Technology and Yearnings

This morning, my daughter asked to borrow the laptop, and I agreed. So while I read the Sunday papers, she was sprawled on the floor, playing the Bloxorz game, which she finds as addictive as I do, and then, later, based on the sounds, some other games. After a while, I asked her to migrate into her bedroom because the mechanical hooting and braying of the game was clashing with the soft piano CD that I was playing. Delighted with the idea, she did. A little bit later, she and her mother left for church while I took a nap. The laptop sat on the kitchen counter until they got back, and I woke up, almost simultaneously. I wanted to write a little bit -- about houses, and about a mysterious animal in my dream; it had the striping and fur of a tiger, but was the size of a squirrel and moved with crab-like motion -- but I couldn't: the laptop was dead. Well, not quite. It had enough power to boot far enough to say that I should change to alternate power immed -- and then it died. Frustrated, I plugged it in to suck up gojuice while I read, occasionally fuming that I could not just yank out the battery and slam in a new one -- because, even though we could certainly buy an additional auxiliary battery, I knew of no way to charge that battery without having it inside the plugged-in laptop. Is it possible? Oh, yes, I'm sure that it is. I just have no idea how to accomplish it -- not to say that I would if I could -- I'd cringe at the cost, I'm sure; I didn't even like spending thirty dollars for the special USB cable so that I could plug the laptop into the USB hub for the desktop PC (though it's delightful to have, because now I can transfer files much more quickly than through the wireless connection); I certainly wouldn't spend that same amount, or more, just so I could have a spare, charged battery. I wanted it; I didn't want to pay for it.

Which is, curiously, exactly the lesson that my daughter is learning now, as her liquid cash approaches the magic hundred dollar mark; she will see a book that she wants, or an ice cream, and you can literally hear her doing the math: if I spend two dollars on an ice cream, I'll have two dollars less, and I'm only seven dollars and thirty cents away now, so I'll be...umm.. nah, I don't want the ice cream. Unless (big smile) you want to pay for it, Dad!