Hooray! The new laptop (Jane) arrived yesterday afternoon. Showing amazing, practically inhuman levels of restraint, I waited till Patrick got home before I unpacked it (although I did sneak a peek inside the box, which was enough to discover and be astonished & impressed by the fact that it came with a remote control - why??? I don't care! it's cool!). This morning I installed MS Word, which is of course the most important program on the whole computer (although, embarrassing as this is to admit, I do spend an awful lot longer using Safari every day...), as well as all the backup CDs I managed to copy from the last laptop before it died. Now I've just begun transferring over all the hundreds of CDs from our music library...but I am very, very happy. At last, my arm is whole again...

It's very shiny. Almost scarily shiny! And it's widescreen, which is a very disconcerting change. My eyes aren't used to it. I keep checking the corners of the screen because they feel like they're sticking out in a suspicious manner. And my fingers aren't quite used to the new, wider keyboard yet. But I'm having an awful lot of fun learning all the changes.

There was one change that was really freaky, though. During the Apple set-up process, you're always asked to select a picture to go with your account on the machine. They've always offered a selection of little clip-art icons for your perusal. This time (built-in iSight camera ahoy!) as I was sitting, yawning, late last night, finishing up the set-up before going to bed, all of a sudden a huge photo flashed up on the screen: a very, very tired, hair-unbrushed, yawning-unattractively picture of me! And the message said: "Do you wish to use this picture to represent your account?"

God no! Are you insane? I clicked "NO!" with the force of sheer terror. Luckily I found a nice clip-art butterfly to do the job instead.

It was a scary moment, though. Gotta watch out for those sneaky, built-in cameras. You never know when they might be watching you...