I'm going to wait a few days to order it but I'm pretty sure I'm going to buy the family one of these and let Scotty have the "new" "family PC" we bought last week. Buying it when we did made sense and I don't regret doing it -- I wanted something I could get up and running quickly before the weekend and at $150.00 it was a good buy -- but even with some work it's never going to be "just what we want." For one thing it will only access 2 GB of RAM, which isn't really enough to keep a Vista machine humming along smoothly. For another, it doesn't have an SD slot or a 1394 port on the front, ; I realize both problems can be solved with external USB modules but I'd much rather have built-in solutions. I think what I'm going to do is upgrade it a little -- add some RAM and a USB/1394 card -- and tell Scotty he can have the thing. Before Scotty takes it I want to use it to try to salvage some music and picture files off the hard drive on the family machine that died. One additional incentive for waiting a few days to buy the new machine is that I can get a $20.00 discount for paying for it with PayPal and I don't have enough money in my PayPal account to do that right now; I authorized a transfer from my bank account to my PayPal account last week but it hasn't gone through yet.

I guess if I can find someone who'll build something that makes sense to me for a price I consider reasonable I'm going to have a barn built for Sunshine. He's never had one and my sisters the only one who seems to think he really needs one but keeping my baby sister happy has been pretty important to me for over 46 years now so I guess I'll keep on trying. Also, when my daughter was here over Labor Day weekend she asked what I intended to do about providing something for Sunshine to stand downwind of on cold windy days and I told her I hadn't decided yet but I'd think of something; I guess a barn will fill the bill whether he actually goes inside or just stands near the downwind side.

As soon as I can manage I also want to make some changes to the fence between the house and the pasture. The wooden part of it's fine but I want to replace the wire. The wire that's on it now isn't stretched tight and is taller than the wood fence at points, as well as only being stretched hand tight and looking sort of ugly. When that wire went up I was scrambling hard to get something up so the horse didn't have to spend the winter in a 20' x 20' pen in the barn lot and I didn't know how hard he might try to get through or over the fence sometime. Now that we've established that he's a pampered pet with no desire to run away I want to replace the 48" wire we used with 36 in wire. That way I can have the top of the wire even or just below the top wooden rail and there will be a big enough gap under the wire for Sunshine to be able to eat the grass under it so it doesn't need trimmed to look nice.

***

I changed my mind about waiting to buy the computer. I decided it was too good a buy to chance CompUSA being sold out by the time the money I'm transferring reached PayPal.

The kids will be leaving to go back to Alabama first thing in the morning and I'm worn out. Sometime tomorrow I need to go to Evansville to have blood drawn so my doctor in Marion can have the results by the time I go there next week. I'm looking forward to the trip since it will be my first time out on the road in the new car.