Ask and ye shall receive
When I said, in my last entry, that I wanted a laptop -- possibly more than I wanted happiness in life -- I thought it was well understood that I was just dreaming out loud of the realistically unattainable; like when one says "I want world peace," or "I want cheese." Apparently not though, because sometime immediately after posting that entry I ended up with a laptop. There's this list that each department maintains. Nominally it's a list of everyone who wants a laptop, but basically that translates to a list of everyone in the department who doesn't already have a laptop. So obviously I was on the list, everyone is on the list, but somehow the list got shorter ahead of me. Shorter down to zero. So now I have this laptop, all sexy and black, with that Thinkpad Surface on the back of the LCD. I dunno what it is, I think it's silk, only more Neal Stephenson-ish. Nano-silk, or maybe black ninja death silk. I like to touch it and feel it quiver beneath my caress. It knows me, and we share a special love - a love that dare not speak its name. Also I put a linux partition on it. A sexy linux partition. For ninjas.
I recently got this virus of death, I dunno if any of you have encountered it, but it's this virus that kills you, so you know, watch for it. I woke up with a sore throat one morning, which is generally a portent that I am about to not enjoy swallowing for a while, and like a good little antibiotic seeker, I went to the after hours clinic that night seeking antibiotics. The man in the white coat swabbed my throat, and asked me questions and cut me off before I could finish answering them. Then he said that he had been seeing this all night, that it was almost certainly viral, and the sort of undercurrent to it all was that I was going to die. So the next day I went into work, which was smart for two reasons: one, I felt awful and got significantly closer to dying; and two, I think I managed to infect (I just typed infest, which is just as apt a word) several other people. I don't know, they all actually seemed to be already sick, so maybe it wasn't my fault, but all things considered it was not my best Tuesday. Wednesday I decided to stay home again, but with my new laptop I am able to VPN in from home so I attempted to make the best of my downtime and still get something done. Instead, around 11 I decided I was feeling feverish and went to take my temp in the bathroom. The temp was a pretty mild fever, 99.8 I think, but the fun part was afterwards, when I went to put the thermometer back in the medicine cabinet and then woke up on the floor with a very sore head. So passing out, I've decided, sucks large. No warning, no dizzy feeling, no opportunity to say something witty like "Ungh," just me standing and then me mostly dead on the floor. Pretty fun. We had to buy a new scale because my head broke the old one. But I'm feeling much better now.
I know it's not much in the way of a life update, but really, this month and next are real holding patterns for me. Come december it's christmas, and it's mortgage pre-approval time, and it's house shopping time, and yeehaw, but right now is holding pattern. I have to go stroke the laptop now.