It had to happen eventually

I have two backpacks, I call them "work" and "away". They are different models of backpacks (both old, nondescript things) but they share the same color - green. In a rush to get out of the house and off to the beach I grabbed my work backpack and thew it in the super tanker thus forgetting to bring my Macbook and Roku while brining along everything I'd prefer to leave home and get away from. Darn.

Perhaps it's time to get one of those nifty backpacks I see people at work using. Better yet why not consult the good people at ThinkGeek:




Let's face it: you can't confuse the Chewbaca backpack with a work laptop. No way. This bag has style and it makes a statement. Thinkgeek also has a Yoda backpack but I think Chewy is more my style and certainly more "me". Let me know if you feel differently.

Maybe what I need isn't a backpack. Maybe what I need is a messenger bag. To that thought I present the Alchemy Goods recycled Messenger Bag:



Messenger bags have always stuck me as sort of "metrosexual" but I can't argue the bag's functionality. Because I just blew a lot of money on a weather-enabled GPS I probably won't be replacing much of anything that isn't broken for a while. That was the trade-off we made when purchasing the condo so I won't complain.

We knew money would be tight for about three years, and it surely is. It's been good for us, really, this financial change. We have drastically cut back on our spending and eating out. This has helped the checkbook considerably. The good news is once we emerge from our 36 month walk through the cash desert we will have hopefully trained ourselves to get by with less consumption of unnecessary goods. If I want something it's still easy enough to get: just volunteer for a week of primary on-call. You are practically assured to make at least $500.00 doing that. You'll pay for for that money, let me tell you. Sleep will be practically non-existent and you'll wrestle with psychological questions such as "does it really matter if our Hanoi, Viet Nam site is down?" Well guess what, somebody, somewhere around the globe DOES care about the Hanoi office and you'll be up all night on conference calls having to answer questions like "how did this happen" and "what is being done to resolve this outage". Oh, and get ready to call the local telco in Hanoi as well, that's always entertaining, let me tell you.

I'll wrap this up. I can't believe I forgot my Roku and laptop. The Charter Internet service is finally working well and we could have spent all day watching cool movies but NOOOOOOOO!!!! Next week we'll do just that I can assure you.