Goodies

I return from Christmas a great deal fuller than I left and with lots of new toys, including a snazzy new laptop (lenovo z61t because i'm sure you're interested) and a new ipod video. Yeeehaw!

Decided to go IBM this time since my poor Dell has all but died on me and I'm not taking chances on the quality of my laptop this time. It's a shame Dell makes such unreliable laptops (but they have such large resolutions..boohoo); i feel guilty switching to a new compy. My laptop and I went through alot together at Amherst: I nearly wrote my entire thesis on that sucker and I hardly ever turned it off. Godspeed my old friend.

(alas, after coming back to life after its latest crippling crash, it hasn't successfully started again since I came home from NY. Which is a shame, because there're a few things on there I'd like to retrieve)

In pre-Christmas news, I got the final pick at the research building's holiday yankee swap thing. I had no clue what a yankee swap was before last week, but suffice it to say, picking last meant I got to pick whatever gift I wanted. This left me with a lovely bottle of wine. It was kind of intensely awkward though when I picked, since picking meant taking a present from someone else. It's confusing..

The same day as that party was probably one of the more eventful happenings at work since I've been there. There was a bit of a chemical "spill" (more like some idiots were dumping xylene down the drain; way to be!) which meant HazMat shut down the basement floor of our building -- i.e. where half of our lab has their desks/benches and many of our behavioral testing rooms -- for the larger part of the day. Yikes.

Lazy Bones

So I'm kind of bad at this I guess.

And it won't help that my laptop has just about kicked the bucket; it's refused to start up all of yesterday and today it's decided that it'll start up once in a while but then randomly freeze/restart itself. What do people do without the internet?? Is it terrible that I think about going to work to use my computer?

Also this weather is bewildering. As miserable as the ridiculously cold winters can be, mild winters are seriously unsettling. What's the holidays without some snow? We've gotten a measly coating ONCE so far this winter. Even last year's weirdly warm winter had a respectable amount of snowfall by this point. C'mon now.