My Brag Book

There are so many things I could brag about. I mean my children are all geniuses and model material. (I see you rolling your eyes).
My 9 grand daughters are perfection in pink with IQs off the charts! My one grand son, well, there has not been a more handsome or brilliant boy ever born. (Again with the eyes?)  And my brother married a beautiful nurse who managed to nag him into work side by side with him to build a chain of three reputable pet stores which they eventually sold and are now retired and living nicely in their Chicago area home AND their Florida home. (No soup kitchen for them, yet.)  And my beautiful sister who my children think walks on water because she always has lovely and loving things to say about all of our kids and their babies both to their faces and behind their backs. (No, really, she IS that nice!)
And I've spoken of Momma often here so most of you already know what an amazingly loving momma I have. She is the my buddy, my shopping partner, (neither of us like to shop, but have to sometimes) and she loves me unconditionally almost all the time. (I'm not as nice as my sister.)  My husband is just about the best ever was, except for the not picking up after himself thing, but I'm still working on that. It's only been 29 years, 11 months, 2 weeks and a day or so.  There's still time for improvement.

But, you know what I want to brag about?  ME.  (eyes, again? stop it, right now).  Yep, me. I'm gonna tell you one of the things I accomplished on my own, pretty much and I use it everyday.
I wanted a computer back in the early '90s.  They were expensive and no one I knew had one in their home yet.  Then my brother (the store owning one, oh, that's my only brother) bought one. He connected it to his stores and could then check in on their receipts at the end of the day. How cool is that?, I'm thinking.   So I start looking around and talking to the one person I know, one of my clients, who owns one and has 2 sons who know how they work, kind of. They were learning quickly and they were kind of excited to teach me how to compute.  

I get an inexpensive used IBM.  I don't even know how to turn it on. Seriously. I wait a few days until my client and friend comes to the salon and helps me get it all set up. I'm going to use it at work for now and later I'll try that two computers talking to each other thing with my home machine.  She did get me started with a great afternoon of learning the basic DOS language and making me cheat sheets to refer to until I was comfortable with my software. In a couple of months I was keeping my own books on my Peachtree Acct. program.  Running my schedules on the word processor and writing on the same.  I was loving this machine and I wanted to know all about it.

It was about 2 years before I first saw 'windows'. WOW!  No more DOS?  Well, only for fixing. I wanted to know how to fix so I started reading manual and books and talking with the sons who knew how to fix minor things and add memory and do a lot of things I thought I could do. I added more memory to my IBM and to my first home computer all by myself. I put a new motherboard in my first computer when it was about 6 years old. I replaced the floppy disk drive in that same machine when it just quit working.  I did all of those repairs by reading the manuals and the packaging of the replacements.

I learned and I studied on my own and finally, I GOT THE INTERNET! My learning was unstoppable now!  The world was at my finger tips.  IF I could just learn to stay on task.  That internet led me in a million different directions and hours would pass and I would have forgotten what I started to research.  (You have, too and you know it!)  But I did learn a lot of basic fixes.  

I am bragging about this because I am not a young 'un and I wasn't  then. I am bragging because now at 62 I am probably more computer savvy than my kids.  I'm bragging because I think it's super cool when my techie kids call me and ask me how to do something!  Or they're going to get a new laptop and call to ask my opinion before they shop.  Oh, yeah!  I'm kewl like that.  And I have not lost my love of tappity tapping on these keys!

In my next life, I'm gonna be a Best Buy Geek.  I'm gonna drive one of those little black and white Geek Mobiles.  Oh, yes I am.

Jo