Wednesday, 10:00

I managed to get the living room straightened up last night, so today I'll take a break and then get to work on the mess in my bedroom tomorrow. This week has been really long and tiring, ugh. (OK, the living room still has a pile of boxes--because I'll need some of them for packing up books--and my sorted VHS tapes, but it's all out of the way and organized, and it's not like I burned a hole in the carpet or something, so I'm sure my parents won't mind.)

I brought some (shounen and shoujo) manga to work to put on the "free books" shelf that we have out in the hall. When I was sorting through my (BL) magazines, I found two duplicates (why??), so I brought those into work to throw into the recycling with a bunch of other papers. Some really thoughtful recycling worker pulled them out and put them on the free shelf yesterday, so this morning I noticed and threw them back in the recycling. Jeez, everybody I work with knows those books are mine, let's not mix the porn in, OK?

Now at least I know it's NOT safe to bring to work the BL manga I'm planning on getting rid of. I wish our recycling center in town would take paper, but they only accept newspaper and phone books, so I have to find someplace else to dump my books. Recycling porn is complicated.

( cut for Bronze poster )

The battery on my laptop is not charging. It works fine when plugged in, but I can't take it away from a power source. I did some google research, and I guess it's either a bum battery or bum connection to the battery. A new battery is ~$120. Not sure how much fixing the connection would be, but posts I saw on the topic suggested it's best to go with a flat "refurbish" rate, which means for ~$250, Apple will just replace any parts on the laptop (logic board, battery, etc) that need it.

However, my laptop is going on five years old, so I'm wondering if I should pay to have it fixed, or just replace it? I'm eyeing a refurbished MacBook Pro for $1200 that's looking pretty attractive right now.

The problem with either option is that my current "new computer fund" is a whopping $0.00. (I just knew that was going to bite me in the butt soon.) Either way I'm going to be stuck with my bum laptop for a while, so I guess I'll have some time to consider my options, but I'm curious what others would do in my position.