Current mood: Muddled

I find myself suddenly in need of a USB hub. My Christmas haul included a digital camera and a scanner, and I received a hand-me-down Lexmark printer a few days later. All of these devices are USB, which is glorious. Between my two computers, I have eight USB ports, but two of the Mac's four ports are taken by the keyboard and the mouse.

The sun shines in a beautiful blue sky out the window to my right. However, it's not quite 50 degrees. To most Floridians, that's friggin' cold.

I've finally found a minute to answer e-mails that have been sitting in my Inbox for close to a month. Sorry, y'all. I'll try to get better about that.

I find myself on a rotating work schedule for the first time in a long time. This, of course, will be better than my previous work schedule, which was simply, "Be there all the time." For four weeks, I'll work Monday through Friday; for the next four weeks, I work Tuesday through Saturday, with Saturday being a night shift. Then, in four weeks, I switch back. There are worse scenarios, certainly. In an odd development, my job has actually been sort of fun the last week or two, now that Holiday Hell is over. This of course only adds to the confusion about my future; on Jan. 2, I was totally ready to give up newspapers and go work in a cubicle. Now, I'm reminded that some of the quirks of working in a newsroom are really very cool. It's enough to make you think ... well, to make you think I should probably be committed.

My mother's getting married in a few months. This is not something that, really, should not be a footnote in a series of bullet points. But she's been living with the guy for the last five years, so it's really something that was kind of inevitable has that kind of anticlimactic feeling of inevitability. I'm not 100 percent sure how I should feel about it, frankly. He's a fantastic guy, and being married to him will probably add years to my mother's life. And I'm happy that she's going to be doing something that makes her happy, after years of making decisions that have made her amazingly unhappy.

Back in the day, this is the point at which I'd pull the paper out of the typewriter, wad it up, toss it toward the wastebasket (probably missing to the left) and get on with my day. I'm reminded that the sound of pulling paper out of a typewriter was a pretty satisfying sound. No such satisfaction here.