Yesterday, I had the day off and intended to go Christmas shopping and also pretend that I was one of.. those girls that hang out at Northpark drinking Starbucks and you know, affording things. Instead, I spent all day fixing Thom’s new PC which did not work when it was put together the night before.

I hauled it back to Microcenter expecting to return the motherboard and just pay some service department schmuck to do the work, but that didn’t work out. I had to buy a screw driver to dismantle the PC on a bench at Microcenter, but my sales guy gave me more new parts than I likely needed, and I left confident that I had prevented myself from having to make another trip to Microcenter.

I was wrong. I made two more trips that day, and also half a million phone calls to people with more PC building experience than I. It became apparent that I was not careful when I removed the original mother board and I had to go back to Microcenter to beg some guy to retrieve it and let me pull the brackets for the cpu cooler off of it. Eventually, after another trip and a new power supply, the damn thing lived.

I had no time or patience left to accomplish my goals at the mall, so I opened up Pinterest to clean the electronics out of my mind. I was thinking, as I flipped through crafts and hairstyles, that its funny how a few years ago I thought that the insides of a PC were complex magic that I would never be capable of understanding. I devoted my attention to learning just enough to not sound stupid because I thought I’d never master the full formula. But despite this one costing me a day off and some elevated blood pressure, its really so much less difficult than my younger self imagined. Its just tools and pieces that have roles.

About fifteen minutes looking at Pinterest between Guild Wars 2 loading screens and the next thing I knew I was giving myself a blue ombre manicure. Ironically, applying thermal paste is not as hard as painting your nails.