Day 202: Windows failure

The good news is, thanks to my trusty company desktop computer, I got my grant proposal submitted - it's due Monday. The bad news is, it's good I wasn't relying on my laptop, as it now refuses to start. There's some sort of memory failure with loading explorer.exe. It gets as far as my wallpaper, and sometimes I can even get the start menu to work, but it won't let me run anything of consequence. For example, I can run "cmd" but not the administrator version, so I can't do chkdsk. It's a great nuisance. Maybe the IT staff at my office can help, but that wouldn't be until Monday at the soonest.

So it was disorienting to have to use my desktop. For one thing, it has no audiovisual functions. I wanted to join our biweekly office "social hour" and I was able to log on and see them happily conversing, but they didn't notice me trying to say things in the Zoom "chat." J. had lent me his headphones so I could at least hear them and talk, but it took about 40 minutes to get the driver downloaded and working. Eventually it did, and I got to play trivia with them for at least half an hour, so that was relaxing.

Later, the person who's been streaming fun movies on Friday evenings showed The Addams Family, which was strange - I saw it when it came out, but today I found that I remembered almost nothing except the closing credits music and one brief scene between Gomez and Morticia.