Laptop love, WordPress complaint

Cran-grape juice mixed with seltzer is a refreshing beverage. It is tangy, sweet, fizzy, and hell on a keyboard.  I managed to dump almost a full glass all over the place and the laptop took a good dose of it. So did my poor abused carpet.

That accident left my keyboard stained a rather fetching shade of magenta.  It also left it sticky, unresponsive, and ultimately crippled.  My trusty laptop of almost four years is no longer with me.  I would like to observe a moment of silence for the first computer I ever bonded with.  My iBook changed my outlook on computers.  Before, they seemed like a necessary evil to me.  They never seemed to work for me properly. They were clunky, ugly, and kept me chained to the desk.

I suppose that back in my dorm room days it wasn't so bad.  A desk tends to dominate the room anyway.  It was the best surface in the room to hold drinks and the ashtray, both almost indispensable to me in those days.  So the desk was just fine. In an apartment things change. I hated the feeling of isolation and avoiding that did not help my procrastination problem.  The laptop gave me freedom of movement (though to be honest that freedom almost inevitably leads me to the couch or a chair in the living room by the TV).

The purchase of a laptop marked my switch to Apple as well.  I can't pinpoint why, but Apple products just seem to make more sense to me.  I won't claim any kind of expertise, but I can say that I like the experience of using a Mac so much more than any PC. My work machine is a PC and I am always fighting with Windows.  The files and menus frustrate me.  I don't like how the desktop is managed and so on. And I won't underestimate the power that sleek design has over me.  I know that a Mac may be more expensive, but I have confidence in it.  And for someone like me, that is awesome.  It isn't that I don't go crying to Adam for help, but I think that I would be doing so more often if it weren't for the Mac. And there would be more bad language.

My previous choices didn't go so well.  The first computer my family bought was a disaster.  Two words: Packard Bell.  What a POS. We didn't know.  So we fell for a pretty demo and took home a clunker.  Its purchase marks my obsession with memory. I can't tell you how many times I would try to run something only to be told that I didn't have memory. Sure, I had memory, but it was the wrong kind.  Whatever.  My grad-school era machine wasn't much better.  It is a good thing that all I really needed  was a word processor.  It wasn't good for much else. The iBook broke the trend.

The time between laptops was much tougher than I thought it would be.  I have always considered myself to be something of a casual user.  I suppose I still am in comparison to Adam and his friends.  But it was something of a shock for me to realize just how dependent upon the laptop I had become.  I was at odds without it.  I missed checking websites, email, chatting, ordering online, looking up information on a whim, doing work, writing, and updating this website.  I guess that this constitutes some sort of small epiphany for me.  I am no longer a member of the pseduo-, neo-, Luddites.  I am officially hooked.

My new MacBook arrived a few days ago.  We have been getting to know each other and everything is going well.  It will soon undergo "surgery" so that Adam can put in extra memory. This time around I won't be freaking out.  I don't doubt Adam's competence, but there was something really disconcerting about seeing my new toy opened up and exposed.  All those delicate little connections intimidate me.  Though that could be because I am so hamfisted.  I will be staying far away, but I trust that all will go well.  From what I can tell I will have memory that is far out of proportion for what I do with a computer. And that is fine by me.  I want whatever I stick into it or save to it to just...work. Without monkeying around.

So...I was going to conclude by saying that I had lots of other sites to catch up on.  But instead I am going to grouse about the changes to WordPress that happened while I was gone.  I was initially pleased to see a button for italics and other "Word" like properties.  I couldn't get underline or italics to work in previous posts and for someone who works with MLA and titles that is not acceptable. But now I can't seem to get this post to follow paragraph breaks.  

I read a lot of poorly written compositions that demonstrate no understanding of what a paragraph is.  It pains me to think that my writing now runs the risk of being as poorly constructed. I could be complaining about nothing and this will look just fine.  It is just as likely that I (and by I, I really mean Adam) will be doing some shopping around. Grumble, grumble. At least I have got a new laptop with which to do so.  

UPDATE Adam has worked his awesome computer-fu and has fixed my problem. He changed the editor back to its original form (no What you see..). We also changed the theme. Apparently it was responsible for some of the problems with italics and so on. Result: a new look for "The Sacred Cheese." And best of all, Adam restrained himself enough to only tease me a little during the process. Victory!