Look for posting pickin’s around this hogwallow to be rather slim the next cpl-three days. As it happens, an old and dear friend of mine gave me a new-in-the-box MacBook Pro last weekend. Over an illustrious 20 year-plus career as resident setup, troubleshooting, maintenance, and repair guru in the IT shop of a certain media firm we all know and loathe, my boy pack-ratted the surplusage of miscellaneous ‘pooter detritus currently cluttering up his closet (most of it Winbloze junk, his personal preference) for reasons best left undiscussed at this juncture, to include the laptop he graciously threw my way.

So tomorrow I’m scheduled to receive from Amazon a 2.5 foot Thunderbolt cable so’s I can link up said virginal MacBook’s much snappier, fresher, just flat-out better processor and HD with my trusty iMac’s much larger, brighter, more aged eyes-friendly screen. I already networked the dynamic duo via WiFi, which enables simple file-sharing betwixt the siblings but nothing more. To use the iMac as the MacBook’s monitor demands a hard-wired connection; the felicitous conjugation just can’t be accomplished by lesser means.

Twinning the Macs for big-screen purposes also bumps me up from OS Catalina to Big Sur, a promotion that makes me one very happy camper indeed. Thing is, I am entirely unfamiliar with Big Sur, and from what I’ve seen so far there’s a lot to learn about the ways, workings, and weirdnesses of my spiffy new OS before I’ll be even halfway competent at running the thing, let alone good at it.

Understand, now: from my earliest days as a shavetail compooter wrangler, I’ve looked forward to each and every fresh Mac OS release date with a rapturous excitement akin to the way a child waits on tenterhooks through the endless, dreary weeks of December for Christmas morn to finally dawn, going back before the advent of balky, brittle old OS9 (known far and wide amongst greybeard Mac freaks as OS Crash, and rightly so). I enjoyed diving into every operating system upgrade, and jumped on board quick as a snake when each iteration dropped. It pained me no end to learn that my late-2012 iMac maxed out with Catalina, it hurt my heart beyond describing.

I mean, Catalina came out a LONG time ago, man. That sucker’s old, old as dirt.

The Mac operating system’s deserved rep for user-friendliness, reliability, and superb design notwithstanding, it takes time for even as salty an old Apple-loving dog as moi to get fully up to speed on a new OS, no way around it. It’s sorta like a brand-new pair of engineer boots: irrespective of how high-priced they were, there’ll be a lengthy break-in period before you can slip into the things and walk around comfortably. No shortcuts, no workarounds, no give anywhere to be found; it’s a slow, hard slog that nobody but NOBODY gets a pass on.

Seeing as how this project will require transferring a great big ol’ buttload of files, settings, software applications, and other such needful bric-a-brack over to the laptop—a deadly-dull evolution bound to involve unforeseen hassles of every type, description, and magnitude—I expect it to soak up the rest of my weekend at least, if past experience is any guide. Which, in turn, is sure to elbow posting-time aside until it’s done.

Then again, maybe I’ll get lucky this time around and the process will go smooth, fast, and trouble-free. Lord knows my luck is due for a change. We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.