The fire alarm in our apartment complex went off, right when we were about to sit down to breakfast. Turns out someone’s young kid was trying to cook, and burned something. Standing outside waiting to be let back in felt a lot like college, when people used to pull the fire alarms just to be jerks.
I had a lot of trouble with my external hard drive. I ended up tearing it apart and sticking the drive in another enclosure. At one point I was sure I’d lost the only living copy of the database containing all of my journals since age 10. It continued to flake out in scary ways, so I eventually used my hardware budget from work to buy a [Time Capsule](http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/). All is well.
At the grocery store, trying to believe how many dollars Gillette wanted from me for a pack of cartridges, I finally got fed up and declared that there must be a better way to shave. It seemed like that for every other product I used, there was some kind of non-sleazy-seeming choice; the same must be true of razors. The Mach 3 and Fusion systems always struck me as kind of cheap and cartoony, a caricature of manliness that comes from the same fantasy land as the late-80’s G.I. Joe toys. The marketing uses the same dull, generically attractive women as beer commercials, and has the same insulting swoopy chrome branding as a cut-rate PC manufacturer. I did some exploratory Googling and came up with the legendary [How to get that perfect shave](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6886845) article; that led me to the whole traditional shaving revival that’s going on around the internet these days. The line about safety razors being the way Cary Grant shaved sold me right away. :D It wasn’t much longer that I was ordering my own Merkur handle and blades. Doesn’t it look orders of magnitude classier than the others?
