If we hadn’t gone wireless in the house, I would have been perfectly content to give up the work laptop. Before we went wireless, work laptops tended to sit in their carrying cases in some dusty corner of the computer room until such time as I had to actually *use* them for work, and only then would they come out to play. It was only after we went wireless that work laptops started getting used on a more regular basis – mainly because suddenly I became mobile.

When I had to turn in my laptop back to Benthic Creatures I didn’t think much of it – not until the following week, when I discovered how annoying it was that I couldn’t just go camp out downstairs and still chat with people online, or curl up in bed with the fireplace on (since it’s been rather cold and soggy lately) while still staying connected.

My first suggestion was that we would get them for our anniversary – a sort of joint gift. Then this weekend I was grumbling about not having a laptop anymore, and suddenly there we were, standing in Fry’s Electronics, weighing the merits of processors and screen sizes and DVD drives.

Mine is named Hermione, because like the character in the books (and like every computer I’ve ever worked with), she’s incredibly smart, but a little bit know-it-all too and not always willing to share. Somehow it seems to fit.

Richard named his Dumbledore. This also fits. It’s kind of fun to see those names on our little home network now – Hermione and Dumbledore. We already have Hedwig and Norbert as our bikes. We should just rename our network workgroup to Hogwarts and be done with it.