The 2014 Chenin Blanc Incident

I nearly lost a child at noon on Saturday.

So there I was, sitting with my littlest with a tasty glass of…Chenin Blanc, I think it was…watch The Voice on Hulu via my laptop, while his bigger siblings did their own thing downstairs on the big TV.  Why The Voice?  I blame Dean.  But that’s neither here nor there.

At some point, I needed to leave the room.  I set the wineglass down and took care of business.  When I got back, the bigger kids were in the room, the 3-year old sitting in my office chair.  I noticed the glass was empty, but didn’t think anything of it.  I must have finished it off, naturally.  So I went downstairs to get a refill.  Came back up, and as I approached the desk (where the other two bigger kids were spinning the 3 year old around and around on my chair), I noticed it: a great big pool of fluid, completely covering the keyboard and trackpad of my laptop.

You know those scenes in movies when a bad thing happens, and the character moves in slow motion, shouting, “Noooooooo…..” to no avail?  Yeah.  That was me.

I dashed over, grabbing up towels from the bed (I had been folding laundry before The Voice) and shoving little kids aside.  Must.  Sop.  Up.  Wine.  But it was not to be.  The screen flickered and went out right as I got there, and despite my best efforts to dry the machine, it had been completely flooded out.

It never started up again.

My 3 year old is lucky to be alive.  As it is, he will never go to College, at least not on my dime.  That little fiasco set me back over $3,000 – the Apple Store examined the laptop the next day (I was stuck at home on Saturday because the Admiral was running a Ragnar Relay with her friends, and had the minivan with her.  There’s not room for all the kids in my Jetta) and determined the logic board was completely hosed, and since I had just outlived my Applecare plan…I ended up buying a new computer instead of paying almost the same amount for a repair – and if you figure time value of money 15 years from now, I figure I just used the money I would have used for his tuition to fix the disaster he caused.

Well. I didn’t really spend almost the same amount as the repair would have been.  My philosophy on computers is to get the most suped-up, whamydine model I can, so it will last for a good long time.  Thus, I got a new Macbook Pro (alas only 15″ as they no longer make 17″, which is what I had before) that’s maxed out on processor, RAM, and Flash drive capacity (since it doesn’t use a hard drive – that’s pretty sweet, but also odd since the thing doesn’t make any noise at all).

Luckily, I had backed the computer up less than a week before this happened.  Also luckily, I didn’t do much writing last week.  So I didn’t really lose anything.  But still, there’s a principle at stake here.

Or something.

Anyway, I’m digging the new “wheels”, so to speak.  But the cash outlay still hurts.

As you can imagine, this is why I didn’t get the Pericles chapter up on Saturday.  I generally do it in the afternoon, and Mr. 3-year old’s evil plot knocked me offline around noon.

*sigh*

So that’s all I have to say about that.  I’ll get the next Pericles chapter posted in a little bit.  Until then, have a nice evening.

🙂