I'm typing up this message in my living room, and typing up pages from the Texas novel on my new laptop and listening to some super storm movie on the SciFi channel. It's kind of cool to be transcribing my handwritten chapters while listening to the tv at the same time. It's so relaxing to sit in my chair and type into my laptop and half listen to a movie on tv. This is so much better than sitting at my desk.

I think I might go to the coffee shop later. I want to finish typing up all my handwritten pages before I start writing again. The next movie is about earthquake aftershocks in New York. I hate earthquake aftershocks. For two years after the big earthquake here, everytime the ground shook I thought it was an earthquake aftershock. I remember being at a friend's tennis court in New York (how rich are you when you have a tennis court as part of your backyard) and feeling the ground shake and thinking it was an aftershock. When I mentioned it to my friend, she laughed and said it was probably just a heavy truck driving by.

I was walking through Golden Gate Park and walking along Stow Lake, when I saw all these people with telescopes and cameras watching these two birds in the tree. There was a woman with a table selling cards, and when I stopped to check it out I found out that we were all watching a blue heron couple mating in the trees.

I heard someone say, "I think she was on top of him." The woman at the table explained that the blue heron couple had produced 71 babies and have been mating in Golden Gate Park for years. It was so cool to watch that I bought a card of the blue heron couple as a souveneir.

It was so beautiful and sunny day in the park, even though it was a little chilly at 60 degreees. I love living next to Golden Gate Park. It's like having this amazing nature preserve as my backyard.

What I will probably end up doing is disabling my wireless network until I want to surf the net from my laptop. Then I'll just reconnect it. It's kind of a pain, but I don't plan to surf the net from laptop very often. At least I hope I don't end up doing that. Now if I can just figure out how to connect my printers wirelessly I'll be happy.

I did end up buying a memory stick, and plan to transport files back and forth between my laptop and my pc that way. I'll have to see how tht works.

So I'm posting from my new laptop, which I just connected wirelessly to my other computer. I wasn't going to do that, but I didn't want to spend another $50 for a phoneline adapter. My wireless network is secure and I don't think anyone else can get in it. I can see other people's wireless networks, and some people do leave them open.

I'll probably end up buying a phoneline adapter because I'm not all that comfortable with connecting wirelessly to my other pc, but at least I did it. YEAH ME!

So I just contacted Dell and I can return my system and reorder a new system with my company discount, but I have to pay to ship the laptop back. And with all the shipping costs involved, I'll end up saving only $40 and I don't know about you, but saving $40 is so not worth the hassle of shipping the system back and reordering and waiting again.

Unless Dell gives even a bigger discount in the next 21 days, then I'll probably end up keeping the laptop I bought.