To save you from having to read the preceding post (although feel free): I opted to use part of my stimulus $$ to replace my old computer Merlin with new baby Gaia, and had to clone his hard drive in preparation. And cue diabolical laughter . . . now!

Merlin died. As in before Gaia arrived. As in the day after I did the clone. Those of us who don’t believe in coincidence are all nodding our heads.

It took Gaia a week to traverse 45 minutes worth of Colorado, which I spent trying really hard not to curse at Amazon and the USPS. Meanwhile, I was propped up in my tiny studio on my tablet, which has 2/3 the memory of my phone. (Literally. 2GB. I don’t know how the little darlin’ crosses the street by itself.) Had to Zoom through my phone for audio. It was . . . stressful, and I credit Insight Timer with teaching me that I could meditate on my own terms, because this week, already in quarantine, could have been Really Bad.

But she came! At last! Made in Germany, according to the sticker–am I alone in thinking this a bit odd? I must be; Lord knows das Deutsch have mastered engineering from cars to pencil sharpeners. She wasn’t *quite* the computer I thought I bought–lots of space for an additional couple of drives. If I’d known this, I wouldn’t have bothered with the cloning or the hasty cloud backup I’d also done . . . right before Merlin dropped deader than Jacob Marley. Let’s hear it for paranoia and ignorance!

Her HDMI port isn’t connected to anything (what the sheep??) so the monitor is on VGA, but these are first-world problems. Gaia is fast and silent, a veritable ninja compared to the lumbering Merlin. Of course, all my cookies are gone, but seeing as I also had my debit card expire last month, I have to re-enter a lot of data everywhere as it is. Moving on.

So I plugged in the external drive and . . . nothing. Downloaded the software. Nothing. My son tried, and discovered that a-a-a-all the data was gone. Poof. We still don’t know what happened. If I hadn’t been a canny old person with no trust in technology, having known technology when it was still teething, and thus backed up my essential data onto Google Drive, all my writing would be GONE. I would probably be in the hospital if that had happened, because I’ve been loosey-goosey about backups.

Currently I am still moving into Gaia, and enjoying such fluff as being able to greenscreen in Zoom at last. Merlin’s hard drive is plugged into my son’s machine because we want to troubleshoot a bit, but it’s not talking to anybody right now. We’re waiting for the geek to advise us as to the next step.

Oh yeah, the casual games: Had to re-download and restart them. Not so bad; I guess the journey is worth more than I had credited.