Just a few random thoughts before tax class...

1. I’m slowly being dragged, technologically, into the late 20th century, and I’m finding that I enjoy some of the things that other people take for granted now. For all of my childhood and time as an undergraduate at KU, my parents never had cable television. My mother, brother, and I wanted it, but my father said that it was a waste of money and that we wouldn’t be getting it. So we didn’t. It wasn’t until only a year before I moved out that my father relented (once his golden boy, the drug addict he invited to live in our home, suggested it).

I have cable now in my apartment, and let me tell you, it is everything I hoped it would be and more. I enjoy having the opportunity to come home and turn on the television and watch the news. I like being able to watch the Daily Show and The Colbert Report now and then. It’s exciting that I get to watch C-Span when I can’t sleep at night.

Over the Christmas break, my brother helped me pick out a cell-phone, too. Having a cell-phone is fantastic. I don’t have to worry about having a land-line. I really wish they had a plan that gave you fewer minutes, though. I probably only spend about 3 hours on the phone in any given month, and 2.5 hours of those will be calls to (or from) my brother, and since he has a phone with the same company, I don’t get charged for those minutes anyway. I’m starting to wonder whether having my own place will be like when I was at KU, though. In five years living at KU, my parents only called me on the phone about once every three months (and almost always because they wanted something - "come home and sign this insurance form" or the like). I only got 6 phone calls in 5 years that were just to say ‘hello,’ and five of them were on my birthday. So far, my parents haven’t called once in almost three weeks.

2. I’m listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s "Scheherazade" right now, and I’m once again reminded why I love his music.

3. I hate the auto-formatting function on WordPerfect. It came pre-installed on my computer when I bought it, and for a long time, I liked how WordPerfect functioned. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any way to turn off the auto-formatting function. If I type "news:" on a document, the program automatically turns "news:" into a link that goes to nothing. If you try to put a web address into a document, it automatically turns it into a link, underlines it, and colors it blue. You can remove the underline and make the text black again, but I can’t seem to turn off the linking. I've just ordered a new computer online (should be here in a few weeks) and made sure to switch to Microsoft Word instead.