Brand New Day

And a brand new laptop!

Maybe this isn't big news to you, but it's big to me. Over the weekend, my husband and I agreed it was time to buy me my own, personal laptop.

For years, I've been doing everything on my company-issued laptop--everything from "real" work to writing to blogging to upkeep of my iPod. Over the past few months, however, the company has been tightening security policy (and for good reason, I might add!). The rules keep getting stricter, so that now, every time I even plug in a Flash drive that's not issued by the company (to say nothing of my iPod), I'm busting the security policy.

As if that weren't worrisome enough, however, I got an email last week telling me that my laptop is one of the 100 oldest computers in the company and they generously want to give me a new one. My immediate response? NOOOOOOOOOOO!

See, my computer is my brain. And not just my work brain, but my personal life brain. It's not just my manuscript files and so forth that I fear losing: it's everything from my email address book to last year's taxes to photos to... Well, you get it.

So, knowing the company was going to take away both my work brain and my personal brain in one fell swoop AND that I didn't want to keep breaking company rules just to make my life easier, it became real apparent that the time had come to get a new computer, and on Saturday, we did the deed.

I'm still in the process of moving stuff from the old work laptop to this one, and some things don't seem to want to come over (if anyone has a brilliant suggestion for making the Windows Mail import manager see my old Outlook 6 DBX files, let me know. It's driving me bonkers!), but by and large, it's going pretty smoothly.

And at long last, my work life and my private life can be decoupled!

So, what did YOU do this weekend for fun?

UPDATED: Bad, Jackie, bad! I forgot one very important super-squee for my critique partner, Darcy, whose manuscript Glorious is a finalist in the very prestigious 2007 Maggie Contest (Georgia Romance Writers). Yay, Darcy!