“And you weren’t even surfing porn,” my son, Sean, said when I told him how I opened something that looked all official, from the USPS (supposedly), on my hotmail.

Yeah. Rude of them, criminal even, stupid of me to ruin my third hand-me-up (from my children) computer, the one with all my business stuff, all my various writings, all my scanned drawings, all my connections to, say, my friend Ray (on my other, supposed-to-be for work mail site, almost exclusively used for bragging back and forth about awesome surf sessions), and my almost-never-logged-out connection to realsurfers.net, officially and totally tied to wordpress.

The next day my daughter, Dru, calling on her way to work in Chicago, said she’d heard how stupid I was, and, oh yes, that her mother told her I was getting a “sweet, sweet laptop out of the deal.”

Yeah, got it delivered on Friday. Evidently you have to pay extra for the book of instructions for Windows 8, and besides, Word (of any year or numerical designation) does not come with it, but can be rented for about two hundred a year, or a mere $9.99 per month. 

Great. And, evidently, for those without the instructions, the start up page is tied to Microsoft’s Hotmail, and the password must be used, and, for some reason, most of the times I’ve tried, the thing is locked. Shut it off, turn it on; and, though, somehow, I was able to watch part of the Margaret River ASP contest, Kelly building up an insurmountable score only to be surmounted by… oh my god, I’ll have to look it up and… oh no!

No, I remembered, by Michel Bourez, who, though I couldn’t stay up long enough to watch it, won the final against Josh Kerr.

So, classic contest excitement, but, this morning, I tried, failed, shut it down, started it up, and it spent the rest of the time before I had to leave updating.

Now it’s Sunday night and it’s updating… again. I’m writing this on Trisha’s old school (Windows XP) computer. I don’t like it, but, right now, if I can post this, it seem “Sweet.” Sweet