In about half an hour, it will be nine years since I quit smoking.

I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. We were invited to my niece's for dinner. It went very well, and we were home in good time to wind down and relax. This holiday weekend was one of the best: I have four days off, it is not my turn to take emergency calls, we got paid two days early, I have a few hours overtime, this is the payday for commissions (I got $186.00 in commissions) and best of all: I got a seven percent raise!

This morning we took the cat to the vet then went out to a lovely breakfast. Once the shopping frenzy was done, I went to the Aple store and bought my new desktop computer. I spent the afternoon cleaning the den and rearranging the cable and router wiring. I set up the Mac and now I am sipping a beer, and installing Leopard (Mac's newest operating system) I have Office for Mac and the printer driver to go, then everything will be done.

So, it has been another boring stretch since my last blog update. I have ordered a laptop from Dell. For my personal computing pleasure, I have made the switch to Macintosh. I have had quite enough of Microsoft, thank you, but the applications I use at work are very specific in their operating system needs. I have an old IBM Thinkpad running Windows 98 for use in the systems requiring a DOS base, and The newer applications will only run in Windows XP. The manufacturers will not be updating this software. When we asked about running them under Vista, they replied: "If you can get them to run in Vista, let us know how you did it." I do not plan to do their R&D for them. So, for the future, i will need a solid machine running Windows XP. Dell has them available for now, but in the future will more than likely phase them out.

I have moved my old Windows XP desktop into the small basement study, where it will mainly be used to back up work applications and sync my PDA. I am using my MacBook now, and once I get the reimbursement from the company for the Dell, I will be heading out to the Apple store to decide which Mac I will use for my new desktop.

See: you thought watching golf on TV and watching paint dry was boring. This little glimpse into the mundane and boring life I lead tops them......