Anything else you'd like to tell me, Universe?

Most of my computer-time is spent on my Dell Inspiron laptop. Before I got that at the end of my first year of graduate school, I primarily used our desktop, which has always been located in whatever space we were using for the "office."

In our first apartment in Toronto, we had a tiny room just outside the living room. It was very handy since I could sit there and check on Scooter simply by pushing my chair back. Or if he was upstairs in his room (with gates on his door, the top of the stairs and the bottom of the stairs), I could hear when he got up since the office was right at the bottom of the stairs.

In our current apartment, the office is right next to the front door. And we have a very long hallway to the rest of the apartment. While one can hear a decent amount of the noise from the rest of the apartment, it is not very distinct. So when I worked here regularly, I would frequently have to leave the office to go see what Trillian or Scooter was trying to tell me. Whenever the clothes washer is running, there's a chance I won't have heard them at all.

The laptop has allowed me to do most of my work from the living room couch. The flipside is that it's also very easy for me to hop online and waste valuable work time reading "just one more blog" or playing "just one more game." I'll be good about avoiding too much extracurricular online activity for a while, limiting my email and blog reading to a couple times a day, but then the time I spend on those things starts to creep up.

In the past month or so, I've had electrical tape around part of my power cord. Due to the position of the power supply port--it's on the opposite side of the computer from the electrical outlet--and the fact that (apparently) Dell power cords tend to be weak at a particular junction, I have been in danger of ripping my cord.

In the past day or two, I realized that some wires must have finally come apart under the electrical tape, as my computer would suddenly switch to battery power even when everything was ostensibly plugged in.

So I have ordered a new power supply. On a holiday weekend, of course. Which will add multiple days to the time of delivery.

All of this is the long way of saying: I have less computer access than usual. I think maybe the universe is trying to remind me that I need to be reading for my comps.

Back to the books.