Hee! I have a new computer!!!

Despite being literally (yes, I mean literally) half-deaf last night, I went out to the Apple store with Tim to look at laptops. I kept having to drag him over to my right side, as he tended to end up on my left, speaking in low tones near my deaf ear in a store that was way too hoppin' for a Tuesday night.

I pulled up Stickies on the 12" iBook, the 12" Powerbook and the 14" iBook and typed a little in each. I'm completely unfamiliar with OSX (Panther!) so it took me awhile to just find any text program, but once I started test-writing on them, it was pretty clear fairly quickly that I would not be happy with a 12" anything. And, since I really couldn't afford a 15" Powerbook (I could, but the interest rate I got on my Apple loan should be illegal) and, since I really did like the extra wrist room (thanks, Greg!) on the iBook, my choice was clear (that and the idea of walking out of there with a new laptop was very appealing -- thanks Jenn!).

It took me several minutes to figure out where to find salespeople (I was confused momentarily by their "genuis bar" which is on-site tech support) and then I kept getting "it'll be a few minutes" from various salespeople. Like I said, it was busy.

After some shuffling of papers and discussion of payment methods, I put the whole thing on my Apple Credit Line account (I'm paying off 70% of it today to avoid the interest -- Tim's buying my old machine so he'll have a laptop, and I had some money to put towards it, but I needed the Apple loan to cover the rest -- they were very confused by us wanting to pay by three different methods there for awhile). I even managed to hook the manager, so instead of making me wait two days for them to install my Airport Extreme Card he "showed me how" by doing it for me right in front of me. Yay!

Once home, I quickly discovered the joys of unprotected wireless connections! I have very nice, sweet, neighbors. I hope they don't mind I might use their wireless connection every so often :-)

So, I have most everything transfered over to the new machine and now must really sit down and RTFM on OSX so I don't feel quite so hopeless while using my new machine. It's probably mostly a matter of getting used to where the finder is, but I'm still unsure how it all is supposed to work. Also, I really want the icons to stop bouncing when I try to open applications... it seems to waste time needlessly, you know?

But, otherwise, it's a really neat, fast machine! I have Safari! I have the latest version of Quicken and have already imported my old data (though now I need to figure out how to use this version -- my old one was at least 6 years old and completely unlike this new one); this is good because my old version became corrupted somehow on Sunday.

Yay! New Apple! Yay!

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Because being deaf in one ear for three days is rather alarming, I went to the doctor this morning. My suspicions were right -- ear infection! I'm on antibiotics, joy. I also have such a bad sinus infection that he'd have given me antibiotics anyway, even without the deafness, so I suppose it's good I went in. Still, I'm pretty damn tired of being so sick all the time. Even my doctor was shaking his head, looking at my medical records for the past couple of months, saying, "You poor thing."

Sigh.

The antibiotics should start working in a few days and I might be able to hit the gym again by next week... I hope! At least this cold takes away my appetite, so I'm not too worried about gaining a lot of weight right now.

That's it for now!