This Must Be The Place.

Well, kids, it's been an exciting past couple of weeks for your old pal Amber! As you can probably tell, I've been busy.

Busy not blogging.

Busy not blogging even The Bachelorette.

I know. I get it. I'm sorry. It's just like...life, man. Life. It gets crazy sometimes.

And also I get really lazy.

So there's that, too.

But to catch you up to speed on June:

My laptop completely died. As in, I turned it on one late Tuesday night to see a black screen and the words "Missing Operating System." The only correct response to something like that is to utter an "Oh fuuuuuck" and then mix yourself a drink. Which I did, mainly because Gin & Tonics are delicious and I had already planned on having one.

With the Great Laptop Crash of June 2013, I also lost my entire iTunes Library. The one I had been building since, oh, you know, 2003. Sensing that the end was neigh, I had begun saving all my music to the cloud via Dropbox...only to discover a few days after the crash that Dropbox had only saved the music folders, NOT the actual files. I wanted to cry - do you guys realized how many beautiful and amazing easy listening classics I lost?! My whole Michael McDonald collection, everybody. MY WHOLE MICHAEL MCDONALD COLLECTION! - but I didn't. Also, luckily I had the foresight a couple years ago to start buying most of my new music on Amazon, which automatically saved it to my Amazon Cloud Player. So that was nice.

Oh, and then my phone also died in the Electronic Holocaust. Which actually wasn't that big of a deal, since it's been giving me grief for the past two months and I was already at the point where I hardly needed it. And, to be honest, I was kind of starting to really like not having a phone...when I didn't have it, I realized just how much time I spent doing those reflexive cell checks to see if I'd gotten new email (and like, it's never GOOD email that you're suddenly getting, right? It's never some email out of the blue from that hot guy you like...it's always the "I need you to do this for me NOW" stressball crap) or texts. It was kind of revelatory to go out to a place and not have a phone to check during a lull in conversation. I guess what I'm saying is...having a phone made me a much more engaged person than all you electronically-hooked fools and I'm so much better than you for it now and I'll just keep reminding you of that every time I see you check your phone.

And while it was pretty much the worst week ever to not have a working laptop - client deadlines were looming, crucial moments for projects were happening, etc - I decided that instead of getting upset over the mandatory unplugging, I would just make the best of it. So I did a lot of yoga, read a lot of books, finished up my newly-renewed obsession with Mad Men, caught up on my sleep, etc. And then every couple of days I would trek out to my parent's house on the lake to use their computer and catch up on work, which ended up being a pretty rad plan...got some quality time in with my parents, got to be out on the lake for a couple of gorgeous days, got up to speed on my Real Housewives watching...it was fantastic.

My new laptop arrived last week, and it was a shiny new MacBook Air. Gingerly opening the box, you could hear angels singing, a couple of bluebirds landed on my shoulder, the sun started streaming...it was beautiful. I have waited SO LONG for a Mac, you guys...and it's so pretty that I actually was kind of scared to touch it for a couple of days. Like it had to be a moment - I had to wash my hands before using it, I had to have a couple of free hours to really dig into all the new programs and files, etc. You know that thing of how our brains are discounting mechanisms? Where the more familiar we are with something, the more we start to discount it or value it less? That will not happen for my MacBook Air. This MacBook Air is like that hot chick you waited all through high school to ask out, and then she finally says yes, and you know full well just how much of a lucky bastard you are to be going out with her, so you call her when you say you're going to call her and you put up with her dumb friends when she wants the two of you to go out dancing with them and you do a whole bunch of other shit that with someone else you would probably just blow off but you do it because you know that's just what you do when you care about keeping something.

Yeah. So my new laptop is like that.

So that's the status with that. Now that I'm back in action, I have a few more posts to update you all on other areas of my life that are not electronic.

It's going to be amazing.

Maybe not amazing...but it's going to be fun. For me, at least. For you guys...get your own blogs and then we can talk about whether or not I'm responsible for your level of entertainment.