in which cardboard boxes are ruled out as a possible place of residence and a good replacement is discovered(!)

Guess WHAT?!? On Saturday I found a place to live! I mean, I have been staying with my brother-in-law's family since I arrived on the East coast(-ish), but that couldn't last forever. The free rent was great, and they are amazingly nice and generous, but I need to be closer to the city (and, more importantly, have easy metro access). So that hopefully someday I can find a job. That would be pretty good.

But yeah! I have a place to live. And it's great! It's in a little townhouse in Virginia (but still inside the D.C. loop) and is right by a bus stop that will take me to the metro. Which means I don't need to buy a car - yea for saving money! And it means that I will be able to go to all kinds of cool stuff, like the National Symphony Orchestra performance last Thursday that I got a free ticket to. They played, along with two other pieces, Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2 in E minor - that was an amazing and worthwhile hour of my life. The thought of going to more things like that, especially if they're free, makes me happy.

So I'll be in a private basement bedroom, which is good-sized, and it has a walk-in closet right next to it. Which will make storing all my stuff much easier. The walk-in has a pretty low ceiling, but I'm short enough that it doesn't really matter. And the kitchen is big - great for me, with my love of cooking and its accompanying multiple boxes of kitchen stuff. And my roommates (at least, the two that are signed up) are LDS, which is good standards-wise and having-a-friend-to-go-to-church-with-wise. AND it's one of the cheapest places that I've found in the area - yea for saving even more money! I can start moving in on November 8th, and I'm so excited!

Just thought I'd share the great news.

when the bad and the good combine to make me pay money to the computer-maker people

So it's been another while since I wrote. But it's not really my fault. You see, my laptop tried that whole absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder thing with its wireless internet workingness. But the growing fonder did not happen. The growing frustrated-er did, though. So my laptop tried to pacify me by working right for a few days and then not working again. That didn't help the fondness either. And it's really not so helpful to the searching-for-jobs-online process when the online part does not cooperate. Ergo, I may be getting a new computer soon. Maybe something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Acer-8-9-inch-Processor-Battery-Sapphire/dp/B001EYV9TM

It's pretty and superly-portable and has a pretty good battery life and a big (160 GB) hard drive. And it has a web-cam so I would see my family while I speak to them. That would be pretty awesome. Plus, it's pretty cheap (well, relatively speaking) for all that. And I'm all for good deals.

I'm also considering the white one with the same specs, despite its resemblence to a Mac. Because I don't endorse Macs - I don't like their operating systems at all. I know, I'm the black sheep of my (immediate) family for not liking Macs, but I just don't. Still, I do, for some reason, like the white. And it wouldn't show fingerprints like the blue one. If I decide to get a white one, I could get a version with Linux Lite instead of Windows XP, which could be cool.

What do you think?