The wheel suddenly stopped working on my mouse at work one day this week. I was just using it and suddenly it was completely loose, broken, obviously. Before I got the iMac, I assumed that all Mac mice were just the little one button hockey puck ones, but that's not the case anymore. At home I have a wonderful three button wheel trackball--a trackball and a wheel and a right button.

And at work I had a two button wheel mouse, and I've gotten so used to the wheel that not having it was driving me nuts. Not that I used it without the wheel for very long--only one afternoon.

I met Bob for dinner at Chili's whatever night that was, and after we ate, he went home and I went to Comp USA to buy a new wheel mouse. All the other people at the office had cool digital mice with red glowing lights, but I didn't want one like that, I just wanted a regular old mouse with a ball. As long as it had a wheel . . .

You apparently can't buy a mouse with a ball anymore. They're all digital, or, as someone at work said when I brought mine in and exclaimed over that fact, "ball-less."

I bought the least expensive one, a $19.95 Logitech one, and it's fine, and the red light is fairly unobtrusive--I was afraid that having it light up every time I moved it would be annoying and distracting, but it's okay.

And one night this week I burned back-up CD's, and one night I downloaded and installed the new iTunes, which is basically like the old iTunes except that they've added a graphic equalizer, and there are apparently some enhancements as far as burning music CDs that I haven't explored yet.

And I'm writing a novel.

Obviously, NaNoWriMo gave me the idea and got me thinking about it, but I'm not participating in that project. I decided I didn't want to give myself that artificial, and stressful, pressure, so I didn't sign up, but I did decide to make a good start on a novel this month, and I have. I've scrapped everything and started over once, and that was a fairly liberating action--I was stuck on what was going to happen, I didn't really like what I had done so far, but I didn't want to throw it away and waste the time I'd spent on it. I decided that was dumb, so I started over and I'm happier with it now.

My goal isn't to finish in November, or to write 50,000 words in November, but just to make a start, and to try to figure out how to do this. The process is interesting, and it's pretty heady stuff to actually get in there and make the effort after thinking about and talking about it for so long. So who knows? I'm going to try, anyway.

I may, at some point, post it online somewhere, or parts of it. For that, we'll have to wait and see.

It's coming up on winter again, and that means that the sweater dryer has come up from the basement. Or, as it is also known, the "combination cat bed and trampoline."

Dinah's favorite toy in the world is something that a journal reader sent, basically a two-foot piece of heavy gauge wire with a piece of cardboard at either end. It generally stays downstairs in the dining room or the hallway, but she's been known to carry it upstairs in the middle of the night and play with it in the bathroom when she's bored and can't sleep.

Then, in the morning, she'll carry it back downstairs and put it back in the dining room. It's sort of like giving a kid a present and then having them play for hours with the box, I guess. I mean, it's a wire. She's pretty much destroyed the chunks of cardboard that originally adorned either end, and now it's just basically a wire. Doesn't matter to her, though. She loves it.

So, with the wire, the sweater dryer, and the broken cat hammock (they like it broken just as much as they liked it with four legs, and Misty says her cats have also broken the one I gave them, and like it better broken), they're pretty much set for toys.