Brandywine Books is indeed your go-to venue for major publishing news! Today, for instance, I find this item, selected purely at random from among the many notices that flood our executive offices:

West Oversea is now available as an ebook on Amazon!

Granted, it was available on Amazon the day before yesterday, too. But in the interim I have worked my publishing magic. WO is no longer a Nordskog Publishing book, but part of my own burgeoning publishing empire.

Tomorrow I hope to get the paper version uploaded.

I may or may not make a splashy announcement about that. Depends on how slow the news day is.

Today was a big day for me for another reason. I finally found myself with a few hours I could call my own, and I went out and bought myself a new laptop. For years I’ve been bouncing from one cheap laptop to another; you may recall me kvetching a while back about how hard the letters on my keyboard were to read, and the fact that I couldn’t view the thumbnails of my saved photos. The keys on this one are white on black – and illuminated(!). And I can see the thumbnails just fine. Seems to have been a matter of digital memory or the flux capacitor or something. I am reveling in the snappy response and the vivid graphics.

Occasionally I get a brief respite in my life where my financial head is above water. This is one of those times. So I treated myself. A parsimonious man I am, son of a haywire farmer. Making a semi-large expenditure is a challenge. But I do use the contraption for work, I must insist.

My only complaint is that I couldn’t plug in the plug-in thing for my wireless mouse. Have they changed USB connectors that much since I bought the thing? I’ve got a replacement coming from Amazon; until then it’s the humble track pad for me.

I also bought a little tensor lamp to illuminate the Sigrid Undset biography I’m translating, so I can work more easily at night.

It’s all conspicuous consumption, I guess. I did, after all, grow up near the home of Thorstein Veblen.