Slow Cooking, Slow Computing

On Friday afternoon, the tech guys showed up at the office to change out computers and switch us to Windows 7.  This morning, we discovered that all files hadn't made the migration (or something glitchy happened with server synching over the week-end).  Happily, my old hard drive still exists and the larger My Documents folder also still exists on the old server.  I think that everything has now transitioned, but my old hard drive will be kept a bit longer.

As the tech guys worked, my colleague and I talked about writing by hand and writing by typewriter.  We remembered carbon copies and the ditto machine of my grad school days.  We couldn't use the copy machine, but we could make as many damp, purple-inked dittos as we wanted.  Somewhere in my physical file cabinet at home, I likely still have those copies.

I remember learning to work the ditto machine and thinking, "Ah, one of the tools of revolution is now in my hands."  Little did I know how cheap it was about to become to compute and to print--or to send words and documents and images flying across the globe for almost no cost.  Amazing.

I will agree with my writer friends who extol the joys of writing by hand, of slowing down to consider our words.  Of course, many of my words don't merit that level of introspection, so I wouldn't trade in my computers.

Over the week-end, I returned to a different slow joy.  On Sunday, we stopped by an Italian market and got all sorts of deals on vegetables that were past their prime.  We got pounds of tomatoes for just one dollar.  Sure, we had to cut out a spot here or there.  But that still left plenty of tomato.

But that did leave the larger question of what to do with all these tomatoes which weren't much longer for this world?  I made a tomato sauce, of course.  I chopped them all up, along with a green pepper, various herbs, and a slug of red wine, and let it simmer all afternoon.  It was the perfect way to spend a rainy Sunday.  And a great way to save veggies.

It's not the same as growing them myself, tending and harvesting from my garden.  But it's close.