That gringo accent

A very generous relative (or, rather, the relative’s boyfriend) downstreamed their laptop as a replacement for my old Dell office machine, with a monitor that took up the whole front seat of my car.

This is a load off my mind (and, potentially, a load off my car roof — I’d expected I’d have to tie some items to the car roof, given the amount of space a computer — with or without monitor — took up in the back seat. Volvo sedans aren’t nearly as roomy as you might think) — taking an old office machine across borders is dicey. It seems to be a gamble whether or not a customs’ agent will consider it a commercial item for resale, whereas laptops are obviously considered a personal use item.

The old machine was a piece of crap, but it did good work for the last year and a half… I finished my book on it (and turned out the short “Bosques War” as well), and managed to keep the Mex Files going (and growing… according to technorati, MexFiles is one of the top 100,000 websites it monitors — and moving up with a bullet! It’s almost one of the top 95,000 — hee hee).

Unfortunately, the old machine’s technology was, shall we say, retro. To carry over my data, I had to get our local computer store to download everything to a CD, and am slowly carrying over my links, data, bookmarks, etc. And, the keyboard on a laptop is different. I still haven’t figured out how to access accent marks — the recommended procedure (Fn + ALT + ASCII number) doesn’t seem to work for me. I’ll figure it out, and in the meantime, I’m going to have to use English spellings for Spanish names, even though I know they’re wrong.

While I’ve replaced the old computer, I’m having to go with the old car. I’d budgeted for a brake job (being a nice guy, I’d let my neighbor — who said she’ d lose her job if she didn’t have a car to use at least in the morning — borrow it. She drove it a couple hundred miles with the parking brake on. OUCH!) I don’t think anyone has a spare 1988 Volvo rack-and-pinion laying around, and had to go ahead and order one. With installation by the very honest (and highly recommended BAM Automotive of Alpine, Texas), it’s still going to set me back about 600 bucks.

This is a bit more than I budgeted for car repairs, but with the computer taken care of, I’m only a few hundred short…

Yup… time to put up a “beg-a-thon” button: