rax | I am redefining success to include this. (Reply)

After all of that, despite being on a later flight than I was supposed to be out of ORD and only because I tossed my sandals in my bag and sprinted barefoot through the airport, I caught the last third of the ceremony, had lunch with my family [0], and made it back to the airport in time to have my flight back to ORD be delayed, potentially jeopardizing my getting home on time, and... I don't even care that much. I did what I came here to do, and it was worth doing, and as far as I can tell the Rik-Zury-Nicole assemblage is proceeding apace and better in my absence in terms of housing-related stuff. So if I get in at a slightly stupider hour than planned? I will survive. I will not be thrilled, but I will survive.

Also yesterday in my nine-store errand run of doom, I retail therapied myself a new MacBook Air. So far here are my impressions:

Transferring information from an older laptop over wifi takes foreeeeeeeeeeveeeeeeeeer. [1]
The hardware is so fucking gorgeous. Oh man. I look at MacBook Pros now and think "how chunky and blah." The keyboard is wonderful and the screen resolution is high enough that I could turn up my font size on my main terminal window! That's really exciting, I promise.
Lion... meh? They made Spaces less good (no more horiz/vert grid layout, harder to access, requires going into detailed documentation to find it at all), the iOS-style dashboards thing does not excite me, and you can't set a universal desktop pattern, you have to set it per space. Also you can't right-click the dock anymore to get the dock configuration widget and I realize that's really minor but it bothers me.
The main reason I got this, other than "every two years I kind of want a new laptop," is that I spent two months of the last twelve living out of a single bag, and I suspected that the space in the bag and, to a lesser extent, the weight saved by using a smaller laptop would matter. I am not sure yet, but I suspect that it will be at least a little better, and maybe a significant improvement.
...plus I just like touching it
The process of buying it was... very Apple, and not in a way I really liked. I wanted to walk up to a counter and say "Hi, I want to buy this laptop." Instead I had to touch an iPad and tell it I wanted someone to come help me, and wait for someone to come help me, and then he showed up and kept having to go back and forth to get things, and the credit card was declined at first (not Apple's fault), and you just sort of mill around buying things and then rather than taking the thing with you and setting it up, they want you to unbox it in front of them, and are all "You do the honors" as if you are unwrapping something truly special and not just the laptop you decided you wanted because the really good Vaios are like $2000. I found it really weird. I had considered ordering it online, but I would have had to pay taxes anyway (AZ's sales taxes are ridiculous, y'all are shitty libertarians, 9% sales tax and no public trash pickup?? What the hell are you spending the money on? [2]) and this meant I could take it with me on this trip. Which was super nice last night, because long battery life.

Relatedly I am soooooooooo tired. When this flight gets here --- they are claiming in 5 minutes or so and only being 5 or 10 minutes late --- I am getting on first, using my ~~privilege~~ frequent flyer status, and trying to fall asleep before it takes off.

[0] Well, I watched my family eat lunch. But that is what Rachels do at restaurants.

[1] Wait is it firefox that won't let me press-to-repeat anything but vowels, or OS X? whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

[2] Probably we spend it on racism. ;_;

Edited to try to make crosspost happen!