adapt, improvise, overcome

 ...Or whatever that saying is.

Anyway, my laptop keyboard had been acting up (you might have noticed that there were a lot of typos where the "t" was absent; that was the biggest problem of the keys, but also the left hand shift and shift lock did not always work)

After typing last night's post, I tried to write some things elsewhere and the "t" would not work. Like, at all. I tried gently brushing under and blowing on the key but no dice.

I mean, I have my phone, but my fingers are fat and the keyboard is small so it's a lot harder to comfortably type on there. Also I can touch type on a real keyboard so I can compose faster looking at a screen instead of having to hunt and peck.

So I thought: I bet they make separate keyboards you can plug into a USB port.

(Yes, I need a new laptop, but between the eye exam yesterday, and the dryer fix, and paying my homeowner's insurance just a week or so ago, it's not quite in the budget this month, at least not for the kind I would want - and yeah, wal-mart had a few in the $400 or so range, and I could have done that, but.....I tend to subscribe to the Sam Vimes' Boots theory for things like that (and though I'm not TECHNICALLY in poverty, just, "momentarily embarrassed" as the British aristocrats used to say, I'd rather not buy a really cheap laptop now and have it annoy me for its entire short life; I'd rather save up and buy a better one later).

So this morning, on my jaunt to Mart of Wal for the dried canberries and sour cream and the like I needed for the muffins, I detoured first to the electronics section and contemplated the laptop keyboards.

Because I am a bit of a dinosaur, I really wanted a CORDED one that would plug in to the usb port and draw power from the laptop, but no joy there. So I bought not the bottom of the line (some kind of no-name mini keyboard that didn't have a numeric pad and was also small - so would be less comfortable to type on) and not the top of the line (on the grounds that I didn't know for sure if it would even work, and I figured wal-mart would not take back an opened keyboard). So for about $20 I got a Logitech one that does have a usb dongle and runs on AA batteries (and note to self: turn it off when you're not actively using it so to save battery life)

As you can see, it worked. It took a couple minutes for the dongle to talk to my computer but now it can. I still have to use the trackpad on the computer for mousing things, but I can pull out my desk drawer and set the new keyboard on that, or, when I "roam," I can have the keyboard in my lap and the computer on a table next to me, like when I sit in my recliner.

It's not a PERFECT solution (that would be a new laptop with the features I want) but it's not a bad solution....