I’m not good at figuring things out. I  take the long road around and don’t always close the deal. And because of my legendary inability to remember stuff, things rarely stay figured out. This could apply to anything. How to get a computer to behave. How to cut out a quilt block. How to take a three-part bird feeder apart for cleaning (and put it back together immediately afterwards). Seriously: if you have a push-door when I’m expecting a pull-door, you might as well have locked me out. Honeys? I even forgot how to swim. When you have a Magic-Erase brain, you can live a pleasant life free of remorse and grudgedom, but you’d better make a lot of friends.

Because, after many decades of living with my original personal operating system (POS), I have realized that as empowering as fending for oneself must be, I am equally empowered by delegating almost everything to sturdier brains. There are plenty of them out there. It pays to be nice to them. These are people who can dispense expertise without depleting their store.

What I do is find one of those people and tell them what outcome I’m looking for and they’ll ask me some questions and solve it all for me. For example, when I needed a new phone, I asked Walter. Walter asked specific pertinent questions I had actual answers to, such as “What do you use a phone for?” and quickly determined how much phone I didn’t need and then sent me a link to a particular phone available on my particular cell phone plan (Consumer Cellular, a.k.a. Grandma’s Tin Cans and String). Boom. I clicked on the thing and it thunked onto my front porch a few days later and it’s just right. And I have saved myself hours of extraneous and pointless thinking that could be better used for wondering what a beetle’s face looks like up close.

Or The Daves. Who, as you recall, flang me a life preserver and hauled me in from the sea of expensive bad TV and asked specific pertinent questions and sent me links to things, which soon thunked on the porch, boom boom, and then installed it all, and it’s just right, and I still have all the neurons I had before the process started, unscuffed. And mostly unused.

And so we come to the conundrum, now going on eight years old, of what to do with the billion photographs that are being held hostage by my sludgy old desktop computer. The only reason I still have the computer is that ransom situation, because otherwise it doesn’t work at all, and never plays on the internet. If I need a photo from it, I wake it up and jam in a thumb drive, and a few hours later I have extracted the thing, but even the waking-up part is sludgy and the machine pants like a winded bear the whole time, and I’m afraid some day it’s going to blow up and I’m going to lose the whole stash.

I’m also afraid if I shoveled the photo liberry onto my laptop, my laptop would immediately urp it back up like a dog that ate a raincoat; so I figured maybe my photos could live in a little outbuilding, like a portable hard drive, and I could just pop out for them as needed, the way you go out to the shed for a hatchet. But how-what-when-which? Gah. Choices irritate me. Too many ways to go wrong.

Fortunately neighbor Anna’s father Tom was coming for a visit. Tom’s my age, but he knows stuff anyway. I explained the situation to Tom and he went right over to Old Sludgy and swatted at it until it coughed up information, and then he did a consultation with my laptop to see what it would agree to, and sure enough, in a flash, he had produced a link for me and something thunked onto my front porch—just in time for him to complete the intervention before he goes home again. SuperTom was In Da House, all set to slap his big brain all over my computer.

To be continued.