WFMW--Wireless Mouse and Keyboard.

Last Christmas, about the most ecstatic email I received after the holiday wasn't from any of the computer savvy young cousins, thanking me for the fantastic presents.

It was from my mother's college roommate. And she was SO EXCITED to tell everyone about her new wireless keyboard and mouse. They changed her relationship to her computer. She just loved them. And she highly recommended them as gifts to the geriatric set, since the elimination of the wires was helpful to pre-arthritic hands and easier to deal with.

Well, she had one over on me. I'd never heard of such a thing. But I was certainly intrigued. And as our computer grows wires like our dog grows fur (camera, iPod, Palm Pilot...) I loved the idea of eliminating wires. But I couldn't really get behind throwing money at this since I had a perfectly functional mouse and keyboard.

Sometimes, the universe listens to our innermost desires and provides. Our regular trackball mouse stopped going left. Well, it would go left, but it took about fifty vigorous clunk-and-drags of the mouse to make that happen. We tried everything--cleaned the mouse, cleaned the trackball, got out the qtips and alcohol, pluged it in to a different port...nothing. The mouse had reached the end of its days.

Enter the wireless mouse and keyboard. At first, I was just going to get the new mouse. But when I got to the store, I discovered a huge price range for them...and some of them weren't all that much cheaper than a mouse and keyboard. The Logitech Wave happened to be on sale that day, and I fell in love with how it felt on my hands and that it had a built in wristrest (one more thing off my desk!). So home it came.

I don't want to say it's perfect; there are one or two functionalities I miss or could live without (most notably, I can't click the wheel for faster scrolling, or if I can I haven't figured out how yet). But wow, for this stage in life too, the wireless is great. My boys are fascinated by the computer but can really wreak havoc sometimes by playing around with it. This way, if I'm, you know, going to the bathroom or something inconvenient while they are watching a Playhouse Disney thing, I can take the mouse and keyboard with me so they can only watch. It's been a great quality of life/peace of mind addition for me. And they can play with the old keyboard without harming anything and they like it since it's "real!"

That's what's working for me. How about you? And check out what's working for them at Shannon's blog this week.