a functioning malfunction

I have a moody relationship with technology. I am knowledgeable, but still at its mercy. I get excited to see what is new & fresh, but at the same time don’t want to give up the old standards, yes I am looking at you dvd/vcr combo. We love the ease of digital music, but still like to have real music in our lives. My husband is passionate for vinyl, which isn’t very portable, so he converts some of his treasured LP stash to mp3s (so for him its not always about the highest quality sound he can get, its about making it mobile, a hissy, crackly mp3 ..seriously?) Most every stereo system in the house has radio, cassette, disc & record player and a few have ipod & thumb drive ports. Climbing into the car you can jack in your ipod or bluetooth your phones music to the car from the touch screen. Kindles connect to the wifi, roku streams netflix so we can have instant tv.

With all that we love about technology & the pleasures it brings, sometimes we still revolt against it. We don’t text, we don’t talk on the phone when we drive, shop or anytime we have another human with us, we have smart phones that we use like plain dumb phones, we still get lost, we still use the phone book, we still manually start our car, we still shovel the snow, we still play board games, still pay some bills with checks & some of the movies we watch have to be rewound.

Sometimes it’s not our choice & the technology revolts against us. If it’s not paper jams, it’s connection issues, or errors, or upgrades, it can be maddening. But what I’m finding (besides having another computer to run to) is that I can use these beyond my control tech glitches/ wait times to get some other pleasurable work done, there is nothing wrong with knitting a few rows while the computer scans or boots up, right? Work on a pattern or two while my ISP is replacing my router. Dreaming of designs & color palettes whilst taking the dog out for a poo.
Busy work is good, it keeps me sound. Due to technical difficulties I acceptably fell behind (no internet) and also happily got ahead (christmas/craft queue) over the last few days.

Every year I make all the members of my family a Christmas ornament for their respective trees. This year the ornaments have an extra special meaning, these remembrance candles are for my Grandpa, who passed away last month. A sweet little remember me, that will always be lit, cherishing the memory of a life. FRL 1928-2011 ♥