My goal is to keep my new shiny toy as far from possible from my destructo-son.  His birthday is coming up in a month.  I should find him a little baby laptop he can pound on and not destroy.  Now, I just need to be given a little time to write.   I can't do it while he's awake, which unfortunately is also the only time I'm awake.  The child only naps on accident.  Words are stewing in my mind and I want them out, but it will take a daddy-and-baby-go-out night for me to type out anything.