'And God blessed the broken road that led me straight to you.'

I have had one of the modern world's most pressing fears on my mind for several months: I have been operating day by day, minute by minute, under the assumption that eight years' worth of data and photos could be lost forever.

Why have I been experiencing this crippling fear? Because of this:

And this:

Internet, I have been experiencing the Blue Screen(s) of Death (DID YOU KNOW THERE'S MORE THAN ONE?) for months on end. BSODs that appear with no warning, in the middle of checking my e-mail, writing blog posts, uploading pictures, even overnight while I'm slumbering peacefully in bed and not touching a single key on my keyboard.

And then within the past week, I got a NEW BSOD -- well, it's not blue, but it showed up the same way, rudely, with no warning, and shut me the heck down. But at least it did it in a cutesy way:

"Well, this is embarrassing. Firefox is having trouble recovering your windows and tabs." RECOVERING THEM? WHEN DID I LOSE THEM?

It's been a nightmare. There have been several nights when I worked on a blog post only to lose it completely. I migrated from writing them directly in Blogger to writing them in Word, thinking I'd have a better chance of recovering my work if it crashed mid-post. FALSE. All I could think of when I lost a post was, "BUT THOSE THREE PEOPLE ARE COUNTING ON HAVING A POST TO READ WHILE THEY DRINK THEIR COFFEE TOMORROW MORNING." And so I'd start over again. Because I love you three so much.

I've probably never mentioned it before today, but I used to be a Mac girl. I worked on Macs in college and my first personal-use computer was Apple's first color laptop, the PowerBook 180c. It was a beaut. I loved it and ran it into the ground. We were a Mac family until we had to replace one of the last ones we had (a Centris 650, maybe? I'm showing my age.) We went with a PC primarily for financial reasons (HELLO, APPLE. YOU ARE PRICEY.), and although I hated making the transition at the time, I eventually got used to it.

But this month marks a new season of life. This week I got an early Christmas present. It came in an unassuming brown box.



When I opened the box, I saw a handle. A handle! Squee!



The handle was for a cute little cardboard briefcase containing this:

In a beautiful, shiny, silver finish.

And when I booted her up, I saw my old friend The Apple Minus a Bite pop up.

It's been a looooong time, friend. Good to see you again. PARTICULARLY nice to see you when you're dwarfing my old monitor. You go ON with your bad portable self, Apple.

It welcomed me in like 19 languages. This was the tail end of the English "welcome."

The flat keys on the keyboard will take some getting used to, but I think I'm going to love it.

The only thing I'm not crazy about is the way my watchband scrapes the surface of the laptop while I'm typing. So far, no scratches. But if you've been reading this blog for any length of time at all, YOU KNOW WHAT THOSE SCRATCHES WOULD DO TO ME.

Have I mentioned how LARGE the screen is? I'm officially in lurve. My cousin Harry who works at the Apple store urged me to consider a smaller screen if I really needed portability, and that's a great point. I really thought hard about it. BUT HAVE YOU SEEN THIS SCREEN?

Ultimately I decided to go with the 17-inch because portability is really only an issue for me when we travel to the beach or at the holidays. OR TO DISNEY, for example. But it's not like I'm going to be carrying it around every day, so I opted for this model.

I'm so happy I did. Harry came over to get it all set up for me, and he did a great job. (Hi, Harry! Thanks so much, Harry!) He also got roped into a few MarioKart races with these three while he was here:

Long story longer, I think I'm gonna love it. Fa-la-la-la-lahhhh, la la la LAH!