Everything Is Different Again

      . . . .  The desktop computer and 24" monitor ordered last week arrived on Sunday.

In other words, while still trying to do all the things one does and needs to do all the time, without enough time to do them, feeling ever more cramped, harassed and failure-ish, one is dealing with everything on screen being in different places, older stuff like Office not quite so compatible with the New! Improved! More Expensive! Office, which one no longer buys and has, like the Word program I have on the old laptop, but rents annually.  So yes, more expensive, as the last Word program I bought was from 2013, and it still operates just fine.  Plus, I'm so comfortable with it I never have to think about what I'm doing -- just write and do whatever.  This is different now, on the New! Much More Powerful! Blahblahblah Win10 machine.  Like everything else.

Plus, it's currently very cold, real winter!, and is staying that way into the foreseeable future.  Nights into the mid-teens, days, top temps under 40°.  I seem to have forgotten what this is like.  Which adds yet more tasks to the ever increasingly multi-task of dressing to do anything from going Out to going downstairs to do the laundry.  Why yes, we too are double masking now.

I suppose I will get used to it fairly soon.

What is puzzling though, is I don't feel as immersed in my watching of series and films and so on on this 24" screen as I do on the 17" laptop screen.  Watching on that screen, was literally tunnel vision, that blocked out everything else around me, which is o so welcome in These Times.  The larger screen -- well blocking out everything else isn't happening so easily.

If this were my and most of the world's biggest problem though, wouldn't it be a grand world indeed?

Gotta say though, that new monitor, on it, scenes such as this, just pop and sizzle in a way they didn't quite, no matter how sharp, on the laptop's more compressed pixalation.

The opening scene from The Flame Trees of Thika (1981) adapted from Elspeth Huxley's memoir (pub. 1959) of growing up in British East Africa -- Kenya, on the coffee plantation her family tried to establish back in 1913.  The series is currently available for streaming on Acorn TV.  I have read the book -- and other works of Elspeth Huxley, and I did see this quite some years ago, on dvd.  It's interesting to me how much more experience and knowledge I bring to this work,  and to the histories of African nations and culture generally, between then and now.