shopping.

it was a very expensive weekend.  on the other hand, i was reminded of why mikey is one of the two persons i enjoy shopping with the most (and both are men, mind you!) if i even have to go shopping to begin with.  our project was to find tom a new laptop and we went all over the place, checking out prices and such.  tom also wound up with five pairs of new shorts since the ones we got him last summer were already more or less trashed, plus two new pairs of crocs (they were on sale so we had to get two).  okay, now for the laptop....  we ended up buying it at the microsoft store at the florida mall.  it is a lenovo touch screen, i7 quad core, 16 GB RAM with backlit keyboard, a fabulous graphics card and a solid state drive.  it is lightning fast and i have to confess, i really do have laptop envy even though i have two perfectly good dell laptops with i3 processors that are satisfactory for what i do!  we hemmed and hawed over a few others in the store, but in the end, tom decided on the lenovo along with a product key for office 365.  the salesman also threw in a tutorial on windows 8.1 which i know nothing about (i do now) along with three $5 starbucks gift cards.  feeling markedly poorer, we went home to pick up marie and annie for a dimsum lunch (yummy) and then to yet another mall as annie needed to find a bathing suit for a pool party.  i'm sure the poor kid would have loved to stay at the mall a little longer but after the morning we had, we were all just exhausted and as soon as the bathing suit was in the bag, it was time to go home.  tom took a nap and left the laptop in my hands to configure stuff - installing antiviral software, dropbox, office and others, and then i started transferring his stuff from the old laptop.  naturally, these things are never straightforward.  computers are like boats - there is always SOMETHING. but whatever i initially messed up, i fixed, and tom was very happy with his new toy.  it didn't have an optical drive so off i went to trusty old amazon to get him an external drive.  anyway, i don't know....  spending all that money wore us out! 

sunday morning was our usual - mikey cut up fruit and made coffee.  tom fried up the bacon and marie made french toast.  i stayed out of the kitchen and played with tom's new laptop and started packing up stuff to go home to the boat. 

being away from the boat on the weekends helps.  but when i am home, i still wake up in the middle of the night thinking that i forgot something.  i leave the boat and come back thinking she'll be there waiting.  there is just this enormous void.  i miss her very, very much. 

this is our last week in cocoa with one more weekend to go.  yesterday, the AIS that tom sent off to the manufacturer because it kept cutting out on us, arrived in the mail.  or rather, a NEW unit arrived (they replaced it) and it got installed and configured to the nav laptop.  and that is it - the last thing and TADHANA is ready to leave now and head back north.  we won't be leaving consuelo behind though - mikey picked up her ashes at the vet today. 

oh well, carry on, we must.