I couldn’t do it.

I mean, look at this:

I’m used to working with my HUGE iMac in the back there, not Wonder Woman’s tiny MacBook in the front there.

And sitting at my desk with the one in front of the other, it was painfully obvious that the “I’ll just use the MacBook” approach wasn’t going to cut it.

It also was painfully obvious that waiting for my employer to suddenly bestow upon me a new MacBook could take a loooooooong time … especially when you’re me, and you have the patience of a 5-year-old, in which case anything longer than RIGHT NOW is way, way too long.

But I can nary afford to buy chewing gum, let alone a new Mac … so here’s what I did.

I done went and gots myself this bad boy right here:

Where my geeks at, y’all? Can I get a “WOOT! WOOT!”?

That’s a 1TB (as in “terabyte” … as in “HOT DAMN! LOOK AT ALL O’ THIS HERE HARD DRIVE SPACE!”) external hard drive, which cost me about $160. (And who knew external hard drives had become so affordable? Not me.) Part of it now serves as my iMac’s primary hard drive, the original, internal version of which has, as previously noted, decided to take early retirement.

And now that I have a fully functional iMac with a fully functional (albeit external instead of internal) hard drive, I have realized something.

Ever hear the anecdote about how, if you put a frog in a pan of cold water, and then slowly heat the water, the frog won’t realize that the temperature is rising, and will essentially allow itself to be boiled to death?

Well, call me Kermit, because it turns out that I have been a frog, and my iMac has been a pot of water … and when I first got my iMac two years, goodness me, the water was crisp, and the performance was, too. And then, at some point, the water began to heat up … until, finally, several weeks ago, I discovered I was being boiled to death.

I won’t bore you with the details, but after running some tests comparing my new, fully functional hard drive to my old, super shitty hard drive, I’ve discovered that it was taking me about 350 million times longer than it should have to accomplish various tasks on my iMac. (OK, more like eight times longer … but the difference between those two figures in practical terms, I assure you, is minimal.)

The only downside to the new arrangement is that it requires me to reinstall all of the applications I use for things like writing and blogging and working with photos and building websites, and to also copy over to the new drive all of my personal files, and reconfigure everything just so … a process I’ve been in the midst of for the past couple days now.

BUT!

The good news is that my iMac totally kicks humongous portions of ass once again (like, seriously … I can’t believe how awesome this computer is again … and, even more than that, I can’t believe how bad it got before I realized there was a problem), and I am now really, truly, honest to GAWD-ly ready to blog my ever-lovin’ ass off, people.

I think.

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