Last night, I had to make an emergency trip over to the Apple Store for a new keyboard. Yet again, my darling cats had spilled a glass of water on my desk, thus ruining my keyboard by rendering the "i" and "delete" keys non-functional. Last week, in the exact same fashion, they toasted my wireless mouse ($35) thus sending me to two stores to get the one I wanted.

So, I swore a lot of colorful words and pulled out my spare keyboard. I placed bids on a new Apple one on Ebay. Perhaps I can save myself some cash, as the one they ruined is $49 to replace. (Nasty comments about how expensive Apple keyboards are can be sent right to Apple, please and thank you.) This seems like a good idea and I feel I can deal with the annoyance for a few days, but the spare is missing the left shift key and the space bar is prone to getting stuck. Do you have ANY idea how much you use the left shift key or how visciously annoying it is to have more spaces than you wanted? I do now and realized it was really affecting my productivity to be constantly thrown off by that key missing or going back to delete extra spaces. So still trying to go for fiscal responsibility, I called my buddy Nate to borrow one of his. Then I remembered, he was off shooting some snowboard guy at Lee Canyon with his new Nikon D5 and probably having huge amounts of fun.

So it came down to it, do I wait to win the auction and for it to ship to me while being constantly annoyed and losing productivity or do I just go get the damn thing? What made all this worse, of course, is that IT'S MY FAULT. Cats do not have hands and they did not leave the water on my desk and I didn't learn better after the whole mouse thing. I know how much they like to drink the water out of my glass and how much the kitten likes to jump all over the desk, but yet here I've forgotten AGAIN to take the water off the desk.

I am now $54 poorer, but far less annoyed and will be investing in a cup with a lid for my desk.