Everything old is new again....

 Except the dog. She's just old.

 

We got through Wednesday, seeing if she would get better through just home care.  She didn't, and any time the cone was off her, she'd be nibbling on both the gammy leg and her belly which was also infected.  So Eleanor made an appointment for the vet for Thursday morning, and volunteered to take her, since I had a whole day of faraway fun planned in  court.

 

She came home with a bunch of new meds- antibiotic for the wounds, anti-itch pills and a foaming cleanser to treat where she's picked, and a long-lasting flea medication in case that's what caused it.  They're not even sure, but it's as good a guess as any.  She seems to be doing better after four days of all that, plus this-



(YOU try not feeding this dog when you get The Look at feeding time. That thing turns her eyes into pity lasers.)

 

But we passed on the dog park today, just to be on the safe side.

 

----

 

That day of court and things went okay for me, in the end. One settled, one reserved decision, one that was so meaningless that nobody showed up on either side.  Then back to the Rochester office for a belated birthday lunch catered by a gourmet burger client.  I had nothing scheduled for Friday, and so spent it getting ready for the handoff of my laptop to UPS, since the shipping box for it arrived that morning.   Files backed up to external drive or cloud; browser data either stored or disabled; and finally a few pieces of Actual Work out the door on my trusty backup Groot. A call confirmed I had until Saturday afternoon to put the parcel into play, giving me those final moments for a few last saves.

 

It was about this time that Groot went off Grid again.  It again did the thing where it turned off and would not turn back on.  Tricks failed. So I was left with, not the Groot-based Plan B, but what can only be described as a Plan Z-Minus:



That, friends, is a Compaq laptop that was originally Eleanor's, at least four computers back in her life, shown here in its natural lid-open state since the hinges became useless ages ago.  It is slow, it runs on an XP version that hasn't been updated even to SP1, and its internal CD drive can't handle most installation disks.  Yet by Saturday morning, I'd managed to bring it back sufficiently to life to consider taking it to work for the next week or two. It already had Word and Excel on it; its internet still worked with wifi and Firefox graciously accepted the profile from the much newer version on the shipped-off laptop and I had all my history, bookmarks and passwords; it let me install my bankruptcy software onto it and, through a flash drive, got all of THAT data onto it; and even email worked, at least in a going-forward kind of way. (It would not accept archive files from the newer Outlook version I now use, but no biggie.)

 

I left it at my desk when we turned in last night; one advantage of the hinge thing is that it never goes to sleep. No alarm today, because no dog park, but I was awakened around the same hour by what sounded not <em>quite</em> like our heat coming on.  Then I recognized the sound: it's the one Groot makes when officially asleep but spinning his wheels, usually because of some Very Important Windows Update.

 

Sure enough, I turned it on, and it powered right up- and has been on ever since.  I got the few unsaved details saved off it first, then worked on it all afternoon up to and including this post. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? I know Tuesday will bring a new battery for it, since that is one possible recurring cause of the problem where, if it drains, it is painfully slow recharging and won't work off AC power until it does.  Meanwhile, the old XP Compaq, all locked and loaded, is now packed up in a spare computer bag in my car's trunk, ready to swing back into action as soon as needed again after such sore neglect.

 

Just like the Bills' starting quarterback, benched after the worst loss in team history and replaced by a rookie today who immediately through five passes to the other team and is now on track to post, you got it, the worst loss in team history.