It was 2003 and that’s my good old strawberry iMac. I hauled it all over creation. Here it is at the moldy old Houghton Lake cabin. The one that was sinking into the swamp. The one with the creaky old oil furnace that used to conk out all the time and, when you called a furnace repair guy (yeah, they are mostly guys), he would laugh when you told him what model it was. This photooo is from a trip that I have always referred to as Midwinter Break Odyssey 2003. We spent a long weekend at Houghton Lake and then headed on up to Sault Ste. Siberia with a quick stop at Petoskey along the way. Lizard Breath was away at college for her first year, so we only had Mouse with us. When we got to Siberia, Grandroobly greeted us at the door with the terse announcement, “Fran is sick!” Well, I had just talk to her the day before. How the heck was I supposed to process that? Hospital? Home? Where? Turned out it was some sort of monster gastro virus that took the Commander a few days to get over. I found out that Grandroobly had suggested that they call me and tell me not to come up but the Commander nixed that one directly. She knew that he would not bother to eat and that she’d have laundry and whatever dishes he did bother to use to clean when she got well and maybe he’d do something like scatter plat maps all over the living room floor to boot. Much better to have the three of us there to keep house and distract the old coot a bit. I knew that the Commander was beginning to recover the morning that I was using the strawberry iMac in her computer room and I heard her and the GG talking about nuclear bombs in the living room. I thought, “Yep, life is back on track here.”

Anyway, the strawberry iMac is at Houghton Lake in the top photooo and the GG is hooked up to the internet via a dial-up connection through the Merit Network. That iMac was the last fambly-type computer we had. We had already purchased a new iMac for Lizard Breath to take to college, so there were only three of using the strawberry flavored one. Within a few weeks of this photoooo, yer favo-rite blahgger (who hadn’t quiiiiiiite started her blahg yet) rather clandestinely purchased her very own 12″ screen G4 powerbook. I had been needling the GG about “letting” me buy one ever since I first saw an ad for the G4 powerbook. I unthinkingly needled him in front of the Commander and the next thing I knew, that esteemed woman was calling me up saying, “Well! If HE wanted one of those, HE would just BUY one, right?” And she sent me a check. Thank you moom! That’s a bit of a digression in a way but it was after that trip with the strawberry iMac that our rate of acceleration into the information age began to increase, incrementally at first, then faster and faster, until…

It is 2010. The GG is surfing the internet at the NEW fancy Houghton Lake cabin. The one we finally, reluctantly decided we needed to build because we were tired of sloshing through water in the kitchen and listening to furnace repair guys (and they are mostly guys, don’tcha know) laugh at us. There is wi-fi here now (and the Edge network) and the GG is surfing the internet on my old 12″ screen G4 powerbook (the one the Commander cut me the check for, now refurbished with a new hard drive and more memory), Mouse’s old 12″ screen G4 powerbook that she took to college and has since been replaced with the latest and greatest MacBook, aaaaaaannnnnndddddd dun dun dun, That Device (aka the iPad)!!! In all, there are at least nine computers here this weekend. The three the GG is using, his iPhone, Lizard Breath’s old iMac that she took with her when she first went to college (it operates the webcam), my white MacBook, *my* iPhone, the Uncly Uncle’s windows laptop, and my work laptop, also Windows. Is that nine? Yeah, I think it is. What will be next? I do not know…

P.S. Actually, there was another computer at Houghton Lake in 2003 but it isn’t shown in the top photoooo. It was the BTB’s college windows behemoth and it could go on the internet but it couldn’t go on the internet at the same time as the strawberry iMac. They had to take turns.

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