Meet me at the space-bar

Mere hours ago a phrase like this post's title would have been excruciating for me to type up on this computer. Over the past two-and-a-half months I have been crippled in so many ways by a malfunctioning keyboard. Not even by an entire keyboard; two key keys on the keyboard have wreaked my ruin: the space-bar and the 'm' (along with a few other keys of much lesser importance such as the left cursor and 'control'). It is astonishing how the loss of such a small thing has brought my communication with the outside world to its' knees.

How did my keyboard get to such a state, you ask? Logan was sick early in December and happened to be sitting on my lap not once but twice (possibly thrice) while my laptop innocently sat at my feet (I'm sure dethroned from its titular origin at the point when he insisted on sitting there) only to be covered with a great portion of the contents of Logan's stomach. The keys were a mess but because I had more important sicknesses to handle at the time, the mess got a chance to dry on. So I was unable (and unwilling) to use the keyboard in any way until I found the time to clean it up. However, even once I cleaned it up - going so far as to remove the keys and clean beneath - the aforementioned keys would not work.

Thus I entered my second stage of broken communication. I entertained hopes of attaching a separate keyboard and even raised my sights to the idea of a new computer. When these items were not forthcoming and when I found the need to communicate with the outside world becoming pressing I decided to improvise. I cannot give myself much credit for brilliancy but I certainly will say the efforts I made were impressive. I found that I could use underscore for spaces in some of my messages (although this would mess up formatting depending on the program). I also found it interesting to look for synonyms for words with the letter 'm' in them (which themselves had to remain m-less). If all else failed (or if the search was becoming ridiculous) I would copy and past an 'm' from text elsewhere on the page (often from the .com of the URL). By the time that I was getting better at this and realizing that I would not be out of my predicament any time soon I started writing short sentences without underscore by copying and pasting phrases from space-ful sections of text and swapping out the original words for mine while preserving the spaces.

The one exception to this predicament was blogger. Apparently if you write words and hit 'enter' between them, within the compositional box it may look like an experimental poem but once the post is published nothing appears amiss. It is still difficult to write lengthy posts (hence the brevity displayed in the past few months around here) but it does hide the larger half of the handicap.

All this to explain my joy upon hooking up a real keyboard that really works. Strangely enough I have had to re-train my fingers to hit the space-bar... Can't say it took long, however! This time the computer and keyboard are, despite the moniker of 'laptop', remaining decided on top of the table. There they will hopefully be (mostly) out of reach of our electronics monster.