It's not a Viking funeral, but it will have to do

[anthimeria]

Lots of things have been happening, and a lot of them are even things I should be writing about--I saw Trina Robbins speak, for example, and fangirled at her madly, and I also went to the Alternative Press Expo, and edited the first one-third-quarter-ish of a novel for a friend, and discovered a fellow middlegrade novelist at work, and read the first Hunger Games book, and assembled half of my Halloween costume.

However, the thing that has happened to me most recently is that yesterday, my beloved, five-and-a-half-year-old laptop gave up the ghost.  It was a Dell Inspiron 6000, and with a little help from the 4-year warranty, it did everything I ever asked of it and more.  I wrote three novels on it, did my first NaNoWriMo, found out about WisCon, watched more movies and TV than I can count, read fanfic and published work alike, connected to people and learned things about the world and myself.  It rarely left my side--the longest I went without it in those years was the Carribean vacation last year, because I didn't want to bring it on a vacation spent entirely on the beach.  For what amounted to a thoughtless, lifeless machine, I was incredibly fond of it.  It stuck by me when friends' laptops were failing left and right.  It once got rained on and after I dried it out, worked fine.  It had some eccentricities, more as it got older, but nothing that ever impeded what I needed to do (except the two weeks or so it spent without a hard drive--remember how I mentioned the warranty?).  It never once overheated.  It never once misplaced any files.

So I salute you, my laptop, for a long and faithful life of service.  May you go into whatever heaven there is for helpful machines, where they shall sing your praises forever and ever.