I'm typing this on a brand-spankin' new laptop. It's pretty, wide screen which will take some getting used to, and everything seems to work just fine. But it's also kind of embarrassing.

Because I wasn't planning on getting a new laptop yesterday. I was planning to continue lolling on the couch and enjoying my sick day. But then as I was getting ready to get Emily from the bus stop, I somehow looped the printer cord (which was stretched through the living room so I could scan some stuff in from the comfort of my couch) around my full glass of soda and tip it, nicely and as though it was intentional, directly onto my computer.

And then I said bad words.

The computer's not ruined - it still boots up and runs and connects to the internet, blah blah blah... but the G key and one of the control keys snapped off in the clean-up process. Now, I don't know if you've ever snapped a key off a laptop keyboard... but if not, please allow my idiocy to be adequate education and don't try this at home. It's very difficult to put back on. As in, hours of struggling and failure difficult. And midway through my struggle and failure, the little plastic doohickey that connects the actual key to the actual keyboard broke. Done. Kaput.

More bad words.

I could still type, but it became an exercise in unintentional Ebonics... I was "cookin dinner" and "pickin up the kids" -- and let me tell you, I cannot pull off that style of speech. I can't even say the word "peeps," which is apparently becoming the new cool word for suburban moms around the country, unless of course I am referring to those marshmallow things that appear on the store shelves at Easter time. And even then, I don't EAT Peeps. Unless they're in S'mores. They make good S'mores. Or if you're blowing them up in the microwave. 'Cause that's fun. But I digress.

So I was G-less and half ctrl-less, and when I called up Willem to whine about my own ineptitude he reminded me that I'd already gotten five years out of that laptop and maybe I should just go get a new one. So I did. Not top-of-the-line or fancy, but it does what I need it to do, so we're retiring the other laptop down to Emily's games and goofing around.

This one is going to take some getting used to. First of all, the delete key is over where the backspace key was on my old keyboard, and the home/pg up/pg down/end keys are way over there down the side. And it has the same little blue Fn key down in the left-hand corner, which is where my finger expects the ctrl key to be, so I routinely do Fn-something and get nothing. At least there's no one-button Turn Everything Off spot, so that's a good thing.

The weirdest thing for me, though, is the fact that all of my keys have actual letters or other labels on them. Through my transcription work, I had literally worn the letters right off the old one... which was fine by me but tended to mess with anyone else trying to use my computer and actually look at the keys.

So now I need to come up with a new way to discourage the riffraff from accosting my computer. I'm thinking small electric shocks to sensitive areas... but getting people to wear the electrodes is so tricky. Must continue to ponder.