Whew. I’ve had something like six hours of tech troubleshooting in the last two days, and I was so frustrated at one point that I actually got teary. I’m going to spare you all the saga — the SHORT VERSION of it is that my laptop’s display is deader than dead.
It’s still under warranty, so the nice Apple Store people say the repair will be free (instead of $720), unless they open it up and find water inside (which I don’t think they will; I don’t remember spilling anything on this machine). They might have it fixed before I leave Hawai’i, but if not, they’ll ship it to me in Chicago within two weeks.
All of this complicated by the fact that I couldn’t remember my iCloud password (I had the wrong one written down), and I can’t tell you how many hours of trouble that caused, until I was finally telling Jed about all this, and he turned out to have it (from five years ago!), and so I was able to get back in and reset it. Whew. (#thisispoly)
And I basically can’t function without a keyboard, it turns out, so I tried buying a Magic keyboard to go with my iPad (which I had with me), but when I got it back to the hotel and tried setting it up, the trackpad worked but the keys didn’t. Much attempting to troubleshoot followed (with Kevin and Jed helping), but we just failed. So back to the Apple Store today, and how glad am I that this hotel happens to be right next to a giant mall with an Apple Store basically two blocks away? Weirdly convenient.
It turned out that after they tried all the standard things, the guy went in the back and asked someone, and they said to try putting the settings only (not the whole iPad) back to factory settings, so they did that, and magically, the Magic Keyboard started working. I’m typing on it now. Woohoo!
I‘m still dealing with tech issues — I couldn’t manage to sign into my Office365 account from campus, don’t know why, so I signed up for a one-month free trial (that I’m going to have to remember to cancel) so I can use Word on this until I get my laptop back. And the keyboard on this is pretty good, but a little…slippery…compared to a regular keyboard, so I do fumble-key things occasionally, which is annoying. Not too often, though.
I can’t figure out how to do word count in this version of Word, but that’s only mildly frustrating. It’s just a habit, not actually anything I need anytime soon.
What DOES matter, is that I was able to draft another scene of the Patreon story (previous scenes are in my FB feed, you can probably find them by searching for Patreon story if you missed them), and I should be able to do the Serendib cocktail book edits that Stephanie is waiting on, and do the revisions of “Thin Air” that Jed and Dan and I talked about the last few days, and most importantly, I no longer feel like I’ve lost a limb.
Spraining an ankle was bad, but not being able to type apparently strikes at the very core of my being. Deeply unsettling, like losing my voice.
I’m back now, babies. 
. New scene follows, and more Hawai’i photos shortly…
*****
Selah lifted her hands from the clay and considered the result. The past hours had soothed her jangling nerves, as her fingers rolled and shaped the local clay. Red-brown and prone to crumbling, it wasn’t going to give the kinds of results you’d get from something like fine porcelain. But their professor had told them that today was just about getting to know the local materials, connecting to it, learning its properties. There was some trace mineral there that Selah hadn’t seen before — in the right angle of light, glints of gold shone. It was sparking an idea for a collage piece, one that would combine a Syrinthian approach to poetry with an installation that lit up certain words. When the light was right.
“Not bad,” the professor said, tapping her on the shoulder. Selah startled — she’d been so focused on the piece, she hadn’t heard them come up. The lush pelt of the Varisian professor was liberally daubed with red-brown clay, just as covered as Selah’s hands and arms and apron were. Selah wondered how hard it was to get clay out of fur. “But look, you’ve worked so long, your hands have gotten abraded — they’re bleeding, child.”
Selah blushed. “It’s probably because I fell down earlier, scraped up my palms.”
“Well, until they heal, you must wear gloves in class. I know — don’t even argue with me child. They’ll just get worse unless you take care of them now. Understood?”
“Yes,” Selah said obediently.
“Good. Now look — the rest of your class is long gone, off to dinner. Aren’t you hungry? Clean yourself up — there are bandages in the cupboard above the sink. I’ll take care of your station, just this once.”
“Oh, no, I can do it…”
“Don’t argue with your professor,” they said sternly. And then a smile broke across their face, a smile full of large, sharp teeth. “It’s always a pleasure for me when I find a student with a real dedication to the clay. We’re going to have fun together this semester, you’ll see.”
Selah smiled back, happiness bubbling up inside her. This was why she’d come, after all. To have this feeling, even if her palms were stinging for it. She got up, feeling the muscles of her back complain — they’d been sitting stiff for too long, while she bent over the clay bench. Wash her hands, antiseptic (ow), bandages. Self-adhesive, so she could manage them herself, which was good — she didn’t want to bother the professor with anything else. When she glanced back, the professor had already put her pieces with the rest of the class’s work to dry, and was back at her own bench, head down over a piece with beautiful lines.
Selah would have been happy to just stay and watch, but her stomach grumbled loudly, reminding her how long it had been since she’d last eaten. She flushed, grabbed her things, and ducked out the door. Surely she could find the dining hall on her own, now that she knew how to use the map on her tablet. She was looking at the tablet, instead of the ground, when her feet bumped into something that almost sent her and the tablet flying. Selah reached out and grabbed a nearby railing, managing to right herself and hold onto the tablet. But when she looked down to see what she’d tripped over, the tablet fell from her hands, landing with an ominous crack on the sidewalk.
It was a body, face-down, lying in a spreading pool of blood.
Selah couldn’t help herself — her mouth opened and horror poured out. She fell to her knees beside the body and screamed.
***