Catching Up

It's been a long and foggy week somehow (for a week with only four working days!) and I'm just now catching up and figuring out where my head is.

First up, the video below is so beautiful it made me cry. It's an animated version of the picture book "Blueberry Girl" by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Charles Vess. I desperately want to own this book if I ever have a daughter, and I shall attempt to give it to any friends that have daughters. It's just lovely.



Next, this is a wonderful, wonderful thing. It's the uniform jacket for the concert band I've just joined. The band is awesome, and they do high-profile events in Perth like the ANZAC Day marches and the Christmas Pageant. I joined last week and got this to take home. Squee! We also get caps :) And lookit the shiny buttons and the City of Perth badges!

Third in my show-and-tell is the ring I bought for myself a few weeks ago:



The fourth item is a bit of news. Last weekend I stripped my laptop and old PC of everything important to me and loaded it all onto Mum's mini-laptop, which I'm now using while attached to my PC monitor and keyboard. The reason for this is that the EdDept laptop needed to go back (and is now gone) and the PC had become hideously slow and noisy, to the point of being unusable. Mum is lending me her mini-laptop until I can get my own replacement laptop, which I'm buying with the $900 "economic stimulus" money that the government is paying out to anyone under a certain income in April.

I mentioned this state of affairs to my friend M, who promptly pulled some partner-of-his-accounting-firm-fu and is getting me a Dell laptop that is much more expensive than one I'd be able to buy retail, through their company Dell account. It'll be here in two or three weeks and then I can just pay them back when the money comes in. And I'll be on their corporate repairs account so they'll get it fixed for me if it has problems. I have no words for how awesome this friend and this arrangement are. And the laptop is going to be PURPLE. *SQUEE*