The Wandering Bean: Out With the Old, In With the New

I have a weird personality quirk. Okay, I have many weird personality quirks, but I'm just focusing on one today. Despite the fact that my mom regularly tells me that I have the emotional depth of a robot (and not even like a fun robot like Rosie from The Jetson, she means one of those creepy ones from I, Robot), I get abnormally attached to stuff.

Two years ago when I had to get a new car, I got emotional over turning in my beloved red car that I had had for 10 years. I kept thinking, "I hope it knows it was a good car. I hope someone else gets to drive it for a few more years" even though I know in my normally highly rational head that it is just a metal object.

Last week, my six year old laptop started doing a really charming death rattle. It was taking up to 45 minutes to turn it on, and get properly running. As someone who is diving head first into the dissertation stage of grad school relatively soon, this was not a game I was willing to play. I have already had a computer crash once, I was not willing to go through that again.

So I now have a new Macbook Pro. It is fast. It is shiny. It has 750 gigs of space for me to fill up with dissertation-y goodness, and yet, I still feel sad looking at my old laptop. That thing has been all over the world with me-from Australia to Helsinki. It sailed on a ship with me for 3 months, and it did not judge me when I was seasick for a week straight. I'm happy to say that my old computer is getting a second life. My cousin is in high school, and would like a Mac, so I'm going to wipe the hard drive, spruce it up, and send it on its way to NJ. I'm really happy about that.

This also is going to serve as motivation to finally getting a home office set up. I'm turning my second bedroom into a guest room/home office. Of course, like any good book nerd, I have fantasies of what my home office/library will look like one day: