So, I recently gave in and bought a new laptop. I was long overdue, my old one was seven and a half years old, a machine that had been a gift and was admitted by the gift giver to be the cheapest model in stock at the Best Buy on his way home from work on my birthday. Yeah. It was a Toshiba Satellite that survived a drop on concrete and a drop on tile, yet somehow continued to mostly work despite damage to the power jack so that the power cord couldn’t reliably maintain contact to power it unless it was sitting just so… and the battery had long given up the ghost by the time it hit that point. Somehow, despite all that, I still managed to milk seven and a half years out of it before it reached a point where I couldn’t make it reliably work anymore and had to dig into the savings account that I’m trying desperately to accumulate enough money in so I can buy a reliable car.

I mean, even though internet and computer access is pretty key for daily life these days, I guess I feel a little guilty buying myself a new machine knowing the mess we’re staring down right now. So I guess I’m trying to justify it to myself, and using this blog post to verbalize it? The thing is, I am barely hanging on in the bay area right now, so I gotta figure something out that’ll enable me to pay the bills… or I may need to give in and look at moving out of the area. I would really hate to move, because I love it so much here, cost of living aside. At least, I seem to have lined up some part time freelance work to get a little extra money coming in. Waiting on the final details to gel, and I’m not sure how long it’ll last or if it has a chance to pan out into more work later, but for now… a little extra money isn’t a bad thing, even if it doesn’t directly extend into something else.

I’m not even sure why I’m writing about this, but I set up this blog to try and make myself write regularly, so let’s just focus on that goal. I got burnt out because the last election cycle was just that draining… and now that the idiot in chief has been in office for a month, it’s pretty clear that it’s not going to let up unless he’s impeached, and even then… Pence is a pretty scary too, but he at least plays by the conventional rules. It doesn’t help that the GOP still thinks they can control the Cheeto faced idiot, so they’re ignoring and stomping out every effort by the Democrats to try to get the impeachment ball rolling. I can’t help but wonder if they’re trying to hold off on the impeachment until the midterm, in hopes that Pence will have less than half of idiot’s term to serve, leaving him open to two reelections. Scariness.

In better news, I am trying to push myself to take more pictures again. I need to do something creative that gets me out of the house. Now that I have the new laptop, I’ll try to make an effort to post the pictures for people to see if they come out well enough. I do have a site set up for it, brassfrog.net, though I need to do some work on the theme, probably add a child theme to it. We shall see. I also use the heck out of VSCO on my phone, adjusting pictures with filters and snapping interesting things when I spot them when I have time to stop and snap the picture. I’ll try to get those posts on the photo site, but some of them have been posted to VSCO’s site or twitter. So they’re out there.

I used to write these stream of consciousness posts on LiveJournal back in the day, and while I don’t know if anyone will read it (not even sure if I care if anyone does), I do miss writing whatever comes to mind like this. So I’ll try to do this, even if I don’t have something a little more conventional to write.