Winter Needs an Intervention

Just when I thought winter was pretty much over, it is currently snowing in the northern half of the state. I'm ready to fast forward to the part of the year where I bitch constantly about the heat.

Anyway, two things today. I guess it's three things because I already mentioned one and I have two more items on my bad mood, grumpy agenda today.

I'm really tired of surfing various news web pages and coming across yet another disgusting photo of Miley Cyrus with her tongue sticking out. Her mother needs to tell her to stop it. It's not attractive.

And the media needs to understand we are pretty disgusted by the whole thing and they need to stop enabling her.

Item number 3: I have this small little laptop/notebook, which by some miracle I am using at the moment. I call it a laptop/notebook because I don't even know the difference between the two which probably tells you something about my capacity to adapt.

I call her Sam simply because she is a Samsung product and I'm not very creative with names.

As I said, Sam is small and very lightweight. I bought her thinking I'd use her as my main computer, attached at the hip we would be, and I'd switch Tom from his old, dying desktop to my slightly younger, faster, but bigger, more cumbersome laptop. Currently, we are both using my older laptop and Sam has been banished to her bag for months. Why? I hate her. I was going to say it wasn't anything personal, but I'd be lying. She came with Windows 8, the most convoluted operating system Microsoft has ever developed. The learning curve for me for Windows 8 is like learning Spanish when I was in high school. Obviously it's a foreign language, but worse is that I didn't retain anything. I can say "gracias," "por favor," "Señor," "Señora," and "Señorita" without difficulty, but anything else might as well be Greek, a class I did not take in high school.

So it is with Sam and Windows 8. Navigating is simply painful. Menus aren't where they are supposed to be and when you can find what you're looking for, it's often incomplete or nonfunctional. The keyboard and mouse pad are overly sensitive and in one click I'm in the realm of the unknown and don't know how to get out.

The more time I spent with Sam, the more frustrated I became. Apparently, I am not alone. I read article after article, comment after comment, review after review slamming Windows 8. I no longer felt alone.

Then the news came that Microsoft was developing Windows 8.1. I decided to slip Sam into her case until it was released.

Finally yesterday I decided to give it a go. I took Sam out of the bag, plugged her into an outlet and hit the power button. So far so good. But it went down hill from there.

I won't bore you with the details. I've tried loading Windows 8.1 at least 6 times. I get an error message every time and "Try again!" I can't even get the Windows Update menu to load. After tweaking (oh, good god, I almost wrote twerking!) numerous settings, some of which also would not populate, I finally gave up. I'll try another day. Definitely not tomorrow. Probably not even next week. For today, Sam's getting unplugged, powered down, going back into her bag, in the dark where she can think about her bad behavior for awhile.