That which is taboo

Yup, I’m in love again. Painful, lustful, forbidden love with a steely, powerful object.

My new employer is a lot behind the times when it comes to IT expertise, but they are hip as hip can be with the portable crowd.

When I started work, I was asked “Would you like a PC or a Mac?”

Why, the answer was simple. Mac, please!

In fact, that was one of the go-no go requirements of changing jobs. Having used nothing but a Mac for the past twelve years, I would say I was reluctant to slip back to the Windows based environment.

So, my previous employer provided Macs, but they were refurb and a step or two behind the technology curve.

Not so with fascinating new employer.

No, I got to work and was greeted with a sleek, sexy, top of the line MacBook Pro. The 15-inch variety, 2.53GHz. Four beefy GB of memory. A roomy 300GB hard drive.

Yum!

It has this utterly awe inspiring, new crystal clear glass screen, the cool backlit black keys, and the glass trackpad with NO button. Nope, it’s all in one. You can scroll on that bad boy, click anywhere and whoa does it work nice.

The unibody design is light and compact and feels solid and well built.

This thing beats the crap out of my last work machine, an old style MacBook pro, that poor dented aluminum thing.

Then yesterday, I had occasion to work from home, and as I sat on the couch, caressing the keys of this hot young MacBook Pro, I looked at my VERY old, personally owned 17″ PowerBook (it dates back to, I believe, 2004) and then at my new work speedster and yes…I fell in love.

I mentioned later to The Good Man that I was in love, and that I may have to save our pennies (a LOT of pennies) to buy one of these. This might ensure that my writing projects are no longer in peril of going to the great bit bucket in the sky when my PowerBook fails…and it will. Soon.

He couldn’t hear me. He was too busy caressing his own brand new MacBook Air (well, new to us…he bought it refurb on a smoking good deal).

The family that computes together (on the same platform) stays together.

We’ll call this: Still life with Macsexy Beast. Taken with my company provided 3G iPhone.

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Oh, a small bit of irony. My beautiful, glorious MacBook Pro machine……well my IT organization got a hold of it first to set it up. They also turned it over and used an old fashioned electric engraver to scratch the company name and identifying information into the unibody metal case in a shaky script.

I believe, when the tip of the engraver touched the silky nickel aluminum blend unibody, somewhere in Infinite Loop, Steve Jobs shuddered.

Who engraves stuff anymore? My *dad* used to do that!?!!?!?

It never gets old

This weekend, The Good Man and I met some friends up in Sausalito for fun and merriment.

Getting to Sausalito means traversing the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge.

I believe this year makes twelve years for me living here in the Bay Area and driving across that big orange bridge is still as exciting as it was the first time I ever did it.

I have about a zillion photos I’ve taken of the Golden Gate Bridge, because no matter how many times I see it, I always find something more interesting I need to try to capture.

Then sometimes, like yesterday, I decide to come out from behind the camera and just watch as we drive by. The art deco uprights are still so endlessly fascinating to me, the way the light plays off of them, the subtle texturing. The stout cables that hold it all in place still look like dental floss in perspective of all the iron and steel and concrete that make up the bridge.

I wondered, as we drove across, if the men who finished the bridge back in 1937 could ever fathom what it this bridge would become. Could they have ever imagined the magnitude of traffic that rolls over it every day?

And how freaking cool that something built 72 years ago still stands tall and proud and virtually unrevised (but for some retrofitting and upgrading) since then.

I got to thinking, was there anything from my life in New Mexico that could even come close to this? Something that in driving by with some frequency, I still have the sense of awe and wonder every time I see it?

The closest I got was not a man made item. First thought in my head was Tijeras Canyon. Similar in that it is a roadway to transport people from one side of a great geological obstacle to another.

It still fills me with awe at the beauty and wonder at the too fast development growing in that gap between the Sandias and the Manzanos.

I tried to think if there was something like this, something man made and yet so enduring. Of course, the Indian ruins are far older than the Golden Gate, but not something that one drives by with frequency, as they tend to be back in the hills.

I suppose the most awe inspiring bit of human engineering and transportation in New Mexico is the Sandia Peak Tramway.

I don’t know, to my New Mexico friends, do you have any ideas? I’m sure I’m forgetting something…

Photo by Karen Fayeth

Just one little thing…

Last night, after coming home late, and looking for something to accompany my dinner of hot soup, I watched some throwaway episode of some throwaway show in syndication.

The premise of the episode was that just one little thing can change the outcome of your whole day. It was a riff on the Butterfly Effect complete with a CG butterfly.

I actually thought it was a clever bit of television writing, and it was highly satisfying, along with my chicken soup.

This morning, I had occasion to revisit this bit of chaos theory as I made my way into work.

I left the house a skosh later than I’d wanted to, and when I fired up the Jeep, the gas indicator began making noises at me. I had to stop for gas, making me run even later.

The closest gas station is located on a road out of town that I don’t usually take, because along that road there are three schools. The parents dropping off their kids always backs up traffic, so I avoid it.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. In addition to running later than usual, and running into school traffic by taking a road I normally don’t take, it turns out there was a traffic light blinking at the most critical intersection (right before the highway entrance). So traffic on that road was backed up for about five miles.

And because I sat for an hour on a road that should normally take ten minutes to traverse, I got to work much later than usual, meaning I had a hard time finding a parking spot. The one I did find was a tight squeeze by a wall in the parking garage, and so I dinged my own door on the way out.

It also means the work cafeteria was out of orange juice by the time I got there.

And my staff gave me an arched eyebrow when I did finally roll into my office.

All this really bodes for a great day, right? Ugh.

So as I sit here at my desk drinking coffee instead of OJ, I got to thinking about how just one little thing had ruined my whole good day.

At first I blamed the traffic light. That damn light! If not for the flapping butterfly wing of that stupid busted stoplight I would have made it to work on time!

But that’s not really true, is it?

It’s that I rolled out of the house late. Had I had my you-know-what together and left earlier, there would have been less traffic.

But that’s also not really true, is it? Because even leaving late, I would have taken a different road and been fine…if I had a full tank of gas.

The crux of this whole thing was my empty gas tank.

See, last night when I was driving home, my near empty gas tank was already beeping at me. I could have stopped for gas on the route home, but feeling lazy and tired, I chose not to.

So the flapping wing, really, was my decision not to stop and get petrol last night.

That one decision has blown my whole Wednesday morning.

And unlike the television show, I can’t do a second act on this day and show what would have happened if the decisions had gone differently.

I have to, as The Good Man says, “just play through”.

That there is chaos theory, Karen style.