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Adventures in Lake Wobegon

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Anoka, Minnesota. Creative Commons license, Tim Kiser.

If you are (or were) a fan of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, you’re familiar with the town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.

Lake Wobegon is (we are reliably informed) a cover identity for Anoka, Minnesota. Anoka is a northern suburb of Minneapolis today, but it was a quiet rural community when Keillor was growing up. (It also boasts of being the Halloween Capitol of the US, for some reason I haven’t discovered).

Anyway, you may recall Keillor talking about the Sons of Knut lodge in Lake Wobegon. The Sons of Knut are obviously based on the Sons of Norway. And there is indeed a Sons of Norway lodge in Anoka. It’s called, not the Sons of Knut, but “Vennekretsen,” which is Norwegian for “circle of friends.”

I told you all this to sidle around to the fact that I spoke to Vennekretsen Lodge last night. It went great. The people were very kind and hospitable, and receptive to my presentation. They also bought a fair number of books. And they served a great big cake, because it was the 100th birthday of one of the lodge members. Haven’t seen a cake like that in a long time.

Anyway, what I mainly wanted to write about tonight was the adventure of preparing for that event. Because it wasn’t any walk in the park (except in the sense that parks nowadays tend to be places where you’ll get mugged).

When I do a presentation, I generally prepare by rehearsing several times, and also by pulling out things I think I’ll need to take along, and piling them somewhere so I won’t forget them on the date.

What I didn’t expect was that I’d trip on a laptop cord and yank the thing down onto the floor on Sunday. The screen was ruined. I’ve always found it difficult to use a computer without a working screen.

So – although it’s my general policy not to do commercial transactions on a Sunday, but this was an emergency – I ran to Micro Center, the best computer store in these parts, and quickly found several inexpensive laptops there. I had to wait around a while to get sales help, because Sunday’s a big shopping day for people less spiritually-minded than myself. When I finally got hold of a salesman, he actually recommended the least expensive machine on the shelf. “Does everything the others do, and it’s cheaper!” he said. Sounded great to me.

What I hadn’t noticed – and it would have meant nothing to me if it had, because I’m ignorant – was that what I was buying was a Chromebook. I didn’t know (then) that Chromebooks are the Trabants of the computer world, minimalist machines that only do a few things. Perfectly fine for their target market, but I’m not that market.

I even asked the salesman if it would run Microsoft 365, and he said yes. This is technically true, but it will only run it through the Chrome browser. IT IS USELESS FOR TAKING AWAY FROM HOME AND GIVING A POWERPOINT PRESENTATION.

I even mentioned to him that I needed a laptop for a PowerPoint presentation. At that point he was (understandably) eager to get rid of me, and he said nothing. I hold him morally culpable for this.

Anyway, I took the thing home and tried to get it set up, growing increasingly frustrated. A couple posts on Facebook got me the information I needed – Chromebook was wrong for me.

On Monday I took the thing back to Micro Center, returned it, and got an HP, which turned out to be pretty much identical to the one I broke.

But I got it set up at last. And I was able to head out on schedule for Lake Wobegon in the evening.

One last insult remained, however. When I got to the church where the lodge met, we found that my new machine would not communicate with the digital projector on site. I ended up having to borrow somebody else’s laptop and run the presentation from a file on a thumb drive (I always bring a backup copy on a thumb drive, because experience has taught me that something always goes wrong). The upshot was that this laptop, which I’d gone to such pains to acquire and prepare, was redundant, and my beautiful, carefully selected title fonts, not loaded on the borrowed machine, did not appear.

Now I’m worrying about projector compatibility in the future.

So it goes in our little town.

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Annals of arctic shopping

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Fridtjof Nansen and crew members download Windows 1 from the Cloud, 1894.

A notable day this was. Finally got something done I’d been wanting to do all week. It cost me money, but if ‘twere done, then ‘twere best ‘twere done quickly, as the bald guy said.

I decided I needed a new laptop on Monday. The keys on the old one were stuttering, doubling random letters, which means your work load rises about 50% when you subsist by the keyboard as I do. But I got sick, as I’ve mentioned, and languished at home, doomed to work (work still came in) on my desktop computer, which really isn’t that bad. But I hate messing up my procedures, you know? It’s one of the perquisites of old age, being stuck in your ways.

Today I felt better, and decided this would be it. It was one of the coldest days of the year (the year being six days old), but I figured that would keep the other shoppers at home (I was mistaken, of course. This is Minnesota, where people jump in icy lakes for fun). My reading of Fridtjof Nansen seemed fitting, because just getting ready to leave the house on a day like this is a little like outfitting an Arctic expedition. (OK, just a little, but sometimes our temperatures are comparable to temps Nansen saw in the pack ice. In summer.)

The Norwegians have a saying – “Det finnes ingen dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær” (“There is no bad weather, just bad clothing”). This is one of the reasons I expected to find non-Scandinavian DNA when I joined an ancestry site. The fact that I found almost none indicates I must be a mutation – my father did visit Hiroshima while in the army in 1946, after all.

But at last I reached my favored computer store, eventually attracting a salesman’s attention. My plan was to spend a certain amount on a refurbished one, which has been my custom for a while. The salesman persuaded me I could get a new one for the same money that would be much more powerful and have a much longer life expectancy. It meant buying a brand I’d planned to avoid, but I saw reason at last. (Update: I’m working on it now, and I’m actually quite pleased. The keyboard action is good, and I haven’t had trouble with any apps [yet]). I notice, looking around, that I actually have a fairly tall stack of crashed laptops sitting around the house, so maybe the refurb strategy wasn’t as shrewd as I thought.

It did come with Windows 11. No doubt I’ll live to regret that, but what’s done is done, as the bald guy also said.

At least I didn’t have to retype half my words on this post.