It's November 30th And The End Of The Month. This Is The Only Reason For This Post.

I sit down to write. I get up and walk away.  I sit myself down again, and again, I'm up, walking, pacing the house for, like, 30 seconds. I'm not sitting too much longer than that, either. Ellie is in the kitchen, making her lunch. I have nowhere I need to be, nothing I need to do or help with. I just need to take the few minutes I have to sit, to type, to see words appear on a computer screen. But, somehow, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I can't concentrate. It's too late for coffee, so it's just me, my water glass and a bag of tortilla chips I've secreted under my desk.

This can be slow going. No, that was my passive voice. This IS slow going. And boring. And other words I don't need to type because they're all there, in your head, lined up all neat and organized one after the other. Like a marching band. Or a crossword puzzle.

OK. I'm putting the chips away now. Don't let me have any more chips until I've typed a real thing on this computer.

A couple weeks ago, Ellie's Girl Scout troop participated in a robots class. Guess who was asked to help? I'm serious, they actually wanted me to help these girls program computers to program the robots to draw with markers. Guys? I only know how one of those steps work. (And, yes, it's the markers, that wasn't a hard thing to guess.) I don't know why I agree to these things either. I need a button. A big button. (It has to be big, so people will read it.) That says, "I know as much about computers as your great grandmother". Which will work brilliantly, as long as I start every conversation with, "Is your great grandmother Dorothy Vaughan?" Because, obviously, my button doesn't apply to those people.

Long story set in a library with a bunch of Brownies wielding computers, short, we killed the computer. I DON'T KNOW WHAT I HAD THEM DO! But, the screen, went like, blank at one point. Now, it didn't break forever. Just until one of the teen volunteers could come over and fix it for us, while telling me exactly what I did wrong and how to avoid doing what I did, or something like that. Truthfully? I wasn't listening to her, because I had given up any hope of successfully helping program robots and decided, instead, to take control of the only other item on the table I had any familiarity with: the masking tape.

And no one asked me to do anything different for the rest of the class.

Near as I could tell by their expressions:

the robots totally approved.

And now? 

I eat the chips again. 

Because I've earned them. 

Obviously.

Pin It