In the balance

Yesterday was my birthday, and among other presents (the best was learning that my parents will get the covid-19 vaccine Monday morning) we got a lovely new lamp. Appearing precariously balanced on a skinny bar, I thought the globe might seem unsettling but in fact it's balanced and calming. And then there's the world of colors (it has a dimmer, and can give the golden glow of a harvest moon or bathe the whole room in bright light) and shapes it projects and reflects all day long (do you see the sun that's casting the shadow on the wall?)! 

I can use that calming as the big event of the day after my birthday was the melt-down of my laptop, which wouldn't open: somehow it's lost track of its own start-up disk. It's likely that everything I've done since the last backup is lost, including the arc from the horror of January 6th to the joy and relief of the 20th... good thing I distilled at least some of my thoughts and feelings here!! Also inaccessible, at least for now, are notes from the final congealing of my course syllabus, but I'm optimistic that this material is fresh enough in my mind that this actually gives me a chance to bring it together even more cohesively. 

I'm lucky that there are other devices in the apartment (like the one I'm writing on right now) and pretty much everything else I've been working on lives online and is recoverable - as, in future, I'll make sure everything does and is. So a disaster it is not, but it is a pain. It's been time for me to get a new computer for a while, but still...