Well, I am now the possessor of one-half of a brand new Macbook computer. I am sick and tired of the slowness and all the virus garbage and complexity of Microsoft, so my son Matt and I went down to Best Buy yesterday and picked out a Mac. We got a pretty good deal on it because it had supposedly been a floor model, but it was still in the original case with all the original wrappings. Sweet! as Matt would say.

Now it's starting to look like a computer warehouse around here. We literally have more computers than people living in the house now. I got my first computer about 17 years ago. I was unemployed during the last recession and my Dad bought it for me to help me put together my resume's and things. I don't think the Internet was in wide use at the time, or at least we couldn't figure out how to use it, so at first I mostly used it for Word Processing and to practice my spreadsheets and DOS on (remember DOS?). I even had a small business for a while, going around to people's houses and teaching them how to use their computers.

I got a lot of use out of that first computer. Around the time Blake was born, I decided we needed some extra $$$ so I started a minor career as an Ebay seller. Over the period of about 5 years, I did several thousand auctions and sold everything I could think of. Junk out of my Mom's garage, stuff left over from our garage sales, kid's clothes I found on sale, teacher workbooks, craft supplies, you name it. That brought me enough money to purchase my first laptop, which I still use today. Along the way, we finally outgrew that first desktop computer and bought a new Dell Dimension which we're still using for the kids.

A couple of Christmases ago, Tony decided that he needed a laptop of his own and he got in on one of the post-Thanksgiving sales, the kind where you have to stand in line at 4:00 in the morning. He managed to get a brand new Compaq laptop for about $400 so he wouldn't have to fight the kids to use the Dell. Also, for the last 10 years or so, I've worked from home off and on, so I have a work-related laptop that I bring home pretty much every day. I'm very limited in how I can use it because of increasingly strict security restrictions, but I do use it for fun stuff once in a while, but mostly it's just for my work.

Naturally to run all this hardware all over the house, we had to get a four port wireless router. It is rather nice to be able to use all the computers at once, the kids downstairs and us upstairs. Blake does his homework or plays computer games, Matt is all about music - he's always downloading songs and looking for guitar tabs. Tony does mostly E-mail and computer games, and me, well I do it all. E-mail, blog sites, spreadsheets, stuff like newsletters and stuff for my Stampin' Up! business, and of course managing my blog and my website.

I guess I'm actually quite the computer nerd here. I spend probably 40 hours a week on the computer at work, managing about $3M a month in phone bills for my company and then I come home and mess around on my computers here. It's a wonder ever manage to get outside and spend time with the 3-dimensional people!