STRIKE THREE LAPTOPS, AND YOU'RE OUT

Well, this is depressing...

I've been making my daughter stick with a schedule for podcasting lately... after she convinced me to start a podcast, she saw how hard it was and seemed to lose interest. It's been a struggle the past ten weeks to keep her motivated.

Ten weeks? Yep, ten. We only have seven episodes up though. We've missed three recording sessions now. One because we had to completely re-record. One due to technical difficulties in editing a session, and now, one because our computers crapped out. Yes, computers--plural. 

Being the packrats we are, the Martins have a collection of computers on hand. One desktop in need of a new HDD, one desktop that's about ten years old, running XP, my formerly-trusty Toshiba Satellite laptop running Vista, and the kids each got a brand new Toshiba laptop last summer when I retired from my last job. 

The working desktop isn't so good for recording... it freezes up repeatedly and has very little disk space left. 

The kids' laptops run that idiotic Windows 8 Tablet-wannabe OS, and have a single port for microphone and headphones, like a smart phone. So, we've been recording onto my trusty Satellite, which is about 5 years old. A great, albeit heavy, laptop that I do all my book covers on, format my novels for print editions and of course edit the podcast.

Well, it's time to bury the old Satellite. It's gone the way of the Amiga (although I have two working Amigas boxed up in the basement...). I believe it's a motherboard issue, meaning it's far beyond my paltry repair skills. Add in the kids repeatedly defy my prohibition on "free" gaming sites, clogging their laptops with adware and spam, and there was nary a laptop to be used last night. 

So no episode of Weirdology this week. 

This is doubly-depressing in it was our last episode before I started recording interviews with authors I've met online over the past three years of my own self-publishing endeavors. I was rather looking forward to that. 

Throw in the start of a new school year, a dog with ongoing, expensive medical problems and needing to set the wife up a home office for her work-at-home sessions from her job, and a new laptop gets bumped pretty far down on the old family budget. If only Kindle hadn't hamstrung my book sales with their Unlimited program. Not that I blame readers, I'd choose free over cheap too. 

Time to drown my sorrows in some Xboxxing...