No Gay Paree for me

I had the good sense to email the professor who is conducting the Parisienne portion of YS's study program. I wanted to know how much time they'd be spending in class during the proposed week of our visit. In his current portion of the trip, their class time is limited to the mornings from nine to noon. Their afternoons are free, primarily to give them time to absorb the French culture and interact with their host families. They take a few excursions to castles, churches, and whatnot, but mostly they are free to explore. I suspected things might be different in Paris, and I was right. Said professor responded that they would be very busy, and that given the cost, we should wait and take a family trip at some later date. So, no Paris. To console myself, I bought a new laptop.

My old, heavy, archaic laptop died. Just up and dropped dead. No power, nothing. It's a PIII-600 old Dell Latitude that I bought used off of eBay for $450 a few years ago. I got my money's worth. I didn't even want to try to fix it. I started doing some research, thought about buying a Dell off their website, then decided, on the spur of the moment yesterday (the BEST way to decide these things), to stop in at Best Buy and see what they had. This laptop will mostly be for The Spouse to look up sports stuff, the grandkids to play games, and me to burn DVDs and store photos (so I don't keep storing them on the work laptop). It just needs to work and not be anything spectacular. And it needed to be cheap. Best Buy had a Gateway with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1 GB RAM (I will upgrade that most likely), a 100GB hard drive, a 17" widescreen, a dual layer DVD burner, and Windows Vista Home Premium - pretty much everything I was looking for - for just $699. So, I am now sitting with the new machine on my lap, doing my blog. It's a pretty sweet machine. I was looking at a Sony Vaio, which they were out of, before I saw this one. They were the same price, same specs, but the Sony only had a 15.4" screen, and a bunch of software I didn't need. I have Office 2007. I have anti-virus. I have everything I need. I didn't want to pay for a bunch of bundled stuff, but I did want the 17" screen.

So, no Paris, but a new toy. I can live with that.