Back on Track

Some rough weeks are behind us. Baby and I are both recovering from the flu, and I am out of a severe depression that hit me in the past weeks.

When I moved here over a month ago, my house-mate kindly offered me the use of her computer for my daily email checking. I did a few blog posts as well using her machine but it was quickly getting on my nerves with its lagging slowness. The whole point of blogging is to write without really thinking about it, and just let the fingers fly over the keyboard, and words rush to the screen. With her machine you have to wait for the letters to show up well after the fingers have typed. Worse still if I needed to backtrack on a couple of words, holding down the backspace key often led to disastrous results, leaving me a couple of paragraphs short, when I only want to delete a sentence. On one such venture to this blog, I also noticed that my header went out the window and I had no way of replacing it, since I was working on a strange machine.

I thought I will forget everything as soon as my machine was happily set up in its new corner, but I was in for another unpleasant surprise. The crash of my trusty computer was the last straw, and it really hit me hard. At stake were almost three years’ worth of work data, painstakingly downloaded and collected software, e-books, craft patterns, emails, and most painfully my beloved boy’s pictures from birth until the day before I moved out. I was inconsolable at this terrible loss on top of everything else.

I wasn’t doing well either on other fronts. Baby was sickly and irritable because of teething. I succumbed to moral pressure and bought a music CD; a present I couldn’t afford for my house-mate. Soon afterwards I discovered that my choice was a terrible, and the CD not exchangeable. My cellphone charger decided to quit on me, only a month after switching to pre-paid.  I was ready to crawl into the nearest cave, and just hibernate for the rest of the year.

In the midst of my desperation, a friend took pity on me and invited me to spend an evening with her family. Baby and I went and had a great time. For me, it was a great privilege to spend time with normal people, because I was getting sick of hanging around with misfits like me. It is a great comfort to know and see that there are people out there who make their relationships work, and not everyone is recovering from a broken relationship or looking for a new one.

The dose of love, caring and normalcy I got from my dear friend gave me the courage to seek help for my damaged computer. Another friend came to the rescue and my valuable history was saved. Now I am sifting through my electronic files to restore the software I worked with and put back all the knickknacks I am partial to using. It will take some time before everything is back to its old order, but at least I am halfway there.

Baby has two little teeth, they were his first Mother’s Day present for me. I fixed my problem with my cell phone charger. My experience with my unsuitable present taught me a lesson, and for my other friends I will either give a handmade present or a voucher.  For my own birthday I want NOTHING. Life is too short to keep collecting and passing on unwanted gifts.