If I can establish reliable routines and patterns, I tend to find I’m an easier person to deal with, and am generally more upbeat about things.

Thankfully, after a seriously trying occurrence of Alexander Chuck and Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day that lasted most of a week, the new job, schedule, and general weekday activities are settling into a predictable pattern that I’m starting to be able to deal with, and hopefully I’ll swing a little less widely on the pendulum between “angry shouty monster” and “weepy blubbering lump” for the coming weekend.

I also feel pretty good because I’ve managed to rack up a slight surplus of words against the target value for the first three days of NaNoWriMo, many of which I quite like, even if I still haven’t quite settled down into a plot or even a genre just yet. For what it’s worth, I think I found a little direction today, and for the first time this cycle, I’m starting to think I might like the places it seems to be going.

Finally, I’m enjoying the possibilities inherent in the thing I finally broke down and hit “order” on this evening – I just bought my first new desktop computer in over a decade. I kept the last one running for ten years before the power supply finally crapped out a few months ago – not that it bore much similarity to it’s original specs by the time it finally gave up. I finally decided that it was simply too old to bother swapping in any more parts, and I was tired of using nothing but laptops – there’s just something about a big imposing tower a portable can’t match.

To give you an idea of how long it’s been since I bought a new machine, the old machine has a first-generation Pentium 4 and shipped with a whopping 64 megabytes of RAM. The new box is going to have a 6 Core Athlon processor and 16 GIGABYTES of memory. I suspect I’ll notice something of an increase in performance.

I probably paid a little too much for the machine, but I figure if I buy a new desktop machine once a decade, it’s worth getting the best one I can manage, and if I’m going to overspend, better to throw it into maxing the memory than on some of the other stuff – it’ll save me some of the upgrade headaches later on if I get way ahead of the curve. Not that I won’t upgrade sometime soon – new 1.5 TB hard drives are only like fifty bucks, and this box is going to have a free bay just sitting there waiting for something to fill it with…