A Post That Is Not About Babies

Last weekend we got ourselves a little present (affectionately named The Dingus by SNG) that had nothing to do with individual endurance sports, clothes, or babies-- a refreshing departure. Some of you know that I was once a barista and have opinions about coffee, but I would not call myself a coffee snob (I grind my beans at the store, how snobby can I possibly be?). The Dingus is marvelous, and the culmination of a lot of research. But it is also a compromise since the machine I really want is one that grinds and measures the beans, connects directly to our plumbing for its water supply, makes great espresso, makes drip coffee in a separate system from the espresso (with different beans and different grind), and has a professional-quality frothing wand. Such a thing can't be found for love or money, although this one came close. So, um, no. The one we got hits the mark on good espresso, a good frothing wand, a LARGE water tank and a few nice extras. But we still have our drip coffeemaker and use it every day alongside The Dingus. Unfortunately, the horrendous noise it makes frightens e-baby, so I make her a steamer every couple of days to give her positive associations with the sound. She likes steamers.

Still, I reeeeeally wanted a machine that would hoook into the plumbing. *sigh*

Oh, another topic altogether. I need some opinions and advice on expanding storage capacity. The laptop, which is where we do most everything, is nearly out of disk space. The desktop has some space (not a lot), but is inconveniently located so it's not ideal for managing all our photos, videos, music... not to mention I have no hope of installing the software of the company I work for on a home computer since its footprint is gimongous. We're thinking of getting an external networked drive, say 500GB, to map as a drive on both computers and store all our big stuff (iTunes files, pictures, movies) there. What I don't know is whether this will work. iTunes strikes me as clever enough to disallow you to read your music from an external, shared network drive. There might be other issues I'm not considering as well. Does anyone have experience or advice on the most effective way to seriously expand our storage capacity, short of buying another computer?

We've been getting some rain here lately, which is great news for the drought. But I am about to eat my own feet from the boredom of not getting to go bike or hike or jog. Hopefully Sunday will be nice, since we have some friends coming over to cookout.