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I am a little over a month into life with a new computer. I got it before we took the Wolvog to college so he could set it up for me. He took my old laptop, placed it next to my new one, and set up some fancy tool that transferred all of the old laptop’s bookmarks, documents, and settings to the new machine. After an hour or two, he handed me my new computer, and it was exactly the same as the old machine except that the keyboard worked and the battery held a charge.

I hate change, so while this tool may be commonplace for most people, it was the most miraculous invention I’ve ever witnessed. I felt like Paul Simon singing about lasers in the jungle, “staccato signals of constant information.” Except it was happening in my living room.

These really are the days of miracle and wonder.

As part of my slow slip into elderly lady land, I dragged Josh to the yarn store to purchase supplies for a blanket-like wrap. It had been a long time since I had entered a yarn store, and I realized I had no clue what I needed or how much.

I showed the woman working there a picture of the blanket, and she commented that it was knitted, not crocheted. There was no reason it couldn’t be crocheted — it was just a rectangle. She argued it would be so much nicer knitted, and I should take a knitting class at the store instead of purchasing the yarn that day. Instead of making the sale, she nudged me out of the store with a list of upcoming classes, cheerfully telling me that she would see me soon.

Ten minutes after we got home, I realized I didn’t want to learn something new. I didn’t want to feel frustrated. I just wanted to mindlessly create row after row, filling up space until I had a tri-coloured blanket to use as a wrap this winter. We took my sister’s advice to head to Joann’s the next day, and we walked out of the store with nine skeins of silky cotton/bamboo yarn in shades of blue and grey.

It’s slow-going because the piece is so large, but I do about a row per day while I talk to the twins on the phone or watch television. It’s nice to have a project again.

Children tend to “read up,” which means that an 8-year-old wants to read about 12-year-olds, 12-year-olds want to read Seventeen magazine, and teens tend to focus on books set at colleges. The chain continues with younger people generally watching, reading, or listening to people slightly older than they are at the moment. Twenty-somethings watched ThirtySomething.

It could be that we do it as a form of preparation. You don’t need to learn how your age group operates. You’re curious about what is coming next. But it’s a general rule that we find people slightly older or farther down a road more interesting than people living in our same space.

What happens when you’re in the oldest or longest group? How do you read, watch, listen “up” when there isn’t a next tier?

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve slowly aged out of Facebook groups. The information is no longer applicable — we’ve lived there and done that — but there isn’t a next step to jump to, a next group to join, a next stage to read about. The actors on the television are younger than I am. The characters in the books are often younger, too.

There was an enormous dump of good television at the end of summer — many more shows than we could watch before the twins left. It came with the understanding that there would likely be a dearth of new television due to the writer’s strike. We were about to see what was finished before the strike began.

But I feel strange watching television without the ChickieNob. She doesn’t have the time to watch it from school, and it’s an activity I associate with her. I didn’t watch television, she got me into television, and then she took her television-watching self and moved far away.

I can watch the low stuff on her list, holding on to the other shows for breaks. But it is weird to sit on the bed without her. To turn my head and not see her beside me, ready with a snarky comment or to tell me where we’ve seen an actor before.

The lid on the kitchen rubbish bin broke off, necessitating an evening trip to the store to purchase a new bin. But when we got there, they didn’t have a white bin. They only had our bin in grey. These are the kinds of things that immobilize us. We walked around our garbage collection options — there were like six choices — for a half hour, looping back always to whether we could become grey rubbish bin people. (Spoiler alert: the answer is no.)

Our white bin was sold out online, too, but we ordered one for delivery later in October. And then we went home where I looked at the bin for about two minutes, fixed it, and we canceled the order.

When we talk to the twins at night, they tell us funny stories about people on campus, or weird things that happened in class, or things they learned in a lesson. They have so many stories to tell us.

And all I had to contribute to the conversation was our rubbish bin saga. I watched the Wolvog’s eyes glaze over, and he told me never to tell anyone else this story. So I promptly told his sister, who wondered why we were so obsessed with discussing the kitchen bin.

What she doesn’t know is that I saved her from the story about how Josh guessed that we needed more toilet paper upstairs and brought up some rolls, and he walked into the bathroom right as I was calling out to him, “We need more…” Just kidding. I’ve saved that story for this upcoming week to spread out all of my news.