Ha!

I am logged on from my first laptop, the Lenovo 3000 N100, which is literally ten years old, or within a month or two of it. For whatever reason, I left this computer sitting on the floor of J's mint-green "office" bedroom, using power, for a couple of years, until today. My new Lenovo has become so unreliable that I barely trust it (it crashes several times a day), and on a whim I decided to see what this one could do, five or six years since I last really used it.

It's running XP, good old XP. I easily connected to the wireless network and got Firefox to update; Word Perfect works fine as well. What a lark! I missed this keyboard; it felt right (but I see that the 'y' key is a bit sketchy). On the other hand, it does take more than five minutes to start this thing up, and I'm pretty sure the (replacement) battery only lasts a few minutes on its own.

In reading news: I absolutely loved Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and now I've started Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne. J. is on the eighth Temeraire book.

Huh!

Using a computer with different settings than usual can reveal odd features. I had no idea that the Yahoo search engine now has color-matching in the Images section. I was looking at pictures of Salamanca (Spain), and it offered me 11 color options! So I'm now looking at the greenest pictures of Salamanca. They're a very different set from the purplest pictures of Salamanca.

(Also it's bizarre not to have the 'delete' key in the corner. I keep hitting the 'pause' key instead.)

Check out pink Eugene: flowers, sunsets, football helmets, and mug shots. Orange Eugene is a different story - gorgeous fall colors, and then the tragic conflagration that destroyed our historic baseball stadium.