The more I sit under my favorite Red Maple and think about it, the more I think the best reason to put it where I've been planning to is to piss off Matt. I can detour around the trees he's worried about easily enough but whether I do that or go in a straight line, either way there's going to be a muddy scar across the back yard that takes all summer to heal. So, what is it I really need?

• I need a hose-compatible faucet somewhere outside the house that doesn't quit working when it gets cold this winter.

• I need the end of the faucet to be far enough from the ground to make it easy to walk the water out of the hose attached to it so the hose doesn't freeze.

I can meet both needs with a hydrant right next to the back door of the garage. Putting it there will save about 50' of digging, as well as saving me the price of that much pipe compared to where I was planning to put it. It means stringing a water hose across the back yard and it means in cold weather I need to remember to walk the water out of the hose when I'm done with it but over all I think it's the right answer. 

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FedEx finally figured out where we live and brought me one of these this afternoon. It's definitely a keeper but it's going to be a few days till I'm ready to switch over to it as my primary machine. The touchpad on the thing is way too sensitive for my liking (I'll have to look later to see if that's adjustable) and I never did really learn to like touchpads, even when I used to do tech support on notebooks, so I need to order another mouse to have enough to go around. I also want to add some memory to it before I start trying to do anything serious with it. On the plus side, it doesn't look like getting it online wirelessly is going to be a challenge; it sniffed around and detected my wireless router with no trouble. I haven't tried to tie into the rest of our home network yet but I don't expect that to be any big deal either.

To have a good place for the notebook I need to get the computer I'm using now out of the way and I don't want to do that till I've installed some upgrades I have on order, specifically a larger 2nd hard drive and some RAM, and fired the beast back up to make sure everything works. I also need to copy all of my "Documents and Settings" stuff to my USB hard drive, then from there to the notebook. Once I've done that I'll replace "the family machine" with this one and we'll give the family machine to my sister's best friend's little girl.