My little sister

I just spent two very exhausting weeks with my little sister, who is 11. Omigod. She lives in Kitsap, near Seattle, literally 10 feet away from the Puget Sound. It's unbelievably beautiful, and I find myself already missing the sound of birds calling across the water in the morning, the small boats sailing by in the afternoon, the way the Sound turns silver in the early evening.

But I spent most of my visit dealing with electronics: setting up a DSL modem for her mother, a poet, pricing and buying a wireless router and some cable, installing an Airport card in the poet's iBook, and looking for a mysteriously missing USB cable for the printer, bought three months ago and never fully plugged in. Not to mention troubleshooting the digital camera and resetting the poet's watch, which had started beeping every hour on the hour.

It was especially urgent to get the house (un)wired so that my little sister could go online. I mean, every hour on the hour, the fricking watch would go beepity-beep and my little sister would run in and say, "is the computer fixed?" And I'd say, "not yet," and she'd say, "Well, can I play a game on your phone?" Or, "Why can't I IM on your phone?"

And I know this is a commonplace observation, but it's really true that for my little sister, a computer (and in some ways, cell phone) is an IM and game machine. Without an Internet connection, she didn't even bother fully installing the printer.