Looks like a paperweight to me

My PC died recently. Right around Christmas it decided it really didn't feel like seeing in the New Year. Shut it down one evening, went down the next morning to turn on the power, and discovered it had expired quietly in its sleep.

On the one hand, I'm moderately envious. I'm getting old enough that I tend to respond to a peaceful demise, even if it is just a device and not a person, with "lucky bastard." We all would like to go peacefully in our sleep (instead of screaming in terror like the passengers in Grampa's car). On the other, it was my computer. I may have kvetched about it taking up too much space on my rather small desk while mumbling about not really needing an actual PC when for me it was basically just a glorified typewriter, but it was kind of nice to be able to do mindless Internet stuff without having to share.

Which is what I'm doing now. I'm pretty obviously not totally without access to the Internet. The S.O. has a laptop, and we jointly own a tablet. I'm not too thrilled with the tablet -- it has a separate keyboard that never has worked, so if I want to do anything that involves much typing I have to do it with the onscreen touchpad -- but it's fine for reading the news, checking to see the latest stupidity on Facebook, or playing mindless games. And, given that I am a morning person and the S.O. most definitely is not, I can generally get whatever I want to do on a computer done without feeling too annoyed. Today, for example, I've been up and wandering around the intertubes for a couple hours and probably have at least another hour to go before the S.O. comes stumbling down the stairs hoping I haven't consumed all the coffee. Do I really need to spend more than an hour or two online on any given day? I don't think so. . .

In fact, maybe I should be relieved the desktop PC died. One of the fringe benefits/side effects of being computerless is I'm suddenly discovering there are other things to do around here. I'm not seeing a whole lot of Facebook status updates lately, but I have gotten more letters written. Instead of using the glorified,typewriter for correspondence, I've fallen back on a legacy technology: a ballpoint pen and sheets of paper. (Here's hoping all my correspondents still know how to read cursive.) And, curiously enough, I'm answering letters faster when there are no distractions like online Sudoku games.

One of these days I'll probably haul the desktop PC to a computer repair place to see if it's worth fixing. Maybe. The longer it sits in a corner gathering dust, the less urgent getting it repaired becomes.