The crush of days

I don't know what happened between Zoe's birthday, July 16th and now. I do know that my computer is trying to kill me. Or, possibly computers and the internet together. First, Erik's Mac died. I know. Macs never die. And yet? Where is it? At Mac Docs or some Flagstaff knock-off, trying to be resuscitated. Then, four days later, while using Internet Explorer, which is not my browser of choice and therefore, doesn't have all the anti-virus add-ons that I use for Firefox, someone (not to be named) clicked on a website that instantly brought on a virus of death. It was the kind of virus that any time you tried to open an application, a pretend "we'll save your computer with our antiviral software" window appeared. I cried real tears because this is the week the Huffington Post collaboration project goes live. I had nothing to do BUT computer stuff. Email editors, my collaborating friend, artists. I had no back up plan. No Erik computer. Well, I did have my Blackberry, which I do recall crying about for getting for my birthday. I was pregnant and thought I needed no more internet to help me neglect my children. But, apparently, I did! Erik is full of forethought.
So, using my Blackberry and Middlebrow's computer (who promises to blog again, because he and Dr. Write were visiting, I was able to contact my people. And, with their company, I was able to distract myself from all the internet that was passing me by.
On Monday, I got a loaner computer. It took 35 minutes for it to power up. It had no wireless card. It had no Photoshop and no way to open more than one window every six minutes. But, like any good drug substitute, it could access the internet and let me make the first Huff Post response. Yay.
Other internet badness ensued. Both MSN and my university's email system decided to "improve" themselves. Such improvement copied Gmail's "conversation" system, meaning all the emails with the same subject compiled themselves. That's one thing when you're creating the conversations but it's entirely another when it does it after the fact, all the emails whose subject read "grad question" or "thank you" were compiled into one conversation. Only the latest email was replyable to. The internet has driven me to use the word replyable. It also makes me end sentences in prepositions.
On top of the technological difficulties, Mr. Max has employed his own technical difficulties. At night, he seems to think that having a nipple in his mouth is the same thing as sleeping. While fine for him, for me, nippling and sleeping are opposite activities. I blame Erik because months ago, he frowned on giving Max a binky. Now, when certain babies need binkies most, it turns out I'm the binky. I'm working on a technological fix that will allow Erik to be the binky.

The good news is, in between all the business and disaster, I was able to make Zoe's birthday dinner, put up some peaches from our friend's peach tree, and make the best pork chops ever. Perhaps, if my children will let me ignore them further (Zoe is joining me in complaining that Tiffany, not Kevin, should have won Top Chef and Max is surfing on his stomach on his boppy pillow), I will post the recipes at NVP.

I also plan on posting all the stuff that I have to do now that, I gather from the way I'm getting emails in my now-mostly-unusable university email, summer is mostly over (sorry Hightouch. I have been following your plan to not mention summer's demise until it's really over but I couldn't help it.)

Edited to add: I forgot the biggest crush. My laptop had a hairline fracture in the screen. Annoying but hair-like and entirely see-through-able. After it went in to the University computer doctors, it came back with green, ugly splotches where the crack was. This computer is not long for this world. We pray that we need not bury both the Mac and this Dell Latitude together in the backyard. What would the children do with all our attention?