"Be good to yourself"

New motto -- ha ha -- I just did, anyway - was good to myself. I just got off the phone with Gateway and spec ordered myself a laptop. Technology is passing me by, and I decided to do it while I still have a little insurance money left. I won't bore you with the whole spec sheet, but it's basically a 15.4" monitor with a little over a gig RAM and an 80 gig hard drive, and also a router and a wireless mouse. I'm so excited! It won't be here till about March 7, but that's okay. I have plenty to do to keep me busy in the meantime. (pic is generic. I don't know what mine will look like, but probably quite similar.)

I've wanted a laptop for so long and never could justify buying one. Even now, it's hard other than the simple fact, "I want it." But who knows, maybe once I have it, I'll realize how much I "needed" it in the first place.

This is definitely in lieu of the new camera. After much thought and reading on digital cameras, to buy another one would be wasteful, not giving me much more than I already have, short of buying a DSLR and I don't even want that. My little Z2 serves the purpose. To get a bigger picture from what a 4 megapixel puts out, if you alter the format to a .tiff and increase the size, wa-la, there you go. I tested it, and it doesn't diminish anything -- if you do it from the original. Once you've edited .jpg, then you've lost pixels forever. So, I'm fine with this. I'll get much more use from the laptop - especially considering there's nothing too inspiring to go take pictures of around here anyway! So, I'm happy with my choice. I hope it won't knock me out of getting my kitchen, but finding somebody do to what I wanted was turning into an impossibility anyway. I still plan to build my booth, and with the overall layout I want, it can be done in sections.

After surfing the web most of the day looking for the best deal on a laptop -- looking at BestBuy and Circuit City and Office Depot and -- driving myself silly -- I had narrowed down my choice to two Gateways and was unsure of the difference. So, I called them on the phone to ask, and he explained that they were "packaged" so to speak for the shelves, and that when you go directly to Gateway, they custom build it. So, that's how I wound up doing it this way. The price was a little over my target but not by too much and I was getting the elements I wanted.

Well, believe it or not, in spite of that obsession for the day, I did manage to get most of my last job done. I'm hoping tomorrow we'll swap out and I'll have work for the weekend, but I haven't confirmed with her that her jobs yesterday were a go.

I pretty much left the politics alone today - they were basically rehashing old ground on all the news shows except I got real tickled at Olbermann tonight explaining about how O'Reilly has put a petition on his website wanting MSNBC to get back Phil Donahue to take Olbermann's time slot. Olbermann was hysterical. If you don't know what I'm talking about -- it would take too long to explain. But there's a basic warfare going on between the two. Olbermann has a segment called "Worse Person in the World" where he picks 3 instances of something outrageous or mean or something that people do; and he has "honored" O'Reilly several times with one of his "Worst Person in the World" honors. Since in my opinion Bill O'Reilly is a pompous blow-gut, I'm finding the whole thing pretty funny.

Well, off to finish my job. Working at home definitely has advantages of flexible hours - as long as the jobs aren't what we call a "rush" with some strict time constraint. But it still has to be done, and I'll sleep better if I have it finished.