After the initial moment of panic when my laptop first went into a coma, I really did think Hey, it might be nice to not lug that thing halfway across the country! After all, my mom has a computer, so it’s not like I’ll be totally internet-less. And my mom has been very generous with her computer. Even if it weren’t in the same room Annalie and I sleep in, she still would be allowing me free access to it.

But there is the problem: the computer is in the same room where Annalie and I sleep. That means each night when Annalie is trying to go to sleep, the computer is pretty much off-limits. Since we often are out and about during the day, that really limits the computer time. I get to use it when Annalie is good and asleep, but my poor mom has been having to politely schedule time to check her email. And I’ve been trying to actually sleep at night instead of giving in to the temptation to stay up into the wee hours of the morning blogging and reading.

Also, I’m used to having the laptop in the room with me in the evening when I’m watching TV and crocheting, so if a question comes up about, say, the cost of airfare from Omaha to Washington, D.C., or why an actor in a TV show looks so familiar, I can just look it up right then and there. I have joked in the past that I don’t know how to watch a movie anymore without browsing IMDb at the same time. This past week I’ve learned that there is more truth to that than I imagined.

Finally, I have not been able to download photos from my Nikon. The cardreader on my mom’s printer isn’t working. I bought an inexpensive USB cardreader to do it, but for some reason it’s not working either. I decided to give up and just download the photos when I get home to my laptop which Troy was able to rescusitate and restore to reasonably good health. Which is why I swiped some of my mom’s photos for this post.

My brother and his girlfriend gave Annalie a gift card to Build-A-Bear for Christmas last year. I intended to save it for a time we were in Omaha so Ben and Angie could have the pleasure of going with us. Then we, uh, lost the gift card in the move. It’s around somewhere! We just couldn’t find it before this trip.

But Annalie remembered we’d promised her a trip to Build-A-Bear. She went to a birthday party there last year and loved it. She was quite excited about going back. So I just paid for this pink leopard, which Annalie christened Heart Sophia Pink. I love the names she comes up with for her animals. She also has a penguin called Foot, a little black poodle named Apple, and a lamb with the impressive handle Easter Maryland Lamb.

This photo of my brother’s cat Styx (named after the river, not the band) and Annalie watching TV looks kinda like a LOLcat waiting to be captioned. Don’t you think?

Oh, right…I did a giveaway and said I was going to announce the winners. I am sure you’re all on the edges of your seats, waiting for me to do that. Without further ado, I declare that you are ALL winners in my book! Everyone who left a comment asking to be entered into the drawing is a winner, anyway. Congratulations to Mim, K, kj, Annika, Mysh, and Meaghan!

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.

I think I mentioned that Annalie and I were going to Texas, didn’t I? Well, uh, we’re in Texas!

Because we know so many people here, we can’t just take a quick trip. And since all the people we know aren’t in the same city, we have to bounce all over the state while we’re here. We’re starting out in Dallas visiting friends from Maryland, then heading to OMSHville, then hitting Houston (where Troy will be joining us) to stay the night with friends, and finally heading south to spend a week at Troy’s mom and stepdad’s. Then we drive back up to DFW to fly home.

If my posting is sporadic in the next two weeks, you’ll know why.