The last time we upgraded our computer, we went from a laptop back to a desktop so the kids wouldn’t have the illusion of privacy. Of course that means I too lost the illusion of privacy, and I’ve had first-world, neurotic difficulties writing anything since then. I’ve never been able to write comfortably with the feeling that someone is staring over my shoulder, let alone with someone actually staring over my shoulder. And with the computer in the corner of the living room and two children always around, someone generally is at my shoulder.

And so because from time to time one yearns for a room of one’s own, today’s National Blog Posting Month dispatch comes to you straight from The Back Of The Basement, where the spiders and stinkbugs roam free, the laundry whooshes about next to me and a circa-2003ish iMac sits atop a giant metal office desk that came with the house. I can’t imagine how they maneuvered it down the stairs and into The Back Of The Basement. I imagine they lowered the behemoth into the basement-to-be with a crane back in 1956 and then built the house around it.

The iMac still runs, obviously, but I haven’t updates the operating system since before Pete was born, because it’s too old to go beyond OS 10.4 (that’s Tiger to you). It’ll open some very simple websites, but it will only sort of open my WordPress dashboard, which is why I’m typing this in Word on my clackety, yellowing keyboard.

I am not, in fact and however, alone in the basement, as I had expected I would be whilst trying to write today’s #NaBloPoMo post. There is one corner of the house that allows the rain into the basement when it’s rained all day. That corner is beneath the stairway, and we have yet to decide how to deal with that beyond putting down lots of towels and hoping it stops raining. It has been raining all day here, and so Rockford and the Basement Towels are also in the basement, valiantly attempting to hold back the deluge. He and the towels are, at least, relatively good about not standing directly over my shoulder.

Anyway.

I found a few pre-blogging documents on Ye Olde Macintosh that I’d forgotten I’d written. Here is one of them:

Dinners Poppy Likes
Dec. 9, 2009
Spaghetti
Pizza
Chicken parmesan
Grilled chicken
Grilled cheese
Butternut squash ravioli (with or without maple syrup)
Macaroni and cheese
Rice
Mashed potatoes and chicken
Quesadillas
Taco night

I’m sure that in 2009 I was hoping that by 2015 she would’ve expanded her list of acceptable food items. Alas I think the list has diminished, if anything. She will not longer eat mashed potatoes, she’ll occasionally eat rice if it doesn’t “taste different,” and she’ll only eat chicken under duress.

(I apologize for all the italics. I’ve been reading John Irving’s “Avenue of Mysteries,” and that man leans heavily on italics. I think it might be a contagious issue because I seem unable to stop.)

Having sat here at the giant metal desk in The Back Of The Basement for a few minutes now, it has become clear that JJ T. Cat sprayed his angst somewhere nearby in a location that eluded my previous stench-eradication efforts. And so for now I bid you, Ye Olde Macintosh and The Back Of The Basement adieu.