Still no working “main” computer—I’m sharing a “work station” with Case, mostly checking email and doing work type things at intervals throughout the day (we haven’t started “tapping out” in tag-team fashion, but I’m going to suggest it). I haven’t ordered the parts for a new system yet.

Still not entirely sure which direction to go, gladly taking any suggestions at all: primary concerns are noise and heat, as I’m tired of fan noise and tired of worrying about whether an overheated CPU is going to burst into flame in the middle of the night during that two or three weeks a year when my apartment building doesn’t have air conditioning (Southern efficiency in action). I’m looking for a system right around the $800 mark. I haven’t stayed current with this shit and find that learning the details of the sheer number of CPUs and motherboards, let alone memory types and configurations, to be more work than I have time for right now.

Can’t believe it’s already Thanksgiving week. There’s a huge chunk of work I need to attend to this week, so I’m a little tempted to just order a low-mid-end Dell or a Gateway or whatever prebuilt doesn’t suck right now and pay for the second day air (I know I’d regret it, though). Also tempted to just buy a replacement hard drive for the interim, but I’m still not 100% sure it’s not a defective controller or a flaky motherboard that’s eating these drives.

The split-desk thing isn’t so bad (by that I mean actually pretty great). Case and I are seeing a lot more of each other than we ordinarily do (we’re literally in the same room about 20 hours a day now, instead of the usual 16). Once we get through the next few (incredibly busy) weeks, I’m going to make some kind of permanent desk move to this part of the apartment (we’ll probably convert her studio into an office, since she’s not painting in there on a regular basis and has assured me the presence of a couple of computers and a bunch of work stuff wouldn’t deter her, anyway). I will need a relatively robust computer in the bedroom at some point for writing (I need privacy—I just can’t write out here during the day), but for now we might just leave a “crappy web and email machine” in there and have the two main decks out here. Man, this is degenerating into boring blogdom at an alarming rate. Moving on.

At this stage I owe everyone email; I will try to get to you all by Wednesday at the latest. I also don’t have my IM client up and running out here (just one too many things to try to wrangle in a shared environment), so if it’s urgent, the cell phone is your best bet (though I may be on it a lot this week, so you might have to contend with voice mail).

Oh, heard from Sam—he’s safe and sound and back in a relatively removed position (sounding a little disappointed in the emails, as he preferred the “real base” to the “shopping mall base,” but I’m sure everyone back here at home is grateful he’s not quite so close to the action).