We ended up having a Flash Party™ with Emily Friday night. Although we’d both had a very busy week, when Emily came over, we knew a party was imminent. Nick passed out around 3am and I finally got Emily corralled and back home (across the street) by 4am. Whew! Long day!!
We slept till around 11am on Sat then got up and started our yard work. We felled 2.5 trees and planted 5 trees yesterday. Oy! We came in around 4pm, showered and collapsed on the couch. The rain started a while later and we fell asleep. I woke up at 6:45pm and freaked because we were supposed to be up at D&B’s at 7pm for Quinn’s birthday bash. We got ourselves ready to go in 45 minutes and were happy to find out that Caroline et al. were also late!
The evening at Dave & Busters was fun! A bit more money that we had budgeted, but that’s ALWAYS the way it is with these things. If you think you’ll spend $50, bank on $100. Every time. That was just for dinner. With the game cards it was $145. Eh, it was fun in any case! Shoutouts to everyone – especially Ken and Deb for their Julie the Cruise Director duties. Well done! :-)
Thanks to the lovely rain all night, the new trees are well watered in. It’s very windy and chilly today, which makes it the perfect day to sit here and work with my new Mac!
I’ve been bitching about my G4 becoming flakey lately, so Nick got me a dual 1.8Ghz Mac off of eBay. We got the Mac, the Apple Care warranty until Sept., keyboard, mouse and a flat screen CRT monitor for $1000. What a DEAL! These Macs go for $2000 pretty much everywhere. The guy who sold the system had just graduated from school and needed a laptop rather than a tower system. The Mac needs more RAM, but other than that it’s pristine. Well, it WAS pristine until frelling UPS apparently dropped the damn box and bent the aluminum frame. :-(
The Mac’s internal parts appear undamaged but the case and front foot is completely bent. It had $1000 insurance on it, which is a good thing since UPS will pay for the repairs which will be $685. The case alone is $500, plus we want complete diagnostics run by Onyx and then there’s labour to install the part. Aside from the diagnostics, however, we’ll probably pass on the $500 case. I don’t care about it and we could use the $500 to offset what we spent. UPS is being a little pissy about this, but I’ll be damned if they’ll rip me off AGAIN. When we ordered the iMac Flower Power for my niece, UPS damaged the plastic on it and we never got a damn dime. We think that the sellers probably cashed in on the insurance if any was ever paid. UPS were assholes to us about it and we lost out. Not this time. I’ll see them in court before they’ll get away with the damage this Mac has. It’s significant damage:
Anyway, we’ve had a busy and fun weekend. Next weekend is the Atlanta Comic Expo (or ACE con as we call it). It’ll be fun, although I have trepidation about the DragonCon people running it. Those people are the problem with DragonCon now, so it’ll be interesting to see if they bring their politics and bullshit to this “new” con. You know which way I’d bet! LOL We’ll be there Saturday and Sunday with a couple of art shows sandwiched in on Sat night. :-) [edit 4/09: ACE made it two whole years before it was “reabsorbed” into DragonCon. Sad. -A]