An Ode to D'Artagnan

In 2003, I bought my first laptop. He was dashing, debonaire, sturdy...everything a girl could ask for. I named him D'Artagnan and christened him as my knight in shining armor (he was kind of shiny after all). He was a handsome HP Pavillion notebook with a Pentium 4 processor and 512 MB of DDR SDRAM. I used to know what that meant.

Nine years later, however, my knight in shining armor had grown old and weak. I think he actually wheezed every time I turned him on. He had no battery life, and I had begun to wonder why I was so insistent on buying a machine that had a floppy drive (the salesman, to his credit, tried to convince me that they were on their way out).

Despite my machine's flaws and the fact that I hadn't really used it in two or three years, I had a soft spot for it. Graham says I personify everything, and he's right, but this little guy had stayed with me faithfully through all my years of college. We had a history...and it was full of good memories.

Nevertheless, I conceded that it was time to retire my knight permanently. Graham, my new knight in shining armor (though he's less shiny and isn't named for one of the musketeers), decided that we needed to destroy the hard drive before throwing away the computer. This was the result:

Can you see the look of pure joy on his face?

Really, it worked out well for both of us. He got to dissect the computer, and I got to play with camera settings while photographing the experiment.

So, thanks for all the memories, D'Artagnan. You were a true friend (except for that one time you deleted my 13 page paper).

P.S. - Here's another pregnant shot for Mom. Last night, I thought baby boy might just pop out of my belly button. Graham says that asking him to leave space for me in there is just setting myself up for failure. I think he's right.