Ebay can be dangerous for shoppers. There are so many choices, so many things you can buy, and then I can't help but think that if I wait long enough I might be able to get my item for cheaper than my budget. But then when you finally bid on something, you get into bidding wars with people up until the very last second and all of the sudden the price is way more than what you were willing to pay, and you're grateful that someone has outbid you. At least, that's been my experience.

I'm might try and blog from home by sending a post via email. I forgot I set up my account to do that while I was in LA. The formatting will probably be messed up, but I can fix it the next day.

I called CompUSA and a technician is "supposed" to look at my pc tonight. I'm not holding my breath that I'll get my PC until Friday or worse Monday. A little voice in my head keeps telling I'll get my PC back by Wednesay, but that little voice has been wronig before.

I'm definitely buying a laptop, if my PC is fixed. I found one I liked, and I can get it for a decent price. Even if my PC is fixed, it's an old PC and if it breaks again, then at least I'll have the laptop so I can work until I buy a new PC.

My laptop choice is an IBM Thinkpad 600X, with a 12 gig hard drive and a 500 chip brain. The laptop is off lease, was refurbished and is on warranty until July 2003, which is nice in case it breaks. I'll synchronize my email on the laptop and the PC. All my important files will go on a CD and be erased off my PC, and all current files will be synchronized to be on the laptop and PC. I think I'll also keep a daily copy of my current files on either a floppy disk or a cd, but I can't decide which media to use. I'll have to resarch how to deal with Palm stuff, but I'm sure business travellers have been able to solve this problem.

This double system will force me to do some major housecleaning on my email, since I know I still have emails from 1997. I'm an email packrat. I also have receipts of everything I've bought online saved as well, which I probably don't need anymore. I'm bad huh?

Busy weekend. On Saturday I went to the museum to see the Egypt exhibit, and I guess I should have known, but the hordes were there as well. People just love Egyptian exhibits. There were so many parents with children there, which was very cool, but the little ones were screaming and crying and throwing tantrums and fits, which is kind of hard to take at 9:30 in the morning.

Perhaps if I hadn't already been to the British Museum and seen their Egyptain room I wouldn't have been disappointed, but this exhibit was small as is the case with most travelling exhibits. But for people who have never been to the British Museum, the exhibit must have seemed fantastic. The exhibit had all the "greatest hits" of the British Museum's egyptian collection including the famous Ani Book of the Dead scroll and a giant egyptian statue head that had never left the British Museum before. Still, I did enjoyed the exhibit immensely only because you have to marvel that these artifacts are so incredibly ancient.

Then I went to see Merci Pour le Chocolat and Rivers and Tides, the documentary on Andy Goldsworthy. More on those movies later. Then I went to see the San Francisco Symphony. A friend who works for them called me on Friday and said she had tickets and would I like to go. Of course I said yes, and we heard Mozart's Piano Concerto # 23. Ivan Moravec played the piano and Jiri Belohlavek of the Prague orchestra was conducting. She had great tickets too and we were in the orchestra, where the seats normal cost $70.

I was non stop from 9 am and I didn't get home till 11 pm. By Sunday I was exhausted. I went to church, came home and watched the 49ers/Raiders game and would have gone to library to get on a computer and blog, but the game went into overtime and by the time it was over, the library was closed.

I'm a little behind in my novel at 4,245 words, instead of the 5,001 word target I needed to be by end of Sunday. Pocket Word doesn't have a word count feature, so my word count is just an estimate based on the number of words per average line and the actual number of lines. Such a pain. I'm calling the computer place today to find out what what the status is my computer. I really miss it, and although I'm grateful to have the baby laptop to write, it's a not ully functioning word processing program. This whole computer failure problem has been such an eye opener on how dependent I am on my computer, and how I have to make sure I'm never in this situation ever, ever again.

After a stressed out no writing break, I'm going back to the too busy to do anything else but writing schedule tonight. I need to write 1,666 words a day for 30 days to reach the 50,000 word mark for the National Novel Writing Month.

Since my computer is dead, if I want to blog I'll have to do go to the library and get online. I'm lucky because the local public library is just three blocks from my place, but Saturday will be a full day.

Besides needing to write my daily 1,666 words, there's an exhibit of egyptian artifacts from the British Museum at the California Legion of Honor that I'm dying to check out. The Egyptian section was my favorite part of the British Museum. Then it's off to the movies to see "Merci Pour le Chocolat", a froggie-french movie which is supposed to be very, very good, and "Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time", a documentary about a Scottish artist and his ephemeral works of art.

But there's always Sunday if I can drag myself away from watching the 49er/Raiders football game on TV.