Computer Love

I'm not very particular about the physical aspect of my writing.  I need little except a quiet place. I'm definitely not one of those people who like to work with background noise.  I don't even need a desk. Most days, I write with a laptop on my lap.  These days, I need a napping baby to write, as opposed to a wide-awake baby, and it's a plus when Penny is in a summer camp, though she's a doll, and let's me write for a while each day.

But I will say that a nice computer DOES help.  I wrote Love and Ghost Letters on this here beauty:

My clamshell, tangerine iBook.  Oh, how I miss those translucent keys.  And the handle. It had a handle for carrying.  This was my graduate school computer.  I hauled it around the U and it helped me write my thesis, and later, my first novel.  Orlando calls it the "toilet lid" mac, but I rebuke that.  This was a wondrous machine, and I rue the day I got rid of it.  For sentimental value alone I should have kept her.

There have been other macs since then--two white MacBooks that have served me well.  But neither of those made me swoon the way that orange clam o'joy did.

That is, until yesterday.

Orlando and the girls gave me an early birthday/anniversary gift--a MacBook Air. The teeny tiny one.  And I am in love again.  Behold:

It's so light, and it fits my purse, and it's fast, fast, fast.  It doesn't heat up at all, unlike the other MacBooks.  I can work with the baby on one leg, the laptop on the other, it's that small.  Yet, it feels full-size when I'm typing.  The keys glow with this bright, white light, and the touchpad is big and just sensitive enough, and people, this is close to perfect. All it needs is a handle.

(Seriously, why don't computers have handles?! Everything needs a handle, says the mom juggling a baby and a six year old and sometimes a chihuahua.  Chihuahuas, especially, could use a handle.)

What's extra nice about this birthday gift is the timing. I'm halfway through a work in progress and the writing is going really well.

(I shouldn't have just typed that, by the way. Bragging about your writing or research is like bragging about your baby's sleeping/eating/behavioral habits.  It angers the gods, who then reverse whatever is happening.  True fact.  But I'll risk it to say that the writing is going well, and that this little MacBook Air is a lovely incentive to write even more.)

And who knows?  Perhaps this computer will be as lucky for me as that old clamshell one was.

Tell me, do you have a computer love? Do you get attached to your computer? And if you're the writing-type, what writing instruments get your groove on?