Not a sight you want to see. The reason I switched to a Mac.
My computer was crashing last week – something, I’m told, Macs don’t do. My normal MO is to write this piece during our weekly writing group at 8:00 am on Mondays. We all throw out a word and are supposed to use all of them in our stream-of-consciousness writing. I may do that. More often I get an idea using one or two of the words and roll with it if I use all the words even better. I usually don’t save my file because I don’t put a title on it until later, so I don’t have a name for the file. I learned a hard lesson last week. One that I knew as I always told my students when I was teaching to save early and save often.
Tuesday mornings I have an early critique group at 7:00 am and a group for my CRM at 8:00 am. And for the last three weeks, I’ve had a website learning/work group as well at 9:30 am. That doesn’t leave much time on Tuesday mornings for much else. I go out and feed the horses during the 30-minute break. When I came into the office, I noticed that my computer had restarted. An inconvenience but not a major problem. I had been getting notifications that a new and improved operating system needed to be installed. I had been ignoring them – I don’t need to do that right now.
Then it crashed again. What’s wrong? This Mac is highly unstable. I restarted it and continued with Zoom. When I was done with Zoom, I opened Word to find my Monday morning writing had disappeared. No worries I thought Word does a good job at recovering files after a crash. Apparently, it’s much harder to recover after multiple crashes.
I searched Google and took the steps to find my file. No use I couldn’t. So, I decided to see if I could recover it from my brain. It’s not the same but I think it’s similar.
Frustrated by spending most of my day trying to recover files that I could not I decided that my computer needed to be taken to the shop which I didn’t have time for given that I had spent most of the day trying to recover then rewriting my blog post and the nearest repair shop is in Lawrence. I’ll take it when I’m already going down.
The computer kept crashing. I became more frustrated, and I think it was on Friday that I finally Googled why. One of the reasons was that the operating system needed to be updated. Even though I was already frustrated by spending so much time restarting after crashes I took the time to download and install the update. This took a long time because I have really slow Internet (another frustration since I’ve moved here) and I was using both my computers to complete some bookwork. I thought to myself it had to be done started it and went out to get the horses in and get their feed and stalls ready for the night. I’m happy to report that it hasn’t crashed since. (Until after I wrote this the next Monday.) It still has something that I think needs to go to the repair shop about though.
When I feel like my life is nonstop chaos, I get frustrated. Whether it be physical or mental I want to feel peace. I’m working to get my life more organized so I will feel more peace, ease, and joy. It’s moments like these that leave me feeling that my life is going round and round like a merry-go-round I can’t get off.
(In case you’re wondering this week’s words were peace, organize, chaos, nonstop, and round.)
How do you handle the frustrations in your life? Would you like to handle them with more peace, joy, and ease? I’ll be doing a playshop to look back at 2023 and look forward to 2024. Want to join me? I’ll have the information out soon.
I’m not giving up My Shot. Are you?
Make a Connection in the comments below.
Onward!
