I'm thinking that a solution might be to buy a cheap PC notebook here. Is that crazy?
The other options are: buy a Mac here, which is really expensive and not ideal because of the weird keyboard issue.
Order a Mac at home and have my parents ship it here, which is probably also really expensive in the end, plus worry-prone and time consuming.
Order a Mac at home and... hope someone comes to visit me. That seems unlikely. (I missed the window of having someone I know bring it while waiting for the repair people to tell me that my old computer was dead. This pisses me off. Several things about the repair experience here piss me off, actually.)
Buy a cheap PC. Not ideal because I don't love them, and thus haven't spent that much time with them, and it'll thus take more time for me to get it set up (not that there's all that much I need on it). And I'll have to find a copy of Office, too. (Not that that should be too difficult.) But, on the other hand, I'll admit that there have been moments when having a PC would have made my life easier. And that's likely to keep happening; apparently the on-line form for a big Canadian grant is almost impossible to fill out on a Mac, for example, and there's always the need to bring extra adaptors with when linking a Mac to a projector, for example. So it would be a functional computer I don't love, but then also wouldn't care about that much when traveling, which a new Mac would be, that will also have its uses when I get back. I pretty much work on a desktop when I'm at home, so it's not like I'm replacing my main computer with this purchase.
So, are my rationales right? Or are there other things I'm not thinking through?
And, seriously, guys, this isn't just a rhetorical question. I know that friends and family and others read this, because I get the occasional email about it, even if there are rarely comments. (And I also know that I am not always a good citizen of the web when it comes to leaving comments anywhere, or even always of answering emails.) But this time, I could actually really use some advice. I'm trying to figure out if I'm missing something here, or if this is indeed a reasonable solution (I've made up my mind to do so many things with this, and perpetually had it changed by either new information or unexpected roadblocks.) So if you've ever thought about leaving a comment, this would be the time.
In return, here's another picture... not exactly a pretty one, but an interesting one, in a way. Really.

It's the view of the Moscow river from one of the bridges I sometimes cross. Novodevichi monastery would be off to the right. You can see (if you zoom in... this is a picture I'd recommend looking at the pop-up for) two Stalin gothic towers, on right in the middle, one lurking way in the background to the left. And the giant smokestacks on the river bank are from one of the central heating and electricity centers around Moscow. Oh, have I mentioned this? Hot water and heat are centrally supplied here. From one big factory to the whole region of the city. There are thus giant pipes sometimes underground, sometimes above ground, that shuttle hot water--boiling hot water--throughout the city. And it also means that for a few weeks every summer, the hot water gets turned off while they clean out the pipes. Which, I mean, good, but...