What a Girl Wants

First off, let me apologize to everyone and especially Tina for being a complete and utter moron today and forgetting it was my day to blog. Well, I remembered my day was coming up, and I knew it was on the eighth, but somehow my brain decided the eighth was Tuesday and so I had a few days. ::headdesk:: I’m really, really sorry.

And I had such a great blog planned, too. Although that may have been the perfect introduction. You see, I’m not a normal girl. My brain just isn’t wired straight somehow. I hate shopping for clothes. Shoes totally disinterest me (I have three pairs: dress sandals, casual sandals and sneakers). Okay, bags, but not purses. I like big bags with lots of pockets. Lots of room to carry the things that are important to me.

My cell phone.

My PDA.

My laptop.

My other cell phone.

My MP3 player.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am a technology junkie. Best Buy is a place of worship and dread for me. If it runs on any sort of electrical current and can do something useful, I want it. And I found a doozy this week.

A little backstory. I’m currently job hunting. No, unfortunately I don’t make enough as an author to support myself and my family, so I work. Currently I’m a school bus driver, but that doesn’t pay well enough, either, so it’s back to the corporate world for me. Yes, my collection of shoes doubled when I had to buy work shoes. I try not to think about it. My best opportunity for employment is in center city Philadelphia, about an hour by train from where I live. So I was thinking about the commute, which would offer me a great time to write, and how much time it takes me to transcribe my writing every day. Caveauthor writes longhand. Yes, I do see the irony.

Enter the Alphasmart.

If you haven’t seen one of these little gadgets, you should check them out. They’re like mini-laptops, not sizewise, but capability-wise. They’re basically a keyboard with a little LED monitor that has word processing capability. I’ve seen a number of the authors in my online RWA chapter Passionate Ink rave about this, and a woman I met at EPICon also highly recommended them. They only show four lines at a time, so they are crushing to the internal editor. Now, this is not a new gadget to me. My son has one as an instructional support tool at school. They’re great. Lightweight and run for 700 hours on three AAA batteries. So, hating the thought of going back to office life and needing something to inspire me, I went to the website to check it out.

I swear, the screen glowed with a heavenly light when I got there.

They have a model that is a word processor and Palm PDA all in one. With WiFi capabilities.

Do you know what this means?

I can carry my writing on it. And all my e-books. And my calendar. And my address book. And surf the net (presumably only text based sites, but still) and chat with my friends. Philly is one of the first WiFi cities in the US, so I can find a connection just about anywhere. And it weighs two pounds and costs about as much as a low end laptop.

I want this. I want it so bad I can taste it. It’ll be worth it to wear the skirts and the pantyhose and OMG the shoes if I can just own one of these babies for my very own.

So yeah, me? Very differently normal. Apparently even my calendar is different. (Sorry again, Tina!)