New computer!

There has been a loss in the family. Yes, my computer: loyal servant for 8 years, has kicked the bucket. I attribute it to the Bay Area's frequent (thought getting better) power outages which seem to have fried my motherboard. As my father puts it, "with each power outage, your electronics die a little death." I tried to turn it on, and the fan was running, but it never booted up. I then took it into our local computer fix it store- I won't say which one, but it rhymes with Vest Guy. It was a pretty great sight- I had the giant computer tower in the stroller, with a rain coat over it because it was pouring rain, trying to lead poor Ben into the store. I took the pcu over to the guy behind the fix-it desk and told him what had happened. He plugged it in and used his vast geek knowledge to announce flatly- "well, I plugged it in, hear the fan running but it is not booting up." Duh. "Looks like your motherboard is fried." Double duh. In the next 45 minutes I managed to choose and purchase a new computer, monitor and printer, fed Ben some fruit snacks I found at the bottom of my bag to bribe him to get up from his spot rolling around on the floor, put his shoes back on and sit in the now empty stroller, and get back out to the van with all of my new stuff to race over and pick Jackson up from school. It was a new record in decision-making time. Anyway, we'd been saying we need a new computer for a while now, it had been acting up, but this was not the way I wanted it to go out. I need more time to say good bye.
FYI (technophobes: stop reading now!) - I learned something new about transferring data- I bought something called a hard drive enclosure, which turned our internal hard drive into an external hard drive, so that we could transfer documents, etc. via USB cable, instead of having to pay the dorks to transfer the data for us. Plus we can now use that drive (which was a perfectly good 350 gb drive) as a backup/external drive. Pretty cool.