With Age and Experience Comes Regret

I totally regret installing Windows Vista on my computer. It is slower, it doesn't get along with my virus protection program, and the upgrade on some unidentifiable component on my computer didn't "take" so it asks me for the driver with each and every start up.

But I don't regret this HALF as much as I regret installing a 60-day trial for MS Office 2007 on my computer. Never mind that I can't FIND half the commands (folks, I use WORD and Excel every freakin' day. If anyone should be able to intuitively find, say, 80% of the commands in the new version, I should.) the program is sooooooooooooooooooooooooo slow. JUST SITTING in my computer it does stuff in the background that slows down everything else. And if you thought running MathType with Word was slow before, you haven't seen ANYTHING until you try to run it with MS Office on the hard drive under Windows Vista.

The pauses I experience every time I go to save (which is constantly. I am in the habit of hitting ctrl+s at the end of any paragraph, after adding any new art, etc., etc.,) are MINUTES long.

Add that to the fact that I have a fly the size of the Hindenburg flying around my desk and you'll understand that my sanity levels are at an all-time low.

On the upside, Max is coming home tomorrow, and thanks to friends who were having a garage sale and let me crash it, I got rid of all the twins too-small clothing, a bunch of Chris' too-small clothing, an old printer, an extra dog kennel, and a variety of other goodies and made enough money to buy enough gas so that Chris can drive to Philly and back and go get him.

The whole gas budget situation makes me look enviously upon my Amish neighbors. I look at their transportation and wonder how many bales per mile they get and how much property taxes they pay on the land they need to grow the hay. (I tell you, I've thought out that option far enough to consider whether we could put a small barn in the backyard, what the annual vet bills of a suburban horse might be, and if a horse would have to wear small spikey horse shoes to pull the five of us up our steep street in a snow storm.)

Milo just read a book and now he's laying on the floor doing crunches. I haven't read that particular book, but it is so typically Milo to want to take what he just read and apply it to his own life in some way.

This time next week I'm turning 39. No big plans. I've decided I'm looking forward to turning 40 the following year though. Turning 30 was great. My thirties as a whole were a huge improvement over my 20s. So I have high hopes for my 40s. But I have one more year of 30s. I'll try to make the best of it.