Apple Fixed My Three Year-Old Laptop For FREE!

Brokeback MacBook

For the last couple of years, I've been living with a hairline crack on the right side of my 13-inch MacBook.  This didn't surprise me, because my MacBook lives a hard life: it's been to more airports and countries than some laptops half its age. It's so full of pictures that tech support had to insert more memory to make it functional. In short, it works for a living, instead of lying around as a pampered and spoiled laptop.

In order to deal with this worsening problem--and being someone with a gift for sweeping issues under the rug--I had placed a cute tiger sticker over the crack when I was in Japan in 2009. If the defect got worse, I didn't want the plastic piece falling off and getting lost!

The broken corner, January 2011.

This past January, the sticker fell off. To no one's surprise, not long afterwards,  the plastic corner piece finally fell off. It happened when I was staying in Boston. I spent at least a solid hour looking for the missing piece in my little niece's very tidy bedroom, even shaking her Hello Kitty sheets to see if I could find the missing piece! No luck, the tiny plastic triangle was gone forever.

The jagged edge was slightly uncomfortable on the inside of my wrist, as well as being hopelessly tacky. With SXSWi coming up, I didn't mind being the girl with the near-vintage laptop at the tech-toys festival...I minded being the girl with the visibly broken vintage laptop. There are limits!

When I ducked into the heated Apple store on NYC's Fifth Avenue on a cold day-- to see if I could buy a replacement for the top piece of plastic--I was told that this cracked corner was a known issue  and that I should make a "Genius Bar" appointment. So when I got back to Austin, I did just that.

Visiting The Doctor

When I took my laptop in--and they told me it was really three years old--I expected to be laughed at. When the dude at the Genius Bar added that he's never seen a crack exactly like mine.... I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Yet, when he plugged my laptop into the system and looked at the history, it turned out that my laptop was covered! He even grabbed another brittle bit from next to the camera (a defective part I hadn't even noticed) and pulled it off! He told me that they'd be replacing all the plastic on the inside of the computer (including the keyboard and trackpad), that it would take 1-3 days and that I wouldn't have to pay anything.

Ta da! The corner is no longer broken!

When I picked up my repaired laptop, my sweetie noticed that the replaced pieces (i.e. basically all the plastic on the inside of the laptop) are slightly gray in tone compared to the brighter white of the original keyboard/trackpad etc.

I wish I'd known about this Apple repair earlier! I lived with an annoying crack/sticker for a long time, when I didn't need to.

When I picked up the repair, the girl who helped me said that she had the same model of MacBook, and that she'd had her own laptop's parts replaced twice!

Who knew?

Umm, actually Apple knew. And they didn't bother to let me know that my problem might be covered.

Valentine's Day=stolen poetry

Once upon a time, I used to write a lot of poetry. So when I came across this passage by Richard Siken, I had to share it with both of you.

I spent the afternoon with one of my girlfriends from high school, so I've been thinking about that period in my life today.  This passage feels like the forbidden-ness of everything when you're in high school.

      

"You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for."
— Richard Siken

 I hope your Valentine's Day was filled with the right kind of obsession.

I feel at home in New York...and sometimes I wonder why.

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to flee a big snowstorm in Boston, and go spend some time in NYC.

When I was there I stayed with my cousin, her baby Hudson, and my Aunt Diane, whose flight had been delayed for a couple of days by the snowstorm.

Since the last time I visited, my cousin has moved to Brooklyn, a borough where I've never spent much time. Yet, it feels very much like home, as does the rest of NYC.


In a lot of ways, this makes little to no sense. After all, I only lived in NYC long enough to get mail there while I was doing a brief program at NYC in the early 90's. For years afterward, I was lucky enough to visit my former roommate Cora, and get to briefly drop into her NYC life. Hanging out with Cora and her modern dancer/Martha Graham School of Dance friends, I got a window into the city that I would have never gotten as a plain ole tourist.

But as for part where NYC feels like home, I can't really explain it, expect to wonder if maybe it has something to do with television and movies.


While I was in the city in early February, I stumbled across the filming of a remake of the 80's movie Arthur, starring Russel Brand. The filming had closed down the front entrance of the Strand book store, (close to Union Square.)

I couldn't help but wonder if all of the location filming that's been done in NYC has sunk into my brain, making me feel at home just because of all the images that I've absorbed from the screen over the years.

I spent some time contemplating this, until I came home to Austin. While sitting on the floor feeding my dog, I looked up at a favorite childhood toy that I had recently rescued from my mother's garage. It was a plastic copy of a toy brownstone, made as a Sesame Street tie-in during the 70's. It's kind of eerie how much the plastic toy looks like a real brownstone!

 

So does my strange at-homeness in NYC have something to do with mass media? Maybe.

Someone used one of my pictures! Again!

Oh look, someone used one of my pictures in a blog post. It's the little things that matter.
But, let's be honest. Not many people other than me would be taking pictures of a 7-11 in Japan, then putting them on flickr.

My close encounter with winter:

It’s snowing again in Boston. Again.

I know, I know. It’s kind of what’s expected right now, what with it being the darkest part of the year.

“January in the Northeast…would you expect anything less,” my friend Tracy quipped on Facebook, when I was complaining about how cold it's been.

Yet knowing something logically and processing it conceptually are two different things. This much snow and coldness has been hard for my brain, because it just runs counter to my entire view of the world.

For example, this past weekend I saw people out ice fishing…and my sister-in-law offered to take me walking across a frozen pond, just for the novelty of the experience.  Um, I know ice fishing exists, but my brain is convinced that ponds are for swimming in, not for walking across. I am not Jesus.

Back when I was in graduate school, I remember having my thesis reader, Dr. Bob Jensen talking about how much he missed shoveling show. This past week, I shoveled snow for the very first time in my life.  I’m beginning to think that Bob has some strange ideas.

On Saturday morning, I saw my brother-in-law Andrew chipping away at the giant ice dams on his roof, and cleaning some of the two foot of snow off of their roof. I had heard a rumor that icicles could actually get big enough that they’d really do some damage if they fell on you, but I’d certainly never seen such a thing!

In the last few days, I’ve also learned about something called a “snow farm.” Misleadingly, this isn’t where they grow snow. Rather it’s the place where old, sad unwanted snow is taken to die after it is scraped off the highways. I don’t know why they don’t call it a “snow morgue.”