Party!

I bet you were expecting a post about Penny's birthday party this morning, with oodles of pictures, weren't you?

Well...

Saturday was oodles of crazy for me. Pretty much as soon as we were all awake, I left Matt with the kids and went down to Sam's Club for some staple supplies, and then after I got those all home and put away, I went to the grocery store to get stuff for the party.

And then I got home and scarfed my lunch down so I could make sure everything was packed and ready to go and we loaded up the car and loaded up the kids and headed over to Jumping Joey's for Penny's party. I put up the decorations and set out the cupcakes and the water and... realized that although I'd carefully remembered to buy a veggie tray because all my friends are on diets, I'd left the damn thing in the fridge at home.

After some select cursing and glaring at the clock willing there to be enough time to send Matt back for it (the clock did not oblige), I decided that since the plan was for everyone to reconvene over at our house after the party anyway, I'd just bring it out then. No sweat.

So then Dylan and Jess showed up, and Penny was thrilled to pieces to see them, and they ran around like the crazy little girls that they are. Emma and Sarah showed up a bit later, and they were slightly less crazy, but I think everyone had fun.



(Many super thanks to Elizabeth, whose gift to Penny was a baggie full of quarters so the girls could ride the electronic gizmo machines, which I had completely forgotten about.)

Once the kids had completely exhausted themselves running and jumping and sliding, we adjourned to the party room for presents and cake and snacks, and Penny begged us to let Dylan come over to our house after the party. She and Dylan have been trying to have an at-home playdate for months now, so Dylan's dad agreed to join the post-party party.

But then everyone else bowed out, so it wasn't really much of a post-party. Dylan's dad turned out to be hideously allergic to the cat, so they only stayed for about twenty minutes. I don't know why everyone else evaporated, since I spent the party trying to take pictures or wrangle Alex and only got to exchange about four words with any of the adults. Oh, well. Guess I'll bring the veggie tray to work or something.

At least Alex was good -- he needed lots of attention, but he didn't break down screaming, despite the fact that he was in dire need of a nap after about the first forty-five minutes. I even got him to play happily in the baby/toddler area for a little while.

And then Sunday morning, I got up and came downstairs and opened my computer so it would download mail, then went into the kitchen to take my meds and eat breakfast and the usual weekend morning rigamarole, and when I got back to my computer, the screen was dark. Not a big deal, since I'd certainly been gone long enough for the energy-saver thingy to kick in.

Except that when I touched the touchpad, it didn't come back up. Or when I hit the spacebar. I grumbled and held the power button until it turned off, and then turned it back on. Startup chime and... nothing. I waited a few minutes. Nothing.

I did this about half a dozen times, to no avail.

At one point, Matt told me he could see my computer from the house network, and could access my Public directory and everything, so it was obviously booting up -- the screen just refused to turn on.

I tried plugging it into the external monitor from the guest computer, and that didn't pick up a signal either, which makes me think the graphics card has gone kaflooey.

And I had to go in to work anyway, so I didn't have much time to fiddle with it.

So I called Apple's customer service after the kids were in bed, and they're sending me a box so I can ship the computer back to them and they can fix it, so I'll be more or less offline in the evenings for about a week. Not completely offline, because there's the guest computer and there's always the iPhone, but I'm not going to be logging into Warcraft from either machine. Bah.

And I'll try to get pictures onto Flickr from work, but things are actually kind of busy at work this week, and it's so much easier to upload from home, so it'll probably just be a few especially nice ones. (I took most of the party pics with my "real" camera, because the lighting in the Jumping Joey's was not very good for iPhone pictures.)

Anyway, Penny went with me in to work (because I figured Matt might appreciate not having to wrangle both kids for however long. Given her gregarious nature and the fact that I was here for five and a half hours, she did amazingly well. I was proud of her. (Alex had done somewhat less well at home, apparently, which makes me glad I'd kept Penny with me.)

And now the crazy stuff at work begins again, so I must post and run.