and all i wanted was a BB gun

My holiday story involved my laptop. I know, how spiritual. About two or three months ago the left-side of the my MacBook experienced what we call white wine v. power cord connection-hole-area. The initial symptom was not good: no power at all - dead, dead computer with no battery nor AC operation. After a day or so the juice managed to sort itself out and it finally powered up but only worked via AC power; no battery charging. I took it to the Apple store about a week later; they popped it open, and then called me at work to tell me that it appeared exposure to liquid had occurred and it wasn't covered under the one-year warranty (I'll admit that the wine issue was not revealed at initial drop-off). But, for a one-time fee of $750 they could send it back to the plant and get it repaired. Awesome! A one-time $750 fee. That's really nice...only charging me once. I declined and decided to ride it out a bit longer before finally calling a computer repair place in Arlington that we'd used in the past for X's Vaio. I dropped it off a few weeks ago, alerting him to the liquid and the overall problems, paid the $100 up front for labor, and was told he'd order the module power/battery thingy and see if swapping it out would fix the problem. If that worked I'd pay another $125 and have a laptop with a future. After a week he called and said that, unfortunately, the new module hadn't fixed the issue so I was out the door for $100 in labor which was fine by me. Over the last few days I've been using the MacBook with the power cord and rueing the brilliant/not brilliant magnetic connection that pops right off if the cord or computer gets tugged. It's brilliant in that it would protect your computer crashing to a floor; it's not brilliant when any little nudge immediately powers down the unit. The final bit of this saga is what happened last night. With the boys out of the house we were sitting around doing what we do - X reading a fashion mag, me typing something or other on the computer - when I glanced up to the corner of the screen and instead of seeing an "x" declaring no battery power, charge, or connection, I see a 58% charged number. What the what? After another 20 minutes the battery was fully charged and everything is completely operational now. It's a truly miraculous story; I think I have a regenerative, living, computer. What are the odds? I must have passed along some karma over the last week or so; maybe paying all my local merchants in cash and saving them credit/debit card fees has come back to me full circle. Maybe not.

We've had rain and 40+ degrees over the last 24 hours and it's melted away most of the snow that was piled about the area. I'll push off the remaining slush from the driveway this afternoon.

We're doing roasted chicken, mashed, brussel sprouts (on the panini grill), turnip soup, and gravy for second Christmas tomorrow night. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by.

t