After 10 days away, I'm finally back in my own home, sitting on my couch in front of the fireplace, enjoying a decaf. The last 2 weeks have been a whirlwind - from the trip to Portland, to the secret Eastern city, to Chicago for the Trade Show of DOOM, to Palatine for more family fun and Easter... and finally home today.
Some highlights of Chicago/Palatine: On Friday, we went to the train station and caught the Metra and went 5 stops toward Chicago to Des Plaines, to lunch at the ChooChoo restaurant. Isaac and Bella were both wearing striped overalls and loved the train experience. The ChooChoo was opened in 1951 - a malt and burger joint where the food is sent from the kitchen around the bar on a model train. It's delightful, and the joint was packed. The kids were enthralled and got excited every time that train came out. It was like magic. Sadly the town of Des Plaines figures that spot might be better used for parking, so there's an online petition to save this place at www.savethechoochoo.com
Jimmy to the Rescue: I'd been hearing from Bam that her iMac was starting to act funny. The list of symptoms were alarming, and I was happy that at our last visit in November I had the presence of mind to set up a backup disk for them. When I arrived on Wednesday, I ran over to it, confirmed that there WERE backups, and took one more just for good measure. When it went to sleep after backing up, it was to be its final shutdown. It never woke again... perhaps it knew that things would be OK now that the geek with glasses was there.
Bridget (Lilli's mom) is an Apple Store manager and had a line on an ex-demo iMac to replace it: Amazing machine, amazing price (my jaw dropped), so we went to get it and I spent the next couple of days bringing her data back from the dead, while pruning out years of ridiculous old downloads. By the end, we were back up and running with a fabulously huge 24" display. I love it when a technology story ends well.
Easter was our usual brunch with Grandma and the K-family at her retirement community. Very good food, good conversation, and both Bella and Isaac were pretty adventurous with the eating. About a pound of bacon each, probably.
The drive home started around 2, and we rolled in just before 9, having taken a leisurely dinner at a Pizza Hut in Mauston. The kids slept the first half of the trip, and we watched videos the second half. All was very very nice until about 10 minutes from home when screaming and squirming erupted. It was all hands on deck triage to get things down when we got in the door, and both kids zonked almost immediately.
And now I'm off to do the same.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment