I'm not sure if my computer picked a good weekend to go on vacation* or not. One advantage is that June is a good time for it. Sunday was sunny and hot but not too hot and all around the best day imaginable to spend time running a few errands on foot. And I made headway on some bookkeeping and cleaning up and stuff. Not much, but some. It's not a big deal either way, I've long since stopped beating myself up over it, I don't live with my mother any more; but it's just nice to be a bit more organized.

The downside is, obviously, being so cut off. Apparently there was some kind of election irregularity in Iran? Everyone's thinks it was fixed? Friday I had just found a couple interesting personals ads, and then I lose my only viable** Internet access? And I can't play WoW. There's nothing time-sensitive going on right now, and it's not like I'm indispensable to my guild, but it's annoying.

All around, by Sunday I felt like I was in detox. I'm on the high side of my caffeine cycle (I'll explain later), and I'm trying to eat more healthily. So I'm reducing my intake of coffee and of unhealthy foods and going cold turkey on WoW.

Also, I need a Kindle or something (but shopping around for one is, of course, hard to do without a working computer at home!). I read fast. If I read enough to even put a dent in my free time, then I'd need either a lot more storage space or a Kindle or membership to a good library. Storage space is mostly used up in this house and libraries usually don't have newly released books and I can't reread library books I've returned the way I can pick up a familiar old novel off the shelf, so that leaves a Kindle or similar off-brand toy.

* By which I mean, it won't start. Can't load Windows. I had been having problems now and then with the thing shutting down on its own for the past couple weeks, and Saturday morning the thing was running so slowly it was basically not usable, and when I shut it down and tried to restart it, it wouldn't. By Sunday afternoon I had exhausted my technical expertise and began to suspect that the problem was the hard drive itself, and a tech support guy at Dell agreed with me. Hopefully their technician will come to replace it on Friday afternoon at the latest. Hopefully they will be able to recover the data on the current hard drive, some of which is irreplaceable. Argh. However, there's no need to say "hopefully" about one thing: I'm definitely going to be better about backing up the important stuff.

** I'm not cut off, of course. I'm typing this at work, and some Web sites that are blocked at work, like Hotmail and Facebook, I can just access on my cell phone. But my phone has a three-inch screen and feeble Internet connection, so it really sucks for anything like browsing.