bibelots and antimacassars

a brown upholstered armchair with rectangular white tatted 'doilies' — which are really antimacassars
antimacassars on an armchair

In my personal life, I have a fairly streamlined life. If you don’t count the books (!) I don’t display a lot of knick-knacks. There’s the owl collection I inherited, but most of the flat surfaces here are available for books and papers to rest on. Which they do!

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Two happy things overlapped this weekend — I uncrated my new school laptop, and I hung out with a long-time friend of mine, visiting from greater Dallas. He and I worked together while we were in our 20s, and sitting at my new laptop configuring it while we desultorily caught up felt like home.

Even this part: “Aren’t you done yet? I left you this morning unpacking it, and you’re still fussing! How hard is it: boot it, let it autoconfigure, load Office, DONE.” And he laughs, while I simultaneously twinkle and justify myself in ways he shakes his head at. Just like old times; good times!

a shelf full of pretty little things, tucked in an étagère
bibelots

Even so, I kept figuring out justifications — again, old habits! — until I realized the nub of the difference this morning:

My digital spaces are as overstuffed as a Victorian grandmother’s parlor.

Seriously. My A has rolled her eyes at me for years because of all the little applications I put on my smartphone (the way I populated my Personal Digital Assistant the decade before)… “MOM. It’s. A. Phone. It doesn’t need all this crap on it.”

My computers are similarly, um, decorated. I have utilities, big applications, bridge programs. I have scripts and shells, preferred menu layouts, honed directory structures. My desktops are furnished differently than my laptops; phones more differently still (because: phone-!).

So before I could take my new system with me to campus on Monday, I needed to move over all my furniture from Catalina Aragonese! (She’s my prior school laptop. I name all my computers, and always for something that interests me. No SOQ-PC-005 for me, thankyounotverymuch!)

Two days after beginning, I think I’ve gotten everything relocated and tidied away. Homework? Oh, that. Eh, it’s too late tonight. Priorities are priorities!


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