I normally use the Apple Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad on my office computer, but when we leave town for a while, I turn them off so that their batteries don’t go dead and hook up a wired computer and trackball, and then I reverse the process when I come back.

This time, I left the trackball connected when I got home, since I had plenty of room for it. And I started using it in preference to the Magic Trackpad. It wasn’t a conscious decision to switch; I haven’t even done anything like photo editing where I might want the additional precision of the trackball.

Life is full of mysteries.

I ordered a few things from Amazon after we got back from Hawaii for delivery to the nearby locker. I was happy to see that they’d combined two of them (a filter for my wet/dry vac and a card of coin-cell batteries) into one shipment – that seemed to make a lot of sense. Then I picked up the enormous package.

You can see the filter in its box, occupying roughly 1/6 of the volume of the shipping container. The rest of the container was filled with air balloons, which I have to admit are an improvement over styrofoam peanuts.

It took me a while to find the batteries, which were tucked under one of the inner flaps of the container.

I’ve got two more small items coming from Amazon tomorrow; I wonder how big the boxes will be?