nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd

I'm sick. I went to work because I only have two days next week and I felt like my absence would be noted. And there was big-deal stuff going on I wanted to sit in on (it was cool. My job is cool, sometimes. I wish I could write about it. I can't.)

Yesterday, R had this crazy thing that happened at the office. Both of us work with high-risk populations in a different way. His day ended with an HIV test (not him) and wondering whether he'd have to go on prophylactic ARVs. Intense. Sometimes we get really cavalier about what we do and forget the level of what's out there and what a screw up can cost.

I'm spending Valentines Day solo because my love affair is jetting to South America to kick ass and take names or save lives or something. Instead of getting wasted (last year) or being bummed out, I'm going to come up with something fantastic. It will not involve a Paradise burger.

*

My Mac is a battleaxe. It's been dropped, toured the world and survived excessive use during school. There have been periods where I slept with it nearby, with the sleep light flickering. Three years, six months we've been together. Even though it lacks the bells (video camera) and whistles (decent speakers), I've stuck with my model. I'm a simple girl, it meets my needs.

Or it did until I started to ramp up my music and video collection to fill my 80G ipod and decided to take my CD collection purely digital.

You see, my iBook G4 was purchased before pictures were 1 billion megapixels and before I ever thought I would download movies. I was (relatively) poor and I didn't like video games. Tee hee! I bought... a 40G hard drive.

And that 40G has started to groan, slow down, and generally remind me that it needs to be cleared out. In the old days, I would reformat a PC. Suck everything accumulated I'd forgotten about out of it, start fresh. Glorious. But I'm afraid to reformat my iBook. I have everything set up just so, I don't know where my OS disk is, and what if that dubious black box I've never tested isn't really holding copies of the last four years of my life?

I halfheartedly clear out things from time to time, attempting to make space. I run apps designed to delete all the multi-lingual program instructions. And I dream about starting over. About the million gig wafer thin something with gangbusters wifi that will be mine. It will power itself, somehow. Yes. Yes.

I need to clear some space.