Saturday: The Escalation of Strange

Saturday ended up with a high degree of strange activity taking place.  Unusual, strange, weird--whatever.  Any single event that unfolded in itself wouldn't have been a big deal or worth a mention.  Coupled all together, however, and it makes you write a blog about it.

It started out fairly ordinary.  Sue went with a few of her offspring to hit up the local Heather Highlands neighborhood garage sale.  I stayed home and tidied up the side of the garage where my Harley lives, expecting (hoping?) a guy would show up to look at it.  Well, true to Craigslist shoppers, he didn't show up or even call.  No biggie.  I got some stuff cleaned up at least.  Sue got back and showed me all the goodies she had bought and we had lunch.

We decided to take our cameras out for a shoot--to Auburn's annual Petpalooza event.  The place was way bigger than I recall it being (I hadn't been to it in a couple years at least), and there were vendor tents all over the place.  There were lots and lots of people out with their interesting pets all right, but not as much wackiness in the form of costumes and stuff.  It occurred to me later that it was probably because we were there after they have their noon parade.  Last time I was there it was more like 11am and the place was loaded with weirdness.  We did get a few good shots and had a good time.  On the way home I suggested we hit up an Auburn skate park.  After all, it was Saturday so there should be a bunch of kids out there having fun and presenting photographic opportunities to us.  Not so.  It was barren.  Not a person in sight.  Okay, let's go home.

We weren't home very long, and poof--the power went out.  What the hell?  There was no wind or bad weather.  It was less than a week prior that we lost power to bad weather, so we're both going, "Not again!"  Well, we dug out the voltage inverter, plugged both the cable modem and the wifi router into it and sat their all cocky doing our internet business as usual--only using our iPads.  We decided to watch an episode of The Walking Dead (our new favorite show on Netflix).  We just got it going and was getting into the show when the video just froze.  Hey, what's going on?  I looked at the modem and the top light was blinking and the rest were dark.  Yep, the cable was dead.  What the hell?  We sighed and just sat there and played games and passed the time.

When it got closer to dinnertime, the power came back on.  Yippee!  We got our stuff all set up to have grilled chicken patty sandwiches which included nuking something to warm it and putting my buns in the toaster.  We had the computers up, a few clocks reset, and the power went out again.  Arghh!  It wasn't out all that long this time.  We had our dinner taken care of and were passing the time.

The power came on.  We were both wondering, "Do we bother resetting anything?  How long will it stay this time?"  Well, we went ahead and reset everything and all was good.  We called up the episode we started watching to resume where we had left off--this time on Sue's computer.  We were watching it for a short time when her screen went black.  What?  Not again!  No, not again--this time her computer died!  Apparently, the voltage fluctuations wreaked havoc with her power supply because it just expired quietly.  It had seen enough and gave up the ghost.

No biggie to us--we're computer nerds.  We have extra stuff around.  I pulled a power supply out of a storage box and opened her computer up.  We had replaced it to begin with because she needed more power plugs than her old one had.  That meant this replacement wouldn't quite cover all the drives her computer had but would get us by until we could buy a new one.  After swapping it all in and hooking it all up it didn't work.  I opened mine up, and because our computers both had the identical power supply, I opted to put mine in hers (nice guy eh?).  That got hers up and running just fine.  Mine... not yet.  The power supply from the spare parts box never did work in mine either.  Fortunately, Keith had an extra one in his room and I installed that and got everything running smoothly.

We finally got to finish the episode of the Walking Dead.

By then it was bedtime.

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