WordPress made me do it.  Well, strictly speaking it was Gravatar that gave me the final push. My WordPress dashboard urged me to upgrade Safari. I couldn’t. I had gone as far as I could go with the Snow Leopard, 10.5.8, operating system. Then Gravatar went into a loop when I tried to upload an image. I went off and sulked for a few days.

Blogging was way too hard for this old girl.

Anyway, I had actually published an ebook (my memoir, Never Tell, recovered memories…) on Kindle and Smashwords, so why complain about a few hitches? The Mac iBook G4 was just fine. All it needed was a better operating system. Hang on. Didn’t I buy a better operating system last year? Didn’t I buy a new battery last fall? Isn’t it time to stop sinking money into a 6 year-old computer?

You’re wondering why it took me so long. I could say thrift, but probably it would be more truthful to say fear. What was there to be afraid of, after all? These may be lean times but my bank is still unafraid. It longs to lend me money. And if I prorate what I spent buying the old computer, it works out to about $20 a month.

The Apple sales woman’s first response when I carried in the iBook, was, “Oh, that’s really old, but I’ve seen one before.”

Using her fine deductive skills, she spoke in terms of the Mac Book Air lasting me 5 years. I sought to establish a little more street cred by producing my iPhone and mentioning my iPod. What was less impressive was the fact that I couldn’t remember my Apple password.  I almost had it, but almost doesn’t make the grade.

So I came home with the beautiful slim laptop still in virgin condition and managed with my great nephew’s help to “migrate” all the stuff on the old computer. (Who knew “migrate” could be a transitive verb? Come to that, who knew what transitive is?)

The next day, I lost the dock, the Safari bar, every single page I tried to read and WordPress menu that runs down the left of this page on which I am writing this post. I could not scroll up or down by using 2 fingers on the trackpad or using the keyboard. (What happened to the up and down arrows on the right? What happened to the bar you could pull on?) Around dinner time, I lost it.

I raved on the phone to two sympathetic friends. Well, initially sympathetic. One kept saying, “why did they change it?” (She needs a new Mac Book.) The other one kept laughing at Apple and its overpriced products.

Before I opened the chardonnay, I phoned the store. Yes, I could still buy the 1 to 1 tutoring service and yes, they could probably squeeze in a few unbooked minutes of emergency help in just so I could finish this post.

What did I learn? Keep your fingers far away from the trackpad! Scroll by separating 2 fingers, holding the others aloft and pushing up or down and  put the cursor way up to the top to find the Safari bar-without clicking, good grief. And other good stuff that all you other Mac users already knew and all you young users were born knowing.

They say the brain forms new neural pathways when we challenge it. So I’ve worked it out, blogging makes me smart!