My laptop is in a coma.

I have high hopes that it is not yet dead, but it definitely went kablooey this afternoon and no amount of coaxing from me has been able to resuscitate it.

The timing was impeccable. The 1-year warranty expired a couple of weeks ago. Annalie and I are leaving town with my parents Thursday morning and Troy (our Resident Computer Geek) is gone and doesn’t get home till Thursday afternoon.

At first, I panicked a little bit. Then I thought, Hmm, it might be kinda freeing to not have a laptop to worry about while I’m traveling. My mom does have a decent PC with a high-speed internet connection, so it’s not like I’d be living in 1992 while I’m in Omaha—more like 2006, at the worst. The main inconvenience is that my mom’s computer doesn’t have a decent photo-editing program on it. But now that I have the Nikon D40 that’s not as much of an issue. It’s such a fancy-schmancy camera that the photos I take with it don’t require much editing.

I’ve decided to just take the laptop’s coma in stride. Troy can probably fix it. Even if he can’t, he was pretty sure from what I described to him in an email that it’s not the hard drive that’s fried. We should be able to hook that up to another computer and get photos and stuff off it.

Right now I am using the PC that we still have but have barely used since we became a two-laptop family last year. It’s got old photos on its hard drive from 2001-2007. I figured as long as I was using an old machine, I’d throw some old photos up here, just for fun.

I think I’ve mentioned somewhere before that we used to take photos of Annalie on her pink kitty quilt, so we could see how she had grown from month to month. We only did that a few times. We did better with the teddy bear pictures.

When Annalie was born, Troy’s Aunt Pauline send her a knitted teddy bear with a pink sweater bearing her initials. We took a picture of her next to that bear every month (except for October 2004, when we forgot) for the first year of her life. After Annalie’s first birthday, I made a little photo album on Snapfish and gave copies to all the grandparents and Pauline.

Anyway, if you don’t hear from me much in the next few days, now you know why. I’m laptop-less for a while. But I’m OK with that.

UPDATE: I found another photo of Annalie with the bear!

You will find these photos, along with more detailed notes on each one, in the photoset Annalie and the Bear on Flickr.

Troy and I were engaged on October 9, 1995. It’s kind of a funny story.

We met in August 1994, during Resident Assistant training. We had both ended long-term relationships right before we met, and neither of us were in a hurry to start dating someone new. Not that we considered each other potential dating material, because we didn’t. We were just co-workers and friends at first. As fall turned to winter we got to know each other better and became good friends. We spent so much time together that our co-workers and friends started asking us, “Are you guys dating?”

The first few times we were asked that question, we laughed about how people saw a guy and girl together and automatically assumed they must be romantically involved. After the sixth or seventh person asked us we said, Hmm, why does everyone keep asking us that? We decided that maybe we’d be missing out on something really great if we didn’t at least give it a try. So we shifted our paradigm and started dating. Three weeks later we knew we would eventually get married. It wasn’t any grand gesture or realization, it was just a quiet knowledge that we were supposed to be together, a sense of rightness.

Troy graduated in May 1995 and was commissioned as a Navy officer. He stayed in Lincoln that summer, working at the ROTC unit and spending as much time with me as we could manage. At the end of July he drove off to Athens, Georgia, where he would be a student at the Navy Supply School for six months. Saying good-bye to him was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, and that initial period of living in different states remains the most difficult separation we’ve endured in our 14 years of knowing each other.

When I went to visit Troy over Columbus Day weekend in October, we weren’t planning to get engaged. We thought maybe we’d get engaged at Christmas, and while I was there we went looking at rings so Troy could get an idea of what I liked. At one small jewelry store the owner was very friendly and spent a long time talking to us, asking us questions about where we were from, how long we’d known each other, etc. In the course of conversation we mentioned that I was there visiting for the weekend and would be going home the next day.

There was a ring at that store that I liked very much. Troy decided to go ahead and buy it so he’d have it when he decided the time was right to propose. That was perfectly all right with me; I knew we’d get engaged eventually and wasn’t in a big hurry. But the jeweler was astonished that I didn’t want to take the ring back to Nebraska with me. He told us he could have the ring resized and ready to pick up by the next day, if we changed our minds. We assured him that wasn’t necessary, thanked him for all his help, and said good-bye.

Back at Troy’s apartment we got to talking about it and decided that maybe…yeah, maybe we did want to get engaged now! Troy called up the jewelry store and asked them to have the ring ready the next day. Then we called our parents to tell them we were officially engaged. They were all happy and unsurprised, which we thought was funny. They’d all seen it coming, even though we hadn’t. That was going to be a common theme in the days and weeks to come when we shared the news with friends and family.

The next day we stopped by the store to pick up the ring on our way to the airport in Atlanta. When we got back to the car, I said to Troy, “You do realize that a jeweler talked us into getting engaged, don’t you?” We both cracked up, Troy put the ring on my finger, and we drove happily to the airport. It wasn’t till later that we realized we were so busy laughing that Troy never officially proposed, but it was okay. Laughing together was, and still is, sort of a defining element of our relationship. We figured it was fitting that our engagement started not with a proposal but with laughter.

John holding 2-month-old Annalie, July 2004

My uncle, John David Adams, passed away this morning. He was my mom’s baby brother. He was 45 years old.

His death wasn’t exactly shocking. I think we all knew it was only a matter of time. John had been in ill health for a while. He’d had asthma his whole life, and complicated that by smoking heavily. He developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease as well as congestive heart failure. He was hospitalized a number of times in the past couple of years, and even talking on the phone made him gasp for breath.

John was more or less the black sheep of the family. He chose to live much of his life on the fringes of society, doing drugs and working only as much as he had to. He did manage to get clean and live a “normal” life here and there, especially when his three daughters were little, but those times were unfortunately few and fleeting. He broke the hearts of everyone who loved him again and again. It got to the point where some of my relatives couldn’t stand the heartbreak and the betrayal. They felt they had no choice but to cut John out of their lives. I can’t say I blame them.

My mom was in a different position from most of her family, since she lives in Nebraska and was usually 1,300 miles away from John. It was harder for him to impose on her, so she felt freer to help him occasionally. It was easier for her to see him on her visits to California without feeling the weight of a lifetime’s baggage. When John’s daughters moved with their mom to Las Vegas, my mom made a point of trying to visit them at least once a year. I think it’s safe to say that we probably saw his daughters more often in the last decade of his life than John did.

My mom, John, me, and 2-month-old Annalie in the infant carrier, July 2004

The sad thing is, I know John loved his daughters. Whenever we visited them, my mom would take tons of photos and send copies to John. Even during the darkest times John would be sure to let my mom know how much he appreciated the photos. When we saw him, which was rarely, he would always talk proudly about the last time he’d talked to or seen his girls, about how smart they all were and how pretty, and how glad he was that they were making better decisions than he had made at their ages. He knew he wasn’t the best father in the world; he knew he’d broken many promises. But he loved them.

My mom flew into Southern California tonight. Annalie and I are driving her up to the boondocks tomorrow so she can start taking care of the details. I’ll help her as much as I can, and my Uncle Allen is driving down from Northern California to help too. John had almost no possessions, he wanted to be cremated, and I don’t know if there will even be a memorial service—my mom’s family isn’t real big on funerals—so I don’t know what kind of details we’ll have to take care of. But I am sure there will be details; when someone dies, there always are.

I’ll remember three things about John most vividly. First, I’ll remember his smile, and his laugh. John had one of those smiles that totally lit up his face and you couldn’t help but smile back. When something struck him as funny, his laugh seemed to well up from the soles of his feet, a great bark of joy, and it was so contagious you couldn’t help but laugh too, even if you had missed the joke, even if you were annoyed at him. He was, as everyone in my mom’s family is, a fantastic laugher.

Second, I’ll remember the Halloween masks. When I was about Annalie’s age and John was 16, he came to Omaha for a visit. It was October, and we’d already bought our costumes. Mine was a Barbie costume, one of those cheap plastic ones that went on like a hospital gown with ties in the back—remember those?—and it came with a face mask complete with bright yellow hair, pink lips, and blue eyeshadow and black lashes painted above the eyeholes. I was afraid of masks back then, whether it was someone else wearing a gorilla mask or me wearing a cheap Halloween mask held on with a thin elastic cord. So I was planning to just wear pink lipstick and blue eyeshadow instead of the mask. But while John was there, he started goofing around and putting on our Halloween masks. For some reason I didn’t run from the room screaming in fear. I looked at my tall, burly Uncle John wearing the very feminine Barbie mask and thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. He even talked in a falsetto while wearing it, which made my brother and me howl with delight. There is a photo somewhere of John in the Barbie mask, my brother and me standing in front of him laughing our heads off. I was never afraid of masks after that.

Third, I’ll remember the day he taught me how to make Three-Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies. We were sitting around one day a few years before Annalie was born, discussing our favorite recipes and the jobs he’d had cooking in various restaurants, and he said something about the easiest peanut butter cookie recipe ever. When he told me the ingredients with a twinkle in his eye, I looked at him for about five seconds with my mouth open before jumping up to rummage through my Aunt Julie’s fridge and pantry for the required ingredients. I had to try it for myself! So we made a batch together, and he wasn’t pulling my leg, and they were indeed the easiest cookies I’d ever made. They were very rich too. Many’s the time I’ve been craving something sweet at 8 o’clock at night and have thrown a batch of these together, smiling as I remember the time I made cookies with my Uncle John.

Three-Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies

• 1 c. peanut butter*
• 1 c. granulated sugar
• 1 egg

Preheat the oven to 350F. Combine the peanut butter and sugar. Add the egg and mix thoroughly. Roll into 1-inch balls and place a couple of inches apart on a baking sheet. Flatten each ball by making a criss-cross pattern with the tines of a fork on the dough. (Alternately, roll each ball in granulated sugar before placing on the sheet, and use the bottom of a glass to flatten slightly.)

Bake for 8-12 minutes, till cookies are done. Cool slightly on baking sheets, then remove to a rack. Makes 12-16 cookies.

* A commercial peanut butter, like Jif or Skippy, works best. I made these once with natural peanut butter and the oil separated out and basically fried the cookies, which were rock hard.