Man, where to begin…
I guess the first thing to say is that I usually stop posting when I’m blocked by news in my life, usually bad news, that I don’t want to share yet. I can’t think, or write, about anything else until I get it out of my system, so all writing gets blocked for a while. This has been happening for a while but the latest tale can now be told, to wit:
This isn’t really my story to tell so I’m deliberately being a bit vague, but my son-in-law had a major health scare. He needed some major surgery, but is recovering now and the surgery seems to have done the trick. We’d all been under a great deal of stress until we got the good news from the hospital, now maybe a week ago. The major problem was found while the doctors were investigating a less severe (unrelated) problem he has, so now he’s back to square one on the original issue, but things are looking up.
Meanwhile, and I might have mentioned this in passing already, but here’s some good news: Ben and Jennie are expecting — the baby will be here sometime around the beginning of August. We are all over the moon. They also got a new apartment, only a few blocks away from us, and are both now busy teaching.
Laptop Update: My current laptop is suddenly showing signs of physical wear. It’s mostly a problem with the hinge — the electrical connection to the screen seems to be wearing, and the screen blacks out unless the lid is in just the right spot. So, I bought a new laptop this week. I want to go with Linux Mint, and was thinking of getting a DELL or even another System76, but really I was leaning towards Lenovo, and eventually settled on a Yoga 7.
This is basically a commodity laptop, pretty straightforward (except for a touchscreen and the hinge’s extra flexibility): 16GB RAM, 1TB storage, Intel CPU and GPU. Not bleeding edge by any means, but at least as good as my old laptop and (most important) it feels physically robust.
I wiped the drive and installed Mint, which was a bit of a nail-biter but mostly went smoothly. Installed a ton of my favorite software, got my databases up and running, got QGIS going & migrated my projects, and I’m now working through migrating my music/photos and local website. I have a lot still to do but the laptop is now fully functional — I walked with it across the river to a coffee shop, and spent the afternoon configuring software and browsing.
This afternoon is the No Kings protest in town, and I’ll probably take one of the bikes out for a ride tomorrow.