Manicures and Laptops

Well, I'm a thousand bucks lighter in the wallet but at least now I am calmer. The timing sucks but it will be fun to have a new toy for working on the road.

I chalk this sense of calm up to the time-out I took after shopping.

I rarely get manicures and this was a serious cheer-me-up-now type of situation.

It ate up a good portion of time I could be using for much more important things today, but my sanity needed tending to.

• non-fat latte: $5
  
• french manicure: $30
  
• an hour of down time: priceless

Excuse me, waiter? There's some risotto in my eggs!

And it's deeeeeeeeeelish! :)

Started my morning with a BIG cuppa coffee....I was up late last night fretting over my silly laptop and trying to get some work done since today is my last day to get caught up before my trip. Getting up this morning was not easy. My coffee and I decided to give the laptop one last boot-up this morning to see if maybe an overnight rest helped (ya right!) and we were met with another crazy screen...this time all black with some random characters. Lovely. Oh and it's still stuck in the boot loop. Shopping I will go.

Last night I kept a little serving of risotto and veggies out of the container I put in the freezer. I decided to make some scrambled egg whites and stir in the reheated leftovers. Bulked the eggs right up and tasted great. Mixed in a little salsa and light sour cream because that's what I do. Served with my second much needed cup of coffee.

Now I'm off to do the world's fastest computer shopping trip....hoping to keep the price down and the quality high. haha. Wish me luck!

If it's not one thing....

...it's another! Yes, I'm full of cliches lately. Ugh...so I finally got that whole camera thing sorted out (I think!) and now I'm having a computer MELTDOWN.

My laptop has been on it's last legs for a while, which is why I broke down not too long ago and bought a new desktop computer. But I still need my laptop for travel. I'm traveling this coming week... visiting friends and family, but I'm working the whole time too. So yesterday I decided I'd better clean up the laptop to get it all ready for the trip. Well...apparently it didn't like that idea.

It was processing very slowly, so I decided to just reformat the whole thing and start from scratch. Generally a fine idea, right? Except once it was all loaded up it decided not to recognize a bunch of it's own hardward...like the wireless card (kind of important for an internet based job!!). So...blah blah blah...after much fiddling and frustration I decided just to reinstall again...but now it's saying some file is corrupt and wants me to fix it, but it won't boot properly for me to do a disk check! Actually it's stuck in a loop....starts to boot, then resets, starts to boot, then resets. Argh.

I had planned on replacing it later this year once my traveling and expenses were all out of the way (honestly I was hoping it would last forever!)...now is not a good time!! But I CANNOT leave here on Saturday without a working laptop set up for my work emails, etc....so I guess I'm going shopping tomorrow. Nothing like a last minute, impromptu shopping trip! Blah.

Sidebar: while doing some quick research I thought a netbook would be perfect...but they don't have DVD drives which is no fun! It's nice to be able to watch movies on a laptop when I travel. Too bad.