This past weekend was my birthday. On Sunday, I turned 36. So, I had to have more fun than usual. Unfortunately, I have a cold, again. This is the 2nd one in a month! And so I’m really getting sick of it. I think this one’s finally going away now, but it peaked from Thursday to Saturday.
Thursday night, Beth and I went to Bayou Bob’s for Cajun food. Yum yum! I really like that place. I had gumbo, fried shrimp, mashed potatoes, salad, and hushpuppies. Then, we went to Fado for their Saint Patrick’s Day celebration. It was a madhouse – a thousand people crammed into a white tent shouting at each other, and a couple of bands. We were so close to the stage that sound quality was fairly bad. I think I understood about 4 words the singer sang, out of a dozen songs.
Friday night, Mom, my cousin Deb, and I went to see the world premiere of Vertigo. That’s a production from Boulder’s Lemon Sponge Cake, a contemporary ballet group. I thought it was good, and a whole lot less painful on my ears than the previous night. The dancing – especially the second half – was pretty abstract. I think the first half was better. There were a couple dancers who were amazingly good, and a couple who were obviously a little shakier than the rest.
Saturday during the day, friends came over for gaming and we played the “grand finale” of a D&D dungeon crawl adventure. It was, as everyone predicted, very anti-climactic. But it was fun. Then, I cleaned house a little and relaxed, while waiting for the evening to roll around. Saturday night, about 17 of my friends gathered for my birthday dinner at Hibachi Japanese Steakhouse in Westminster. Since our kitchen project still isn’t completely done, Beth didn’t want to have a birthday party for me at home. So we went out for Japanese food. It was good, and great fun to have such a big group turn out to say hi and munch grilled food with me.
Sunday was set aside for chilling out. I watched some TV, tried to catch up on boring chores and stuff, and worked on the Danger Beach project some. You see, this summer’s Conviviality Theater production is in the planning stages now. I submitted an idea for a theme, along with 7 other people. Well, my idea, called “Space Monster at Danger Beach” was voted #1 out of all of them. So, we decided to have 2 weeks of movie nights, where the group could watch segments of DVDs that reflect possible ideas for the show. Sunday, I watched parts of 4 or 5 1950’s B-movies, taking notes to later share with the group. I also fought for hours trying to make a DVD on my PC that my DVD player could read. I failed.
The weekend ended on a sour note. It wasn’t a good weekend for electronics. First, on Saturday, I walked downstairs and was about to use my PC, when a huge bolt of static electricity shot out between my finger and the computer keyboard. The PC siezed up then. I turned it off, and tried to restart, but it would just make this sickly buzzing noise instead of booting. I tried several times, and always the same behavior. I felt sure that static had just fried my motherboard or my hard drive or something. Fortunately, though, I found that just unplugging the keyboard and plugging it back in fixed the problem. I can’t explain why, but I was relieved.
So then on Sunday, I was watching B-movies and typing up notes about them in my laptop, when I noticed the battery was getting low. I plugged in the AC cable to what I thought was the power jack in the back. A few seconds later, I smelled some unusual burning smell. And then a couple seconds later, smoke literally began to rise up from between the keys. It was a eerie effect, like a fog machine, coming up from my fingers on the keyboard. I panicked and pulled the power cord out, but it was too late. My motherboard was fried by then. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I think that either I plugged the power into the right port and some kind of power surge killed it, or what I thought was the power port was actually the USB port and I sent a huge current somewhere it shouldn’t have gone. How is it possible to plug in a power cord to a USB port, you may ask? I’m not sure myself, but that’s what was right next to the power, and when I looked at it, the plastic thing that holds the metal pins together in the USB port were bare. I guess the plastic thing had fallen off at some point in the past.
What I was most upset about was that all the work I’d done on writing the “Danger Beach” stuff and my rock opera “Welcome to Earth, Shorty” hadn’t been backed up. So, I feared I had just lost the fruits of about 35 or 40 hours of really good creative labor. Fortunately, I took the dead laptop in to a local PC service shop and they were able to recover my files from it. I guess the hard drive actually lived. But the technician said the state of the motherboard was quite dramatic. Now I’m sending it in to Best Buy because I happened to buy their service plan when I bought the thing over 2 years ago, and this should (I hope) be covered under it. If so, the PSP is definitely paying off in this case.