Kicked around by technology

It's been an eventful Christmas break for the Chicago Farnsworth's. Very eventful indeed. Unfortunately, Ashley and I have not been very quick about blogging about it. That's not for lack of desire, mind you. It's not even because we are still struggling to organize and put away the piles of stuff we brought home from Ashley's Mom's house (she had a storage unit with a mountain of...ahem...memorabilia, from which we gleaned the best stuff, filled the car, and made a huge pile in our living room). No, we haven't blogged for technical reasons.

Somehow we angered the technology Gods when we left Chicago. When we arrived home, we found that my pride and joy, the 24 inch monitor on my computer, will not function any more, ostensibly because of a power supply failure. And a replacement for the silly power supply will be over $50. We went ahead and ordered it but I have the feeling it will be a long time coming.

Well, no big deal, we have two desktops and two laptops in our house, so Ashley still had a computer and we had two laptops for me to choose from. Except that hers very suddenly will not power up. We tried a new battery (and of course, plugging it in). No luck. It never even gets to the part where it spins up its hard drive.

No worries, I still have my laptop. Except it suddenly (like, since we were at Heber's house) will not play DVD's. It turns out the computer doesn't even recognise that it has a CDROM drive.

So we put her monitor on my desktop and gave her my laptop. Somehow the speakers that we normally plus into have also ceased to function, at least with the laptop. Very frustrating for people who watch a lot of movies on their computers.

I have checked all these problems and they are all hardware issues. It's like we got struck by lightning, except that we completely unplugged all of our hardware including our computers when we left home. Maybe that was our mistake.

Three of our computers are pretty old anyway, so we were thinking about getting rid of them and getting a new, sweet, quad core processor with a DVD burner (so we can make home videos with greater ease). We'll most likely buy that soon. In the mean time, we are going to buy an interim monitor for Ashley's desktop. Just a cheap one to get us by. The new computer and new power supply are on the horizon, and then we will have a backup computer that can actually play a DVD.

Anyway, that was a long sob story. We've been really bummed because everywhere we look, things are breaking.

On the other hand, the odd upgrade has been known to lift spirits amazingly. We just need to figure out a good thing to do with the old computers. Can't you, like, melt them down and get gold out of them?

Anyway, that's why we haven't blogged yet. We are probably buying a monitor tomorrow, so we will blog ever so much. And with videos (thanks to our new Christmas video camera). :)