Last days of the Big Blue House, and more
Aug/01/08 09:41
Final Days of the Big Blue House
Well, it's a little after-the-fact, but here's the report from the final days at the Big Blue House. Sounds like a History Channel special, doesn't it?
The second week at the BBH was pretty much like the first.
Trips to the beach, breakfast at Bill's Pancake
House, a return trip to the boardwalk, a miniature
golf game that seemed to never end. Now when you see
the pretty pictures of the kids
navel-deep in surf, keep in mind that the
highest reported water temperature that week was
fifty-nine degrees, as reported by the
sign at the bait shop. Youbetcha, I kept track.
Needless to say, the grownups went about
knee-deep to watch the kids, and that's as far
as we went. Yikes.
The highlight of my week was upgrading my
little Mac Mini. When I bought him, I had no idea
that it was so hard to upgrade the memory. The techs
at the Apple Store told me they weren't allowed to
upgrade memory, even though they had to crack him
open last year for a problem with the optical drive.
If you insist on upgrading memory, Apple's officially
recommended tool is a putty knife. And a
sedative. Cause it's nerve-wracking.The official
tech-support video I watched 80x to learn how to
remove the old RAM opened the case and said: "If you
have bluetooth and airport, you may have some
additional parts to unplug and remove." Right. Thanks
for the tip, guys. I'll just deal with the
unidentified spaghetti when I get to it. I enlisted
Mike to "help" replace the RAM, and brave soul that
he is, he did the actual cracking open of the case,
and I "supervised," adding an extra hand in the
procedure where needed. Luckily, we were able to just
move the bluetooth and airport antennas to the side
and just hold the chassis out of the way to get at
the old RAM chip, so there wasn't any additional
disconnecting/reconnecting involved. And it worked! I
am so happy.
The only odd event that week was a mystery leak, water coming down from the ceiling in a downstairs bedroom, nowhere near any water pipes. Luckily, it stopped the next day, and it's still uncertain whether it was water somehow blown in from a serious overnight storm and carried along ductwork, or an air conditioning fluke, but the guys got the chance to play with drywall and spackle, so it was an enriching experience, I suppose.
Keith continued to kick butt at Scrabble.
Then, on Saturday, it was time to pack up and leave. As the only family in the house to have a cooler, we were saddled with a whole lotta food, plus the stuff we had packed plus the embarrassingly large beverage stash. For the first time in 13 years, we weren't able to fit it all in the Civic, and we had to send some stuff back with the Bucher-Dials, who had extra room in their van. Thank you!
Since we've been back, we've still been pretty busy. Cliff reported for jury duty, and was selected as a juror, luckily for a 2-day case. Woo hoo! Thank goodness we don't have to mess with that for a while. Hannah had two weeks of swimming lessons, taught by a nice blonde 20-year-old named John, whom Hannah liked a whole lot. I busied myself with upgrading my other computer, a 50-pound eMac. This procedure was relatively straightforward, the eMac has a trapdoor and easy access to the RAM chip. But it weighs 50 pounds. So to swap out the RAM, I had to turn the beast over, unplug it (yes, Apple insists that you wait until then to unplug it, for static electricity purposes) open the trap door, and pop in the new RAM chip next to the original one. I did so, reattached the trap door, turned it over, plugged it in, attached the keyboard and mouse, restarted it,... and only one RAM chip showed up. So I disconnected the keyboard and mouse, turned it over,... etc. until I got to the RAM, and removed and reseated both RAM chips, then performed the whole re-connection thing again. This time.... it wouldn't start. Black screen, ominous beep beep beep alarm, which turned out to be the Triple Beeps of No RAM Whatsoever Alert. Not a good thing. Disconnected, unplugged,... yadda. Then I removed both chips, reseated them and pressed really, really hard (I've still got groove-marks on my thumbs), and voila! I've now got the maximum (it's an old machine) 1GB of RAM in my other computer. Go, me.
So, believe it or not, Cliff's classes start in a couple of weeks, and Hannah's school starts not too long after that. Yeah! There are still some fun things to do. Hannah likes going to the pool, and just last week we went to Yorktown to see Jay and the Americans, bringing along Hannah's friend Zoe. When asked what part of the show they liked best, Zoe replied: "The break." Oh well, we tried. We had a good time.
Enjoy your summer, guys.
Well, it's a little after-the-fact, but here's the report from the final days at the Big Blue House. Sounds like a History Channel special, doesn't it?
The second week at the BBH was pretty much like the first.
The only odd event that week was a mystery leak, water coming down from the ceiling in a downstairs bedroom, nowhere near any water pipes. Luckily, it stopped the next day, and it's still uncertain whether it was water somehow blown in from a serious overnight storm and carried along ductwork, or an air conditioning fluke, but the guys got the chance to play with drywall and spackle, so it was an enriching experience, I suppose.
Keith continued to kick butt at Scrabble.
Then, on Saturday, it was time to pack up and leave. As the only family in the house to have a cooler, we were saddled with a whole lotta food, plus the stuff we had packed plus the embarrassingly large beverage stash. For the first time in 13 years, we weren't able to fit it all in the Civic, and we had to send some stuff back with the Bucher-Dials, who had extra room in their van. Thank you!
Since we've been back, we've still been pretty busy. Cliff reported for jury duty, and was selected as a juror, luckily for a 2-day case. Woo hoo! Thank goodness we don't have to mess with that for a while. Hannah had two weeks of swimming lessons, taught by a nice blonde 20-year-old named John, whom Hannah liked a whole lot. I busied myself with upgrading my other computer, a 50-pound eMac. This procedure was relatively straightforward, the eMac has a trapdoor and easy access to the RAM chip. But it weighs 50 pounds. So to swap out the RAM, I had to turn the beast over, unplug it (yes, Apple insists that you wait until then to unplug it, for static electricity purposes) open the trap door, and pop in the new RAM chip next to the original one. I did so, reattached the trap door, turned it over, plugged it in, attached the keyboard and mouse, restarted it,... and only one RAM chip showed up. So I disconnected the keyboard and mouse, turned it over,... etc. until I got to the RAM, and removed and reseated both RAM chips, then performed the whole re-connection thing again. This time.... it wouldn't start. Black screen, ominous beep beep beep alarm, which turned out to be the Triple Beeps of No RAM Whatsoever Alert. Not a good thing. Disconnected, unplugged,... yadda. Then I removed both chips, reseated them and pressed really, really hard (I've still got groove-marks on my thumbs), and voila! I've now got the maximum (it's an old machine) 1GB of RAM in my other computer. Go, me.
So, believe it or not, Cliff's classes start in a couple of weeks, and Hannah's school starts not too long after that. Yeah! There are still some fun things to do. Hannah likes going to the pool, and just last week we went to Yorktown to see Jay and the Americans, bringing along Hannah's friend Zoe. When asked what part of the show they liked best, Zoe replied: "The break." Oh well, we tried. We had a good time.
Enjoy your summer, guys.