+1

I was using Mathematica in grad school (experimental physics). Great for simple number crunching, but awful for doing anything programmatically interesting, and annoyingly expensive.

I'm now using Python and loving it.

My sentiments are the same. I loved Ender's Game, but I see his morality infiltrate his writing in everything else of his that I've read (Speaker, Shadow, and a prequel about the parents). It's ubiquitous, and it makes his writing worse. I can't read his writing anymore.

They have a Windows desktop, but they don't use it anymore.

The iPad works great for them. I couldn't survive without a keyboard, but I live inside a vim terminal, pulling out to execute my code. My parents ... they don't code. Without that, there's literally nothing they do that can't be done on an iPad. Even things that seem more convenient (long emails) are tedious for them ("I have to go all the way _upstairs_ to do that? I'd rather sit on the couch, or compose it in the passenger set of the car."). They find it significantly more convenient than their desk top, and they argue over who gets to use it. They'll soon buy a second one.

Based on my parents' experience, I say have your mom ditch the desktop.

Also, microwaves only penetrate a centimeter or two. And yes, putting wire mesh (say, 1 cm square) in the walls will completely shield you from all of the microwaves. Of course, it might also cause cell-phone troubles. And your windows will be holes in your net, but that should be fine unless you sleep with a window and no screen, facing the towers.

But seriously, you should be fine.

I spent a summer working at the DIII-D tokamak in La Jolla, CA back in 2001, and this system was already in use. It had clearly been around for years, and the train (and track) had been packed & unpacked for the n-th time during a long period of scheduled downtime. Things were starting up again, and the neutron detectors had to be calibrated. It was my job to get the train working, making sure the connections were good by assembling the train outside of the chamber & sanding the aluminum (some of which was lightly oxidized and nonconductive) until the train ran smoothly.

Things were going well until I disassembled it for reassembly in the chamber. During the process, I dropped a small connector piece on the floor. My attitude was "oh, well, it's not worth my hourly wage to look for this," until I was informed that due to exposure to the radiation, the piece was considered nuclear waste, and had to be found, even if a replacement piece was only $0.01. Half an hour later, the problem was compounded when the lights went off. So there I was, in a huge bay, with a flashlight, looking for a tiny grey connector on a grey unpainted concrete floor.

I didn't realize it at the time, but the lights going off really sped up the search process. With a flashlight, I could simply crouch onto the ground and look for long shadows. I found the piece after about two minutes of trying this technique.