For the past several months, I've been living in a cocoon. Almost every night, I've been spending time with my girlfriend, in a girlfriendly world of girlfriendliness. It's been wonderful and fun, like effing Disneyland to tell you the truth, all TiVo and Scrabble and dualing laptops, with the occasional night of pizza-binging and/or beer-swilling and/or karaoke singing to round things out, and all of this taking place during my prime hours of 12-5am. Things have been ideal, is what I'm saying.

And yet, I'll have to admit that when said girlfriend announced that she was leaving for a short business trip, and that said business trip would correspond with my rare consecutive two days off, I kinda got excited.

It's not that I don't love my girlfriend. Jeezus, do I ever love my girlfriend. Have you seen her? Have you spoken with her? She's ... never mind, you don't want to hear all that. But it's been a long time since I've done the kind of things that I do when she's not in the neighborhood.

So after dropping her off to catch her plane this morning around the time of day we parted ways on our first date, I started thinking of all the vile things I was going to do as soon as she left Minnesota soil.

I'm totally gonna read some more of that book I just got ... then, I'm gonna make those subtle tweaks to my website I've been thinking about for awhile ... ultimately, I'd like to upgrade some of the software on that old G4 Powermac ... really trick it out ... look into a new wireless card maybe, but not necessarily ... I'll probably not get one but I'll look into them ...

And while I was sad to see my lover go away, internally, I was warmed by all of my grand plans. Not only did I accomplish all of them, but I also took a walk and photographed Lake Superior. Hello, my name is Barrett and I'm a geekoholic.

I have no idea how I acquired this many computers. Sure, I have the laptop, which is my main machine. But I also have two crappy desktops. One is a Powermac that I want to use except that it isn't (wasn't) quite good enough, and the other is a PC that I use all the time while cursing vehemently.

Back in the day, I always swore that I'd never be a Mac person. They just seemed so smarmy. And even today, those Mac ads with the jackass in the hoodie? God, I hate those ads. Still, Macs are so much better than PCs. It's like driving a really nice car when you're used to driving a shitheap. You sit behind the wheel and sure, it takes some getting used to, but suddenly you realize that driving is really, really fun. Because everything is absolutely smooth and easy, and nothing is going wrong. Even an old Mac is better than a PC.

The G4 is pretty old and crappy. I bought it secondhand simply because it was cheap. The hard drive is small, and the fan is really loud. But I think I'm ready to retire the PC and all its crappy, garbagey ways.

And then I'll officially be a Mac person. There's no going back. My girlfriend always calls me a hippy, which I have to say is so, so wrong. She looks at the soy milk in my fridge, along with the cage-free eggs and the organic spinach, and she giggles. I deny it and she points to the Amy's products. The soy yogurt. This whole Mac conversion doesn't help my case.

I prefer the term, "internet bohemian."