They gave me a nametag at work today. Since I seem to be sticking around, the vet said. It's all very cool. I'm doing actual nursing; running bloods, giving advice, irrigating intestines (!!!), developing x-rays, clipping and scrubbing animals for surgery, monitoring them, waking them up and the like.

To boot, I had a lovely family considering purchasing a dog want to pay for the 15minutes I spent giving them advice. They made an appointment and they had a consult, they said, not seeming to know/care that all of this happened with an untrained nurse while the vet packed up for the night and left. I didn't charge them, of course, but there's some nice ego boosting in that sort of thing.

I told the vet that they and their needs (a call-in, basically) suit me very well at this point, especially given that I'm doing the city job stuff again starting... Dec 16th, Dec 12th, Dec 9th, probably tomorrow.

But I'm happy with my job status' and I'm banking on that being the beginning of a good era, for a nice change.

*

On the flip side of this era business, for every good comes a bad I guess. I woke up on the 1st of the month (the day I do payments) to find that my evil beloved computer was frozen. Eight hours later she remained as such and one or two cold reboots and a panicked message to the uber I.T. man (who has held my hand through buying this old girl, her near death in 2008 and all the little issue in-between) later, I used the Mrs' computer to muddle my way through payments and waited to hear the worst about the computer I hated at first and somehow grew to adore far too much.

She's not dead dead, Jim. Not quite. I'm using her now, actually. Very carefully using her, with nothing more than necessary open, and a virus scan user interface that wont run, plus a warning message about a system32 file that may or may not be the devil incomputercarnate. And Malaware telling me every. two. seconds. (not an exaggeration, really) that it has successfully blocked access to a potentially malicious website.

I think it likes to brag a little too much about its mad skillz, myself.

Anyway. The point is, she's not dead dead, Jim, but she's old and she's feeling it. And my external 300GB harddrive, which currently houses ALL of my music and movies, smells likes it's on fire. For reals. It's scary. And currently living in a draw until it can be very carefully used to get all my stuff back.

So I'm being smart and organized and pre-emptive, and I've ordered a new computer. 8GB ram, 500GB HD plus an additional 1TB being added. I'm sure there's lots of other cool features and functions of it (beyond that I'm also getting a new mouse exactly like mine, yo!), but those are the ones that make me feel better about spending all of my money on it.

Though, the uber I.T. man, did come up with quite possibly the most appropriate and wonderful way to look at this situation, ever; You use your computer for anywhere between 6-18hours every day. You paid a grand for it almost 6 years ago. It works out to be about thirty-five cents a day. You wipe your ass with more expensive stuff.

The win of that is pretty epic.

And I'm a bit excited to have a new 'puter to play with, hopefully this week.

Once I stop pitching mini-fits about the fact that I've upgraded OS' (Windows XP to 7) and office (2003 to 2007) and media player (6 to... oh, lord, 10?) and explorer (ie6 to... shiiiiiit, what are they even up to now?) and I'm pretty fine with updating firefox because I do that anyway to feed my facebook game addiction.

But I'll be able to restart again. And shut down using something other than the power button. And start up in less than an hour. And maybe MSN will work. And it wont shit itself every time I open something new. And running two Yahoo chat windows at once wont kill it. And I'll be able to google things without getting porn spam!

This old girl has been good to me and, for now, the plan is to refurb her for dad at some point. I'll miss her. But I know it's smart to retire her while I can still get everything and not wait for the unfixable moment when she just wont power up anymore.

Now, can we talk about this horrible obsession the world has found with rectangular monitors? A flatscreen TV is a rectangle. A movie theatre screen is a rectangle. A computer monitor should be a square. Why is this difficult?

I'm hanging on to my square because it's hip to be one until everyone gets over the rectangle thing. The uber I.T. man tells me to look after mine, because I wont find another. I tell him worst case scenario, I will hunt one down and he should not underestimate me. Mostly because I would be the idiot to pay someone to build me one and spend more on the monitor than the computer itself.

But that's an era for another day year.