Sicko

I believe this is my first blog post in a while. I have so much to talk about that I can never remember once I start typing. Am I the only one afflicted with this mental disease?

Karen and I took the dogs to the Solano Drive-In in Concord to see " Beverly Hills Chihuahua". It was both stupid and cute. It was the number one movie last weekend, and I have no doubt that within a few short months all the local animal shelters will begin to fill with unwanted Chihuahuas. Zoe and Charlie weren't very impressed. They were more interested in all the other people that had brought their Chihuahuas.

Neither one of us had been to a drive-in in many years. The last time I went to one it was in Union City where the overbuilt Union Landing now stands. I forgot how nice it was to just sit back in the comfort of your own vehicle while the movie plays, talk if you want to, light up a smoke, not have to sneak food in. We agreed we'd have to go back again sometime.

The Sharks begin their 2008-09 campaign tonight against Anaheim. What a breath of fresh air considering how bad the A's were over the summer, how bad the Raiders and 49ers are currently, and how bad the Warriors are going to be when the NBA season starts next month.

I was channel surfing last night and caught a portion of a Sharks playoff game against Calgary last season. Of course, I hadn't realized what it was for the first few minutes. I start getting all happy and everything because they're up 5-2, then I see the playoff logo on the ice. Oh, well.

I'm currently dealing with two separate PC headaches. First, my desktop is experiencing a shutdown problem I haven't been able to solve yet. It does a cold shutdown after a minute or two. This is overheating behavior. It's not the first time this has happened to me. In fact, that's how I recognize it as a behavior. So I did what I normally do when I see overheating behavior. I open up the case, clean all the dust out, and fire it back up. But that didn't work this time. So I was playing around with it and discovered that it will stay running in Safe Mode. A tech forum suggested that it could be a driver problem so I just said, "What the hell," and wiped my whole hard drive clean and reloaded a fresh copy of Windows. Usually, unsolvable software problems can be solved by a Windows reinstall, although this is a last resort type of solution. Well, even after doing that it still didn't help. So I'm kind of at wits end. I'm going to do another cleaning, this time much more thorough. I really can't think of anything else.

The other problem I'm dealing with is Asha's laptop. The pin had broken off on the AC adapter and the replacement one was just delivered yesterday. The problem is that I can't get it to boot. When I hit the power button some of the LEDs light up and you can see the backlight of the screen come on but the screen itself stays blank.

Went over Yolanda's last Sunday. Isabel was here on leave. It was nice to see everyone. Isabel seems to be enjoying Navy life. The only problem is that she's apparently committed to her ship for all four years of her term unless she can promote off of it. She's stationed on the USS Bataan. She tells us it's an amphibious ship (!!). It's home port is in Norfolk. And that ain't changing. She said she misses living in California so I hope she'll be able to complete her classes and do whatever she needs to do to get herself moved. She also mentioned wanting to go to Iraq. Yeah, that was a real "what the fuck" moment, but I guess being active military changes your perspective. Let's hope PRESIDENT OBAMA gets our troops the hell out of there before she gets the chance.