Can't You Just Get One?

“I must get a hard drive”.  Insisted my little one.  “I’m turning in an old computer and I need to put all this data on a hard drive before they give me a new one. I need it for tomorrow.”  “Can’t you put it up on the cloud somewhere?” Asked the father, who knows just enough to be annoying.  “No.  NO one is putting anything in the cloud.  They all have external hard drives.  Can’t you just get one?” 

We had a drive around somewhere but no one can find it.  I seem to remember it on one drawer and look in their once and twice and three times   It never appears there. Two or three boxes of electronic archeology yield nothing.  So this morning I bike over to the nearby mall and asked the guys at the store that sells Macs what they have by way of hard drives. 

A hundred and fifty dollars or so later, I have something with two TBs of space, which was once huge and is now rather modest I suppose.  The cloud is limitless!  I put the aluminium rectangle into my back backpack beside two oil paintings that were also inside.  I had intended to take the paintings today to the next mall over and get them framed. 

One painting is from  the summer before last.  We’d visited a lovely art gallery in Addis Ababa and though there were many nifty things, I chose something modest that didn’t break the bank . The scene was a saggy blue with a car with boxes piled on its bak, making its way past a line of pedestrians, in line against a tired green building.  It had sat unframed, against the window in our kitchen for the last thirteen months.  It deserved better. 

And, this past summer in Tbilisi outside of the Anchiskhati Basilica, I purchased a Naïve oil painting, no bigger than an iPad, of a sturdy Georgian gent in a big hat confidently clutching a ram's horn wine vessel.  We’d heard so much about these ceremonial drinking horns but I for one never saw one.  This gent too, deserved a frame.

I went through a quick process of choosing the borders at the shop I’ve done this at many times over the years.  It’s a different person there now, but the process is largely the same.  I found something that seemed to match the guy’s belt for the Georgian painting and was talked into a recessed frame for the Ethiopian auto.  And while she got it all together I told her I’d go across the street to the Avocado Tree to get them started on making the burrito I had in mind.  “You write it all down. I'll be back in a minute.”

Monday 8/13/18