(no subject)

Best Buy would like me to send them $400 to renew the extended warranty on the Behemoth laptop (in icon) for another three years. While I can see the sense from their point of view in charging fairly steeply for a full maintenance guarantee on what will be a six-year-old laptop by the end of that time, I don't think I'll be taking them up on the offer. From my point of view, this is a machine that will probably be retired within a year, with or without a major hardware failure, and would likely be nearly worthless and nearly useless by the end of the three years anyway, if only for software reasons. (Its predecessor, Old Laptop, is six years old and still works, for slow, rattly, Win98 values of work, but it doesn't get a great deal of use these days.) This may not be an ideal state of affairs, but it's the way things are in the electronic world.

I might try for a new battery before the current three years are up, but it's hardly worth the trouble for a de facto desktop.

Done!

At 30,657 words in two months, Ambassador is a complete first draft.

It needs a sequel, but it isn't getting it just yet; I have other fish to fry.

I am now ceremonially eating the last six of the chocolate-coated espresso beans that inspired this whole extravaganza. I have another box, now, from Trader Joe's, but these are special writing beans, just for this story.