Well, I got my PowerBook fixed a few weeks ago.  It arrived safely and contently to my house after being treated at the Apple Depot in Texas.

There wasn’t a real diagnosis on the problem, but the repairs they did were in line with everything I read online.  They replaced the entire top panel of the PowerBook.  This was the suggested repair by many a narcoleptic PB user online.

I cleaned it up nicely and let my 15-year-old brother have it.  He was getting a lot of mileage out of GarageBand, having fun playing with the korn shell in Terminal and his old computer’s hard drive died a few months back.  So, I figured he was a good a candidate as any.

He was pretty silly about the whole thing.  He didn’t notice that I was trying to give it to him; he thought it was my newer MacBook Pro.  And, after I gave it to him Erica and I discovered that he had sent out several text messages to his buddies that read “my new laptop is here.  it’s freakin sweet.”

Last night, I walked him through getting his songs from his iPod Touch onto the PowerBook.  Apparently, Senuti now supports iPod Touches. :-)  It hasn’t in past versions.  He was able to figure it all out with just a few guideful IMs from me.

He’s also gotten a sweet laptop bag that I may have to steal from him.  It has pockets for his mobile phone, iPod, and a padded pocket for the laptop.

I know it went to a good home, and I can make sure it doesn’t get abused.

In preparation for some fun stuff to do with the youth group I work with, I dug up some quick and dirty (and cheap) experiments to give a try this past weekend.  Specifically, getting a hard boiled egg into a bottle and the infamous Mentos + Diet Coke geyser.  Ever tried them? They’re fun to do when bored. And you get a chance to make a mess.

Conveniently, since this past weekend was Easter we had our choice of boiled eggs to use for the first experiment. We picked one and grabbed an empty Frappucino glass bottle to use. You want a bottle that will have an opening that’s big enough for the egg to go into but not big enough to just fall into when sitting it on top of the opening. Take two matches, light them and let them burn for a bit. Drop them into the bottle and then quickly put the egg on top of the bottle. The egg should be sucked into the bottle because of a difference of air pressure (the matches were burning and were sucking oxygen into the bottle). Neat party trick, right?

Well, you can use a few reverse tricks to get the egg back out. One site we saw suggested blowing into the bottle. We must have done that wrong because all I got was smoke and matches in my face. You can hold the bottle upside down under hot, running water and it’ll pop out. Buck wasn’t as patient as I was and stuck vinegar and baking soda in the bottle and turned it upside down and the egg popped out quickly.

Sunday afternoon, we decided to give the Mentos + Diet Soda experiment. That was a lot of fun. We used a piece of 3/4 inch pvc pipe as our “mint loader” and placed it over the bottle. Our pipe was a few feet long, and after dropping half a pack of Mentos in the bottle we had a geyser that went up over 8 feet high. And it kept us relatively clean as well.

My sister has had horrible luck with anything electrical related today.  She calls me around 4:30 to tell me that she heard a loud “clunk” in her car door and then her driver’s side window just decided it needed to go down.  And stay in that position.

Approximately 30 minutes later, she informs me that the computer in my bedroom just decided to turn off and not come back on.  Later, she tells me that the internet went out for a bit.

I  finally got home and went to look at the computer.  I swapped power cords on it, changed surge protectors and couldn’t get it turned on.  I did begin to notice, though, that as soon as I’d unplug the cord and then plug it back in, the fan on the processor wanted to move.  I think the power supply went bad.

I don’t use the computer much at all.  My sister uses it more than me.  However, it has a DVD player/writer in it and it comes in handy when I want to watch DVDs.  I priced power supplies at Best Buy while on a quest to find an iPod Touch.  The cheapest they had was $80.  I didn’t really want to pay $80 to fix a 5 year old computer.

Cue eBay.  I got on eBay and found 2 of the exact same power supplies that were in that computer for $13.  So, I bought them.  Hopefully, that’s all that’s wrong with the computer.  If nothing else, it has some data on it I’d like to get off of it.

Still getting over my internal “time change” from last week.  Yes, I know I should be over it by now but I’m not.  Something weird has happened.  I cannot sleep later than 930am EST (630am PST) anymore.  This started while I was out in LA and hasn’t stopped.  I’m not complaining.  I’ve actually been up and doing stuff on the weekend mornings.  It’s just…weird.

Onto other things.  Last night Erica and I went over to Ben’s to hang out and watch a movie.  Lil Brian was there creating chaos and being funny for reasons he doesn’t understand.  Erica finally got her first real dose of Brian.  We also found out that his last name is Melvin.  I don’t know why that’s important.  But it’s a question I wanted answered for a while.  It’s like when you sit through crappy episodes of your fav television show just to get an answer that you’ve wanted to know for a while.

There was a plethora of entertaining conversation with Brian last night.  It ranged from Michael Jackson, to body parts (didn’t see that one coming, did ya?),  to bad accents, to why his mom won’t let him watch “Borat.”  The top quote of the evening pertains to the last item in the afformentioned list.

“My mom won’t let me watch ‘Borat’ because she says he makes fun of America.”

I’ve begun to doubt his mother will curfew him once school starts next week.  I just really don’t see that happening based on past experiences.  But, as annoying as the conversation can get with him, it also remains mildly entertaining.  It’s cheaper than ordering “HBO” or “Showtime.”

My mom finally got DSL today.  It was a birthday present to herself.  She’s been talking about it for ages and she finally went through with it.  My parents have had dialup forever.  At least 11 or so years.

She started dropping the hints hard and heavy to me over the phone.  “You can get me a wireless router for my birthday.”  “But you don’t have DSL right now.”  “But I might get it for myself really soon.  I can’t deal with dialup anymore.”

And today, she did it.  They sent me a picture message of the modem. It should be up and running in a few days.  So, I guess my mom’s getting a wireless router for her birthday.

My brother’s excited about it.  Now, he can get online with his Wii and Nintendo DS.  I’m excited about it too.  Now I won’t feel so “disconnected” when I go to visit them for a few days. Heh.

Just a few things.  I’ve been so bad about keeping this up lately.

1. Last weekend was Mother’s Day Weekend.  We drove back to visit our parents and say “Happy Mother’s Day” to our mother.  There have been a slew of really bad forest fires in that part of the state lately.  I had heard about it but I didn’t realise how bad it was until I experienced it.  When the winds blew just right on Saturday, the air was full of smoke.  You had to drive with your headlights on at 10am just to see the other vehicles on the road.  There was no visibility.

And just as quickly as the smoke rolled in, it went away.  The winds changed and it was clear Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday.

2. The older I get, the more I stay clumsy.  I’ve always been clumsy.  My mother calls it “accident prone”.  I call it unlucky.

Case in point.  I went to the bathroom early one morning this past week.  I thought I had a “map” of where everything was.  But I didn’t.  I managed to run into the edge of a shelf and bruise the area between my eyebrow and eyelid on my left eye.

3. I saw someone that almost fall down the other day.  It was funny.  He jumped over a small concrete barrier, misplaced his foot and tried to catch his balance.  I sat in my car and watched it unfold and laughed. Hard.  Why do we laugh when people hurt themselves in a non-lethal manner?

4. My brother is 14 and really into video games.  Last weekend, he got “Spiderman 3″ for his PS2.  He got so excited when he unlocked “black suit Spiderman” that he squealed like a little girl.  I’m still laughing at that.

The dark cloud hanging over my house I noticed as I was driving home yesterday summed up everything perfectly.  There was no need to say anything.  It just existed.  A perfect snapshot of everything that had happened over the past few days.

Being responsible isn’t always fun.  I got a phone call Friday night that required me to go back to work.  I had to walk out of a movie that a friend had paid for to go home and correct a problem.  However, when I got home I found my internet out again.  For the fourth day of the week.

The phone rang again.  I found out that there were internet problems at work.  So, I tried to find somewhere that was open.  There weren’t many decent places open at 10pm on a Friday night that I could do work.  We went to campus to get into the student learning centre.  They closed at 7 on Friday nights. WTF.

I opened the laptop and managed to get logged in and did what I needed to do.  In the cold, windy night.  Sitting against a marble pillar, letting the light from the hallway shine down on me for ambient lighting.  I was outside working, waiting for the battery to die on the laptop or for a security guard to tell me to leave.

I tried to eat supper at midnight.  That was a mistake, but I didn’t yet know it.  We got home and I plugged up the dying work phone and crawled in the bed.  The phone glowed blue all night.  Mocking me each hour as I woke up with stomach pain.  Eventually, I gave up and got up.

I had internet for a few hours on Saturday.  I got ready to go eat lunch and the work phone rang again.  I was driving, so I turned around and went back home.  I tried to login; I had internet but it acted like my password was bad.  So I went back to the office.

I finished what I needed to do and went for a late lunch.  I didn’t eat much; I felt sick most of the day.  My eyes were red from lack of sleep and they hurt.  We got back home and then I layed on my living room floor, face down, for a bit to try to make the pain go away.

I went to visit with the friends that I was supposed to go to the movie with Saturday evening.  We decided to go have dinner.  We got to the restaurant and they sat us down.  There were only two busy tables in there and more than enough restaurant staff to run the floor.  However, after 20 minutes of waiting, we still hadn’t had our drink orders taken.  So we walked out.

We got some fast food and went back to the house to watch a movie.  I got a text message telling me the internet went out again.  Fantastic.  I went home around midnight and crawled in the bed.

The next morning, I woke up at 7:30 without an alarm.  I got up to discover the internet was still out.  By now, I was quite livid.  So I called and arranged to have a technician come out to my house and fix the problem.

Somehow, during the day, I never ate breakfast or lunch.  3:00 came around and I decided to get something to eat.  I was irritable, bleary eyed and had a headache.  I had fought with ignorant masses in the large temple of consumerism in town.  All I wanted were groceries.  But I almost pushed down several children while walking through the aisles.  I had already told the man collecting money for the Lions Club that I didn’t have any money.

Then, we went to a coffee shoppe for a few moments of internet access.  We both had things we needed to do.  And I made a mistake and had a medium sized latte at 5pm. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well last night.

This morning was spent waiting on the service tech to come in and work on restoring my internet.  He replaced all the equipment in and out of the house only to determine that the problem was at the street level.

Eventually, I came into work a little later than normal.  My internet’s been restored. But I’m on call again this week.  I was supposed to turn it over to someone else; but they claimed they couldn’t do it.

So, you’ll have to excuse me if I seem a little “grumpy” today.

My sister has several rabbits.  I’m addicted to new electronic gadgets and whatnot.  She’s addicted to rescuing rabbits.

This past Monday morning, just before I went to my “orientation” at work, I noticed my sister had left the house much earlier than she normally did.  I checked my phone and I saw that I had a new voicemail.  It was from her.

Something happened to her bunny, Steve.  She told me his back legs stopped working and she rushed him to the vet.  Later that afternoon, we got the bad news.  Somehow Steve fractured a vertebre in his lower back.  He’s not paralysed, but he has problems hopping around.  We’ve got him in a cage so he can’t wander out of sight.

They say he’ll most likely get better, it’ll just take awhile.  Possibly even a few months.  So, keep poor little Steve in your thoughts.  He seems to be in good spirits and can move around a little.  But it still sucks for him.

I had a very short week at work this week. I worked Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. And it was a welcome short week. I had to work late this past Thursday, but I did it willingly knowing I wouldn’t have to go in on Friday.

E and I went home to visit our family for “Thanksgiving”. We’re not going to get the chance to go next week (I don’t get Friday off and honestly it’s not worth the 8 hour round trip). I was able to do some much needed errands and we actually got out of town at a decent hour.

We didn’t do much Friday night. I listened to the Coffee High football game with my mom. They played and beat a team in the first round of the state playoffs since 1982. My brother didn’t have to go to the game, since they didn’t make the 8th grade band students travel this year. E and B played the UGA version of Monopoly, Dawgopoly, and E spanked the pants off B.

Saturday, we didn’t do much of anything either. I watched “Cars” with E and B. It’s a cute movie and I’m a big fan of just about anything Pixar puts out. There was a little Italian car in the film that didn’t speak much English. He kept saying “pitstop. pitstop. pitstop.” I sat there, thinking, “why are they letting a character say ‘pissed off’ so much in a family film.” Then I realised he was saying “pitstop”. And I laughed. A lot. Another one of the characters ran a “cafe” for cars. They asked her what she had and she said “I’ve got gas. I’ve got a lot of gas.” And all the characters were chuckling at her. Give it a watch. It’s not as “NASCARy” as I thought it would be.

We played some more board games Saturday evening. Battleship, Clue and Balderdash. And I didn’t get on the computer or play any video games all weekend.

We had turkey and most of the good stuff today. Watched some “LOST” after lunch and then packed up and headed back here. This is a 4 day week, so here’s crossing fingers that it isn’t as crappy as the past 6 work days had been for me.

Buck, my little brother, and I have started an online photo gallery. I helped him set it up on my domain for some project work he needed for his 4-H DPA project. He’s doing “Computers” and needed/needs some examples of sharing projects he’s been involved with.

We went to the Georgia Aquarium last weekend and you can see loads of photos from the aquarium. There are also some other random ones we’ve recently taken. Enjoy.