![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On Sunday morning the mouse on my laptop stopped working completely. As did other mouse-like devices I tried plugging in.
Fixing a problem with the mouse is impossible for me, because you can't use the mouse.
Andrew's ended up having to nuke the OS from orbit; now I'm re-installing things and remembering just how very many things there are that need tweaking for me (and for some reason the accessibility stuff (for me, high contrast and large fonts, mostly) are not working at all yet.
But still, one of the first pages I opened in the browser I just had to install is the one in which I'm writing to you now, to tell you how glad I am to be back! I was annoyed by how severely my mental health suffered at even a few days computerless. I could keep up, just about, with e-mail and social media on my phone, but I had a few empty days I'd planned to spend on my book, I couldn't watch baseball or do grocery shopping or even play music on Spotify as I sulkily did chores when I eventually got bored enough of all my usual activities being unavailable to me.
And while lack of computer isn't the crisis it was in the pre-smartphone days, my elderly phone is developing enough quirks (and the apps for it are getting increasingly terrible as people increasingly can't be arsed with the BlackBerry OS, which is fair enough but such a pain in the ass...on the plus side, all my friends complaining that Facebook chat/messenger isn't working for them any more at least make me glad that the mobile website is unaffected on my phone because there's no Messenger app to try to force us on to, Facebook having intentionally nuked its BlackBerry app a few months ago. So between shitty user experiences and a phone that's deciding, eg I can't click on anything in the bottom left corner or I can't keep it from thinking I've clicked on whatever's in the top right corner, it's been suboptimal to say the least.
Anyway, the fonts are still wrong but I'll take that. In the meantime, I went to Martin Mere yesterday, a Wildfowl & Wetland Trust site that had a deal for WI members so about 20 people from my WI (and some of them's daughters and grandkids) went to look at birds. And otters! I have some pictures, but technical failure means you'll just have to take my word for it now. I had a nice day, anyway.
One of the nicest things about it, though, was on the way back. The lady who organized it gave a few of us a lift, one of them being someone I know slightly as the secretary of our branch. We got chatting and I found out a lot more about her life, as a Sri Lankan immigrant who moved here when she married a Brit she has a lot of vehement opinions on the awfulness of the immigration system which as you can imagine are just like mine but worse because she's a person of color and says Islam is the religion she was born into (she doesn't consider herself one, but you can imagine how much that counts to the Home Office). I told her about my book and said I'd like to get her story in it; she seemed really happy to do that and even said she can introduce me to some other people. I wanted to address how the problems I have, numerous and severe as they may be, are maybe one percent as bad as they could be, because I'm white and from the U.S. And she just seems a lovely person and it turns out she lives so close that I have unknowingly walked Gary the Wonder Dog past her house every single day.
The WI's been great for this kind of thing: the other day I ran into H who cut Gary's nails for us outside Fred's. K saw me at the market one day, all excited about my purple hair, needed me to go and talk to her friend who was thinking of dying her hair purple. I've seen N and her lovely dog Lucy in the park a few times. I feel so much more connected to where I live than I did before.
Fixing a problem with the mouse is impossible for me, because you can't use the mouse.
Andrew's ended up having to nuke the OS from orbit; now I'm re-installing things and remembering just how very many things there are that need tweaking for me (and for some reason the accessibility stuff (for me, high contrast and large fonts, mostly) are not working at all yet.
But still, one of the first pages I opened in the browser I just had to install is the one in which I'm writing to you now, to tell you how glad I am to be back! I was annoyed by how severely my mental health suffered at even a few days computerless. I could keep up, just about, with e-mail and social media on my phone, but I had a few empty days I'd planned to spend on my book, I couldn't watch baseball or do grocery shopping or even play music on Spotify as I sulkily did chores when I eventually got bored enough of all my usual activities being unavailable to me.
And while lack of computer isn't the crisis it was in the pre-smartphone days, my elderly phone is developing enough quirks (and the apps for it are getting increasingly terrible as people increasingly can't be arsed with the BlackBerry OS, which is fair enough but such a pain in the ass...on the plus side, all my friends complaining that Facebook chat/messenger isn't working for them any more at least make me glad that the mobile website is unaffected on my phone because there's no Messenger app to try to force us on to, Facebook having intentionally nuked its BlackBerry app a few months ago. So between shitty user experiences and a phone that's deciding, eg I can't click on anything in the bottom left corner or I can't keep it from thinking I've clicked on whatever's in the top right corner, it's been suboptimal to say the least.
Anyway, the fonts are still wrong but I'll take that. In the meantime, I went to Martin Mere yesterday, a Wildfowl & Wetland Trust site that had a deal for WI members so about 20 people from my WI (and some of them's daughters and grandkids) went to look at birds. And otters! I have some pictures, but technical failure means you'll just have to take my word for it now. I had a nice day, anyway.
One of the nicest things about it, though, was on the way back. The lady who organized it gave a few of us a lift, one of them being someone I know slightly as the secretary of our branch. We got chatting and I found out a lot more about her life, as a Sri Lankan immigrant who moved here when she married a Brit she has a lot of vehement opinions on the awfulness of the immigration system which as you can imagine are just like mine but worse because she's a person of color and says Islam is the religion she was born into (she doesn't consider herself one, but you can imagine how much that counts to the Home Office). I told her about my book and said I'd like to get her story in it; she seemed really happy to do that and even said she can introduce me to some other people. I wanted to address how the problems I have, numerous and severe as they may be, are maybe one percent as bad as they could be, because I'm white and from the U.S. And she just seems a lovely person and it turns out she lives so close that I have unknowingly walked Gary the Wonder Dog past her house every single day.
The WI's been great for this kind of thing: the other day I ran into H who cut Gary's nails for us outside Fred's. K saw me at the market one day, all excited about my purple hair, needed me to go and talk to her friend who was thinking of dying her hair purple. I've seen N and her lovely dog Lucy in the park a few times. I feel so much more connected to where I live than I did before.