Hell Week

I'm baaack.

It's been nearly one week since Julius dumped a glass of water on my laptop, frying my hard drive and plunging me into the depths of cyber-withdrawal. I'm finally back on line with a brand-new computer. This one is faster, better, shinier, with more wing-dings and all the latest blabbedy-blahs. I liked my old computer just fine, but it will be fun figuring this new one out.

One thing I noticed in the past week is how much the computer has become like television: a nefarious sucker-upper of time. In the six days I've been offline I've paid bills, cleaned house, organized my underwear drawer (seriously, I really did), cleaned out the refrigerator, tried out some new recipes on my unsuspecting spouse, cleared the clutter off our coffee table, caught up on laundry, and got about one-third of the way through reading a new novel.

All of this would be very well and good if I aspired to a life of leisure and simple housewifely duties. I don't. A big part of my world collapsed in the past week: deadlines were missed, I's weren't dotted, T's were left uncrossed. My poor little blog was left to fend for itself, with only Bugs Bunny for companionship, and I have nothing to submit for my Saturday writer's group meeting.

It's been an interesting week, to say the least. For one thing, I learned that the mainstream media is absolutely useless as an information source. Every time I turned on the television I got the same lame stories: Hillary Clinton said something stupid, Barack Obama still has a scary black pastor. Apparently the Democratic primary and stories about the weather are the only things that capture the attention of the mainstream media right now.

Taking a week off from politics was refreshing, though. I really don't care that Barack Obama is distantly related to Brad Pitt while Hillary Clinton can claim a tenuous kinship to Angelina Jolie. Seriously, this is news to you people? I'm more concerned about the uprising in Tibet, the 4,000th American soldier killed in Iraq (and how many contractors have been killed? Does anyone keep count?), or the faltering U.S. economy. I didn't get much of this information on the television and I feel like a week without the internet has left me a little less informed.

So I'll be back to blogging, as soon as I figure out the wing-dings and blabbedy-blahs. And as soon as I catch up on all the news that CNN and MSNBC missed.