Y'know, I just now realized that I said nary a word about Christmas last week! So... hope you had a very merry Christmas, and that your new year will be blessed above all! (The reason I missed it? Probably because, at this wonderful family time of year, the last thing I think about is posting on my blog... *grin*) I shall post a complete list of my Christmas gifts soon... after the first of January, at the least. Probably not till the third or fourth. I like my new laptop. I can play music on it. :-) I also am enjoying the phone memory card that my brother gave me for Christmas... now my phone can play music, too, and I'll never buy an mp3 player!

It's pretty! It was on sale! And it has... --2 gig RAM --120 gig hard drive (theoretically... but it's partitioned, into portions slightly bigger than 50 gig, so the formatting took some and Vista takes more) --a webcam --a media card reader --and wireless! S'wonderful! Quite an improvement over my previous laptop ( though that one was free ). I actually have multiple USB ports here... and enough ram to surf the 'Net at a reasonable speed. Lovely. :-)

So my brother has been trying his best to install a version of Linux onto an old Mac computer we recently acquired. It's not as easy as it sounds.... because it's PPC, whatever that means. I'm only aware of all the troubles he's having because I'm acting as a mediator of sorts between my brother and one of my friends who happens also to be somewhat of a computer geek (and has actually tackled this problem before, albeit minimally). I've also been treading my way through War and Peace . Got into the 200s today... (That would be pages, meaning I got past the 200th page sometime this afternoon.) So far it's not half bad. I think I like Tolstoy's writing style very much; although the sentences occasionally get very long, it seems as if the way he thinks is similar to how I think, if only peripherally. I love the way he describes the expressions on the faces of the characters. I did make it through the chapters about the first big battle (the one in whi...

I love this. My brother found me a program that would make my laptop chime every quarter-hour, half-hour and hour! Just like Big Ben, too! (The Westminister clock tower, remember?) I love it!!!

I went to the dentist yesterday (in between spurts at the church blood drive where I was volunteering). First time in one and a half years. I need to floss more. Got a gigabyte thumb drive on sale yesterday too (on my way home from picking up the van from the shop, in between spurts at the blood drive). Works great. Now maybe I'll have more MBs available on my computer of five gigs... well, only about three or two gigs when you consider that it had Windows 2000 on it, then I installed Windows XP. That all takes up quite a bit of hard disk space. I'll use it mostly to store photos from my digital camera. And to transfer files whenever I need to - since I have no CD-RW drive, and may not have one till I get a new laptop in one or two years (I haven't decided yet). What is the feasibility of living without a CD-RW drive for two years at college? Consider the digital camera factor as well as the thumb-drive addition. Oh - is it "disk" or "disc" when d...

OK, we went up to my grandma's to pick up my graduation pictures from my uncle. While we were there, this same uncle gave me an Internet card for my laptop! And it works! Then another uncle (the bachelor one) gave me a niiiice black leather laptop bag to put all my stuff in. It even has a unique smell, since he smokes pipes in his living room where the bag was stored for awhile. Not a bad smell, actually; nothing at all like cigarettes' smell. Plus that uncle also gave me a hat from my Dad's favorite college sports team. A nice wheat-colored, woven something-or-other hat (I'd say straw but it's not), with a black band around the crown that has the logo on it. I really like it, but I may have to surrender it to Dad because it fits him pretty well too. ...and of course, amid all the excitement, I left the envelope of pictures on my grandmother's kitchen table. I should be getting them in the mail either tomorrow or Saturday.

...from my new (to me) laptop. No kidding. This guy at church asked my brother to fix his TV - a simple matter really - and when we dropped it back at his house, he came out with this little black box and said he had an extra one lying around so I might as well have it! Apparently his son used to type his college papers on it. He also gave us some speakers, but that wasn't a surprise. As I said two days ago, when I put it in the car to go home: YIPPPPPPEEEEEEE!!!! So now I've installed XP (or rather, my brother installed it and I bothered him a bit while he did), installed the stuff that came with my camera, and borrowed an internet thingy temporarily. (Only sporadically, and only till I get my own internet card thing.) This keyboard thing is a little difficult to get used to - I'm forever looking for the "end" key in the wrong spot - and the mousepad is a whole new ball game. I keep messing up with it, but I am getting better, I promise. :-) This is so muc...