New Mac and near death
I write this post on my lovely new MacBook. It is pretty darn smurfy. The box it came in was, however, tiny and I inadvertently kept some odd family tradition alive by taking a snap of it on my car in the parking lot of the mall where I bought it (John having done the same with their iMac purchase). Considering that is a Miata trunk, you get the idea of how teeny the box is.
I got it Wednesday evening and am already glad for the new machine–it’s lighter, faster, and gives me a temporary aura of coolness amongst my classmates. 
It’s also much more likely that I will take some notes on it during class, which I had been avoiding because my old machine was so loud–that is, its keyboard alone was loud enough for people to remark on it. When the iBook would kick into “jet engine mode” as I called it (the fans would get massively loud), there was no way I could have it open in class. This is much friendlier.
It is taking some getting used to–the buttonless touchpad is cool, but if you have it set to touch=click, it is very sensitive. I may have to turn off that option if I don’t get better at controlling it this way. It’s very easy to accidentally launch apps, for example.
Today I only had one class, Contracts having been cancelled again for the prof to lecture someplace else, and so I drove to school rather than taking the bus, I happily loaded my fancy bookbag with the new Mac in its well-padded pocket, and zipped down to CivPro. Class went well, even if my head did try to explode over trying to understand something about trusts that I really didn’t need to know as the point of the case for us was about notice, not trusts, and afterwards I got into the Miata with its top down and headed up the 5 for home. Music playing, the sun shining, and it being a Friday afternoon with a Legal Skills memo behind me and the weekend in front of me, I was happy. My fancy bag and Mac were riding shotgun (the bag barely fits in the trunk when full), and all seemed right with the world. The traffic was getting heavy (it was about 2:40pm…the start of rush hour on the weekend) but we were traveling over 75 easily.
Then I saw something fly out of the bed of the pickup a few cars in front of me. The way it flew, I thought it had to be a long plastic bag or something–it seemed almost floaty. And then I realized it was just aerodynamics having fun with a 5 or 6-foot metal ladder. Holy crap on a stick. It flopped long-ways between lanes (with the traffic, so to speak) as I tried to slow to anticipate how to avoid it. Then it made one last flop, flipping over its edge and landing dead center, cross-ways, in my lane directly in front of me. I had a car on both sides of me, and a Fire Chief’s truck on my tail, and no where to go, but I knew I could not clear that thing. A thought flashed through my head that if I went airborne, my bag would probably fly out and I’d lose my new Mac! (the fact that I’d probably be killed did not register until later). At the last second, I edged to the right and somehow managed to JUST miss the ladder and the Mercedes in the next lane.
This all happened in maybe 5 seconds or so.
I still have no idea how I did that. Fate smiled on the new MacBook, I think.