Not Sweating the Small Stuff

A Death and a Birth in the Family

Apologies guys for seeming to have disappeared. My trusty old Toshiba Satellite died - most dramatically and horribly! The screen flickered gently but ominously for a day or so. And then went irredeemably black. No amount of coaxing would bring any kind of life back - we had a corpse.

So the scene round the house was:


and:


I considered a trip to Jay's to get the right mourning gear:


or Robinson's


and would have ended up:


with female relos looking like:


Or if you were doing it round 1810:


All this seemed a bit mad and severe, so I contemplated a bit of 'half-mourning':

Girl in Half Mourning 1895

Half Mourning - Waist 1890-1910

Though I was not really sure what 'half' meant. You could have floral designs within the black? Maybe if you didn't really care that much for the deceased? Or every other day you could party on as usual?

In any case, the idea of a mourning broach particularly appealed:





With the lock of the deceased's hair in the first example obviously being replaced by a sliver of the old screen!

I even thought about being photographed with the 'remains', in good late Victorian mode:



But in the end decided against it.

It's much healthier to move on. And prepare for the new arrival. Which was delivered yesterday - in the form of a bouncing 2.8 kg baby Toshiba Tecra 8 laptop.

George de la Tour 'The Newborn' 1640's

Of course, I had to have the puter version of the new-born baby set:



Which included a new wireless modem, super fab carry bag, Comsol housing to harvest the old hard drive as a mass storage device, and so on.

Inoculations followed as virus protection. And reloading old software.

So a new life - see you again very soon guys!