And the first contender to use the post-mortgage savings is... the computer! My second hard drive has been acting up--randomly spinning down at odd intervals. Yesterday it began misbehaving in earnest so it was really unusable. I'm really not a hardware guy--something I should remedy if I'm going to stick with old computers--so I checked into getting it fixed. RE-PC charges $37.50 for the initial diagnostic, which is more than I paid for the silly thing. So I bopped by the RE-PC store today and picked out a new drive. Ah, what a pleasure and temptation it is to visit there. I resited the siren calls of the $300 iMac systems for sale, as well as the 56K modems. (Though I may head back for those on Saturday.) I picked up an external drive, not having the time to try my hand at installing an internal one, as well as some cables. If I can hook it up properly, it'll give me a whopping 4 GB of space compared to the 1 GB my old drive offered. I don't really need that much, but it will give Poodlepums and excuse not to clean out her folder. Of course, I'll also have to think of a name for the new drive. (Poodles was nagging about that on the way home from the store.) I could be boring and name it "Lebensraum II" after the dying drive. But then I'd hate to repeat myself. Oh, well, first things first. Let's see if I can find a karmic SCSI sequence that will work and then get the silly thing formatted.