Out with the old and icky

I have decided that it is time to replace my laptop. Not only does the battery hold no more than 20 minutes of charge, the hinge doesn't work very well, meaning that the screen will fall flat if it is open to an angle > 110 degrees. Plus I only have 1% of the hard drive space available to me*. And a crack appeared in the battery casing some time during our trip. I guess that 5 years is a long time in computer years. Actually, my laptop froze up while I was customizing my new Dell - serves me right for clicking on the "show me more details" regarding the $20 messenger bag. Lord knows, for all the other options, I basically went with whatever The Gambler suggested. Even when I reassured it that it would not become landfill fodder (it will spend the rest of its days in the condo so that I can look at Xrays in the middle of the night), I had to remove the battery to power it down. We ended up having to re-enter everything on The Gambler's laptop. And the mystery plant is no longer - I was seriously having visions of it going all Little Shop of Horrors on me and reaching out to grab my ankles one day. It is now off to weed heaven wherever the City of Toronto takes its yard waste - maybe it will be reincarnated as biodiesel. To be honest, I suspect that it will figure out how to make it into garden compost, and pop up all over the city next year. But not in our yard ! After exorcising ripping it out, I planted this lovely Prairie Tulip. Isn't it nice and benign looking? Speaking of lovely, the first Close Your Eyes and Think of England sock is looking good: Because the pattern is very stretchy (at least partially because I suffer from purl-stitches-that-follow-a-knit-stitch-are-loose-syndrome, and each pattern motif is flanked by purl stitches), I plan to knit it further up the calf than I usually do. At this point, I have 17 grams of yarn left, so they certainly won't be kneehighs on me. But I am holding out hope for a bit more than halfway up the calf. *This is my excuse for not downloading any of my pictures from my camera since we got home. Thank goodness I can upload photos from my Blackberry to Flickr.