We visited an Apple Store today and bought Keynote. Eric wanted it for his presentations. It should be easier to work in Keynote than it was to work in PowerPoint, which never quite made sense to me. I played with it for a few minutes and it’s far more intuitive than PowerPoint, I just have to come up with a wonderful theme for him to use.

Mike tells us that we should be able to start moving upstairs in early February. Considering that it’s still bare framed walls and floors, I find that amazing but Mike hasn’t lied to us yet. He says that the new front door should be installed in the next week or so, and then the siding will go up. Hopefully we’ll have warmer nights here when that happens. With the cold snap we’ve been having, it’s been as cold as 52&deg at night. brrrrr. It’s been a challenge keeping the girls in their own beds, but who can blame them. After doing the kitchen last year, and the rest of the house this year, I’m looking forward to a “normal” January next year. Maybe we’ll even have people over again.

I tried the new browser, Safari. I didn’t hate it, but some things annoyed me. First of all, there was no way of setting it so external links opened pages in the same window. I am constantly clicking links from NetNewsWire and Mail. Before I knew it, I had 20 windows open. Safari is nice, but I realized that there was nothing in Safari (besides the built-in Google search tool) that gave it an advantage over Chimera which has been my default browser for the last month or so. Chimera is incredibly fast, stable and has features such as integration with URL Manager Pro that Safari couldn’t match. I’m keeping an eye on Safari’s progress, but for now I don’t see a reason to switch. My iBook is happily Microsoft free and it’s exciting to see Mac users with choices that we never had before. I’m Microsoft-free because there are better choices, and not because I’m one of those who feels a philosophical opposition to Microsoft although that’s not a terrible reason at this point. Talk about your ‘best of both worlds’.

My frayed edges are showing in unexpected ways. Last year when the stress of doing the kitchen/pantry got to me I ended up in the hospital getting my gallbladder removed. Let’s hope I escape this one without the need for surgery.