Back to work

 Same job as ever.  At least the workload is manageable now.

First Pat introduced me to Wordscapes, and we both now play the Spelling Bee puzzle in the Times.  It's a good feeling to come up with a high-scoring word, like "illogical" or "ratatat."  

Book in progress:  Guadalcanal Diary, a couple of pages at a time.  Can't concentrate on reading the way I used to.  Doesn't stop me from buying them, though.

The new Dell is working properly so far.  After a day or two of wrestling with the sound, I deleted the Creative Sound Blaster Z software and went with Microsoft's generic High Definition Audio Device drivers.  I also stopped trying to feed the sound through the Bose, which I think was too much to ask without an amp.  The TaoTronics sound bar from Amazon sounded terrible when I first got it, but now with different drivers, it's perfectly good.

Amazon's going to think I received another windfall $1,200 from the president.  I've ordered a set of Sennheiser headphones for upstairs, a 1 TB Adata SSD and a PCIe adapter for the new Dell, and 1 TB 2.5" Crucial SATA SSD for the Dell laptop downstairs.  

That last purchase wasn't planned, but after two boots in the past week or so that produced "hard drive not found" errors, and one more from over the weekend that resulted in what resembled a CHKDSK with error repairs that took several minutes, I read the writing on the wall and went back to Amazon once more.  The Crucial drive arrives tomorrow, and I'll put it in the enclosure and clone what's left of the original hard drive with the included Acronis software.  Then, swap out the old for the new.