You're About to be Redirected to the New Home of Ground Control to Major Mom: Happy Place

Greetings from a happy place! Today has been a good day. I got some 9 hours of sleep yesterday and the weather I help to forecast has finally calmed down from the ridculousness I experienced my first week here. After this blog post I plan to hit the gym for a nice long run on the treadmill (it's dusty here so I'm not sure I want to be outside much longer).

Let me start with a little history. From my very first blog post, I've told stories of my "kitchen laptop". This is the computer I have with me in the Middle East...it's circa 2000, so I've no qualms if something bad happens to it, except for all the pictures I have saved to the hard drive. When I'm at home, I don't even save things to this hard drive. It's a "dummy" machine, merely for websurfing and until recently, it played host to our home weather station. It doesn't even host the weather station anymore, since the computer here now here instead of at home.

Click Here for more adventures of the Kitchen Laptop.

I'm writing you this post from a table in the Bra NOWHERE NEAR AN OUTLET! These batteries are great! I've had the laptop unplugged for 55 minutes so far and only used 13% of the battery life.

I'd been running into keyboard problems lately and I figured out it was related to the keyboard being cold. So every time I power down the laptop, then turn it back on, it'd be about 10 minutes before the space bar, "v", "b", and "n" keys would respond to typing.

Over the weekend I was sitting outside early one morning with the computer -- the temperatures were probably in the 40s -- and for the entire time I had the computer powered up, I couldn't get those four keys to work. The keyboard never warmed up.

At home, I'd keep this computer on all the time...and the keyboard usually would be there for me whenever I needed it.

So...now that I have working laptop batteries, I can keep the computer on all the time...all I have to do is unplug it and walk over to the Bra area for WiFi access. And my keyboard is here for me when I need it.

This is great! I love that I can blog freely whenever I'm off duty...and not wander around with my power cord for 5-10 minutes looking for someone to leave -- like a car driving around a crowded mall parking lot waiting for someone to pull out of a parking space.

The signs with the red stop signs are warning not to plug in multi-outlet surge protector strips. This is at the BX WiFi hotspot, at the Bra WiFi hotspot (next to my dorm), people do that all the time. It's discouraged, but not forbidden.

So I don't have to be one of THESE people anymore!