"new device detected"

 So, sometimes things happen fast.

I went to Sherman this morning with the thought of looking for a new laptop (there is nowhere locally, other than Walmart that sells them, or at least that's what everyone said).

I did go to JoAnn's first because I really needed a bit of time out just doing fun things. And I saw this.

This is a skeleton (well, a few parts from one) reconfigured to be a sewing machine. Yes, really. It also has batteries that make the eyes light up (red) and it says something but what it says was so distorted and garbled (and I was startled by it) that I couldn't figure out what it was saying.

I had seen a photo of this on someone's tumblr a few weeks ago and I was like "ha ha yeah someone totally created that using AI" but NO, it's REAL. 

I also got the little tubes of white and blue paint needed for some of the Moominhouse furniture, and some glow in the dark cotton yarn (I dunno, it was on sale, it was cool, I maybe want to knit a glow in the dark cardigan for my little Grumpy Bear). And these, because this kind of thing amuses me a lot:

(Also, I vaguely remember the cartoon version of Beetlejuice - which was a lot more kid-friendly than the movie, Beetlejuice and Lydia's relationship was more friends-bordering-on-siblingish than what the movie showed (at one point he wanted to marry her despite a great disparity in age) and Beetlejuice had some ghost friends, and I think one was a Frenchman who was a skeleton? At any rate, I vaguely remember that. I liked the cartoon despite being well out of the target age range; I remember it as being silly and mostly benign. It was spooky-silly rather than scary or gross, which is more the Hallowe'en vibe I like than the horror stuff.)

And yes, I am ready for it to be closer to Hallowe'en. I have all my decorations at home and am just waiting for it to be close enough to put them out (maybe a few more days, maybe after Sept. 15th). I want it to be cooler and for it to rain - fall weather. (It's better than it was, but it's still too warm out and too dry)

But then I went to Best Buy to see what they had. I knew I wanted another Dell laptop; the one I had was almost 10 years old and had worked fine up until just a week or so ago when the keyboard started to fail. So I looked around

They had an Inspiron - not the newest or fastest model - on sale for about $500, under what I had budgets, so I checked it out, and uncharacteristically for me, made the snap decision to buy it - that means no additional trip needed, and it means I can afford it a bit more comfortably. Two new things it has my old one don't - it's got a touchscreen that will also fold around to act like a tablet, and it has a backlit keyboard, which is a nice feature (I'm not sure I love the touchscreen, and the touchpad is a little twitchier than is ideal)

They keyboard is a bit smaller than what I prefer but I'll get used to working on it. (The whole laptop is smaller and thinner than mine. I'm not sure how many files it will hold; everything now seems to want to be "on the cloud" but I have moved a couple sensitive documents over here that I made sure to save only on the hard drive. (I also haven't figured out, despite having the proper cable, how to "batch migrate" files, like some of my photos, from the old laptop to here. I suppose I can ask someone; the good thing is the old laptop isn't totally dead so I can keep using it and can pull files off it as needed)

Anyway, it synched up easier than I thought with Google; most of my logins it was able to find.

I don't have my photos though. Most of them (including allllll the memes I downloaded) are still on the old machine so I may just have to research for and grab material as I need it, like pony pictures

It's also a faster machine, and it's Windows 11 (so it will automatically update - that was a big problem with my old machine which was still running 7) and it SEEMS like I can get Amazon Prime to stream on it (one night when there was literally nothing on TV, I tried to watch one of the "free with ads" re runs of Murder, She Wrote, and the computer hung up, and I wound up watching it on my phone in disgust). it seems the battery charge life on this is longer too - at 89% it is claiming about 7 hours of charge left