So Much To Say...

Well, despite the fact that it's been nearly a week since my last visit, I can honestly admit that I don't feel bad in not getting back here sooner. So much has been happening -- even more than usual -- that I haven't had time to feel guilty for being an absentee landlord of sorts.

First, everything over the past week or so culminated yesterday with Mother's Day. I managed to get everything together -- goodies, a nice arrangement of flowers for my mama, cards, a charged digicam -- and spread the love. It's always nice spending time with my family, but making sure I got all my ducks in a row this year -- and being able to do so -- was really great. We went to brunch in the mid-afternoon and got to spend time with my grandmother and my uncle, and we had a wonderful time. More importantly, both my mom and my grandmother had a wonderful time, which was/is the point. And since there was no baseball, no football, no basketball and no (Rangers) hockey to distract me, I had as much fun as (hopefully) did they.

Second, Verizon Wireless finally released a new Blackberry right as my plan was due for review and re-up. Since we're all locked into a big family/office plan, the dollars were due to increase since the Blackberry pricing got beefed up over the past month or two, so they basically told me "Get a new phone or you'll be paying another $50 per month." Thanks, Verizon. So I got my paws on the new
Blackberry Curve.

Those who know me know I'm a bit of a technophile (just a tad), so the fact that I waited more than two years -- you read that right -- to upgrade to the new 'Berry says a lot. What says more is that I was and continue to be seriously impressed by this new Curve. Despite the fact that, sure, the Curve was available to AT&T people a year ago; but the thing is, Verizon's wireless network here in NYC is so much better that I wasn't willing to consider having our lines switched over. The short version: since we have four lines, switching over would be a one-time, somewhat monumental task. It'd have to be the kind of thing where we were having serious problems with our phones, and the truth is that the price plan I managed to get us hooked into is fair, we rarely -- if ever -- have phone issues (unless, like with my dad, we forget to charge the phones), and everything works well. So switching just to get better, nicer, newer phones didn't seem to make much sense. Why go for something new and shiny if old reliable still works better than anything that follows it? So, I scored a Curve. And the nice thing is because of the timeframe, they dropped the price for me another $100, so I got the phone for next to nothing, a week before they were officially released, and the switch to the new device was painless.

Ahhhhh.

What wasn't painless, of course, was my ISP decided to crap out for a day or two so my download speed was slower than most modems from the 80's. There was some sort of problem -- line problem, server problem, uplink problem -- that wound up with my connection losing data (official term: packet loss), but a techie showed up late Friday with some cool tools and solved the problem. On top of that, he saw some of the games I had on the shelf by my PC and we talked geek for a few, so he hooked me up with some bitchin' sites vis-a-vis anti-spyware and some great utilities as well. Given I just installed the new Berry and am syncing it nightly with my home PC to keep everything up to date, I was and am pretty jazzed.

Speaking of hom and work PC's, my work PC's starting to take its final walk to PC heaven. Things are slowing to a crawl and the machine creaks when I'm running Word and Excel along with a couple browser windows, which basically is constantly, so it's likely I'm going to be needing a replacement. I've gotten a variety of suggestions, but it's likely I'm going to get a notebook -- either a Lenovo or a high-end Dell -- and since I've had a notebook in the past, plus lots of experience using Kaia's -- I'm curious if having a notebook for work will be doable. I'll end up plugging in a keyboard, a mouse and my monitor at work so odds are it won't be a big deal, and it will definitely run faster than my machine does currently, but I'm not sure if a notebook is the right move, and if it is, I'm sort of overwhelmed by the variety of what's out there. I actually considered building my own machine for the office -- a desktop, natch -- but I'm not sure if having my entire office-based productivity hinging on something I assembled is really the right way to go. True, I'll be familiar with every single thing inside the box, but if anything goes wrong, I'll be crapping myself instead of calling Dell, Lenovo or the local/long-distance PC tech people with whom I consort on- and offline.

Finally...Kaia's hitting NYC in early June to continue her apartment search and to hang out for awhile. I'm guessing her swing here will be a couple weeks, and hopefully that will be enough time for her to find a place and leave some of her stuff behind to bring by cab rather than prep for the movers.

Nothing much else exciting to report; we're still on track to hit Mexico for a friend's wedding in August, July's going to be a hot n' busy month -- specially if Kaia's moving here therein -- and the road is open and the tank is filled with $3/gallon gas.

I'm outtie.

-B-