Laptop adventures

This has been an interesting week by far. On Monday my wife and I were watching "The Wackiest Wagon Train in the West" with Bob Denver from Gilligan's Island. Shari had fallen asleep during the movie because she wasn't feeling to well. Anyway, about halfway through the movie she wakes up and decides to sit up and very gracefully swung he leg off the couch over the carpet and square into her glass of grape juice spreading it all over the coffee table and the lap top we were watching the movie on. (Don't worry, the carpet is fine. A lot of blotting - NO RUBBING - a few glasses of water, some towels to soak up the water, and a little bit of shout stain remover, and the carpet is now cleaner then when we moved in. Back to the story . . . )

So we shut down the lap top, which was still working but we didn't want it to short out, and cleaned up the coffee table and the carpet, but you already knew about the carpet because I already explained that to you. Any who, when clean up was done we called FHE good and went to bed. The next day we didn't touch the lap top at all, which was interesting because Shari was not feeling well and came home ill instead of staying for her annual teachers dodge ball tournament (she missed last year because I was proposing, so I guess this is just not her sport) and she called in sick Wednesday.

Well, Wednesday, unbenounced to me, she tried taking apart the lap top to see why the screen was no longer working. The information was there and you could vaguely see the images but for some reason the LCD crystals were not lighting up. The computer worked just fine, but the monitor did not. This caused us some distress as we were wanting to take this lap top with us on our two week excursion to Idaho, in hopes we might occasionally be able to provide you all with an update of our adventures while we are out and about.

Needless to say, Wednesday night I got sick and so I took Thursday off of work. Now it was my turn to take apart the lap top and see if I could figure out why it was not working. No luck, I did later find out that Shari had taken it apart on Thursday because there was a missing screw and I asked her if she had it. Yep. She said she got it all put back together and she had this extra screw that she just could not find a place for it to go. Well, good thing I took it apart, because I found the homeless screws home sweet home.

Now we think about if Friday, turn it on and off a couple times, because the whole thing lights up when you first turn it on, but about 30 or so seconds in, and all the crystals stop working. No bright image. But you could still see the desk top so we could always strain our eyes and shut it down properly. We were not going to let the grape juice get the best of us. So we decided a team effort would be best and we both sat down and opened the thing up. Swabbed a few things with a damp Q-Tip and looked over everything we could thing of. There was one wire that coating looked like it was nicked and the wire was showing, so we put some electrical tape on it, used the compressed air to dry the machine out, and put the whole thing back together. To be safe we let it sit overnight to make sure that it was dry.

Saturday afternoon we got back from doing our final walk-through on our house (more about this later, but because it is later, you will probably read about it before you get to this point in this story so I guess you already know about the whole house irritation) and decided that the computer was working just fine and it was a monitor issue. So guess what we did . . .

Oh the horror!!! . . .

Close your eyes and take a seat because your not going to believe this . . .

No, we didn't call the Geek Squad, or Dell customer service, or our computer savy friends . . .

We decided, and after much debate, to open the monitor caseing (insert blood curtailing scream here) . . .

It actually was not that hard and the LCD screen would not be damaged near as easily as I was afraid it would have been. So we started snooping around, checking out the wires and their connections, wiggling them around a bit, and we did some swabbing with the damp Q-Tips. We found the strangest of things, no not dust or computer bugs, no mucus producing viruses, or even dried grape juice . . . we found dead cockroaches. Yep those little ones that Shari brought from her apartment when we got married and moved in together and spent till September trying to kill off. I don't know how they got in but there were three, or remains of three of them inside the monitor. So we threw them away and now the monitor works good as new. Bazaar, I know.

Anyway, whether it was God preparing us or just dumb luck I don't know, but at least with the grape juice incident we were looking around so that it wasn't like it would just stop working and we freak out and not even know where to begin looking. So that has been this weeks adventure with the lap top. Yeah for not having to pay a computer nerd too much money to find the cockroaches for us!!!