Major mouse update this time. The furry, no-button mouse must have become hungry while we were in Jersey, and it's expertly eaten all the food off all the traps without triggering any of them. We will have to consider an escalation of hostilities.
Meanwhile, I had ordered another of my all-time favourite mouse on Ebay (MS Intellimouse with Intellieye 1.0), and it arrived today, after dreadful shenanigans with the post office (The Government Agency Formerly Known As Consignia™). So, bolstered by reports of just plugging in mice with buttons and wheels and having them work, I just plugged it in. Discouraged, I downloaded the shiny new Intellipoint drivers for OS X. Nothing, nada. Couldn't get it working on either of the PCs either, even the one that already has an identical mouse. However, it worked perfectly with the other PS/2 adapter, so the problem's not the mouse. Tried plugging it into the USB ports and remembered that the USB ports on that machine are fritzed.
It appears that the new MS drivers don't actually support this mouse; it's been edited out of MS history, 1984 style.
Meanwhile, I needed to write some .pdfs. And Mac OS X writes .pdfs natively. Of course, the files I had to convert were in Word. And Appleworks did a rubbish job of opening up a copy of PNNewt, even by the standards of these things. (Which are not good. Dr Plokta's standard test for the adequacy of third party Word readers is to open a copy of Plokta in them. They always fail.)
I worked out that I didn't actually need Office, and could manage with just getting Word for the iMac, and using Appleworks for my very basic spreadsheet and presentation needs. But it turns out that Microsoft don't sell 'just Word' for the Mac; and there's no Mac equivalent of the "Home Essentials" pack that provided Word cheap to the masses.
I might be able to get an educational discount on Office(my five-year-old has an essential need to produce complex fanzines and manage the accounts of a large international conglomerate); I should look into that.
9:38:41 AM 
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