I Already Feel Corrupted

A bunch of issues hit at once and now I once again--come monday--will have a windows machine in my house.

When I began coaching track at school the agreement, at least for me, was that the money would go towards buying Jen a new computer. See she has an old iBook from Apple that I bought for her back in 2004 or 2005 (pretty sure it was 2005, but I digress). It has served her well, but with Apple's abandonment of the old hardware architecture for Intel based machines (completely understandable) her system is really outdated, slowing, and the second battery that we got for the computer (a replacement for a recalled battery) is failing--or failed if you don't count the 10 minutes that it holds a charge as functional. So my hope in getting her a new computer was to upgrade her to either a new MacBook or an iMac. Jen declined the new computer...initially.

Since the (initial) declination of my computer offering for allowing me to coach track, my laptop (a little over a year old) and our 2 iMacs started misbehaving. My laptops battery started draining too quickly; the iMac (iLamp) we bought 7 years ago really started to work slowly; and about the same time my laptop started losing its charge, the iMac we have had for 18 months started freezing up when the kids would play intensive video games and then suddenly stopped booting. A check of the newer iMac showed a faulty hard drive (which I hoped was causing the system freezes due to swap issues). After replacing the hard drive the system kept freezing. Further testing showed that the video ram was faulty. Not a problem I should be able to replace the video components of the iMac for not too much. Nope. The video card is integrated into the logic board (mother board) so in order to replace the failed video ram I must replace the entire logic board. Prices for a replacement logic board range from $500 to $800.

So with all that happening, with 4 of our 4 Mac computers showing signs of failure, Jen decides she wants a new computer. But not just any computer--a fast inexpensive one. Oh shi.........was my initial reaction. A new MacBook is about $1000, with a low end iMac at $1200. That in Jen's mind is not inexpensive. She then began rattling off the things she is planning on doing with it and then pulls out this statement: "I think I want a windows machine". Dumbfounded and caught completely off guard, my arguments against windows seemed hollow. They are more dependable. "Really," she said. About that same time I upgraded my OS X to 10.5.7 on my laptop which caused all kinds of freezes and crashes on my laptop (reinstalling 10.5.6 today). The laptop started to overheat and the fans were running heavy. "Really," I said. "Our iMac's have been dependable" (whereupon Ky called up saying that my recently installed hard drive on the newer iMac didn't solve the problem and that it froze again).

So I bit the bullet and compared prices. The system that met Jen's requirements would cost about $800. It includes a 20" LCD widescreen monitor, a 2.3 GHz quadcore processor, 4GB of RAM, a 640GB hard drive, and a removable and replaceable 256MB RAM video card. The bad news, it runs VISTA.

I tried again to argue for a Mac but the points seemed hollow and were ineffective as I was in the midst of trying to figure out the iMac problems and my laptop problems. Her new system arrives on Monday, and since Jen really doesn't want the kids playing their games on her system (she wants it all to herself, which doesn't include me), the kids' new system arrives shortly thereafter--the same system as Jen's.

They haven't arrived yet but I already feel compromised and corrupted.

Hailey's Prayers

Over the past several months Hailey has begun to pray more and more. Since attending the Draper temple her prayer has been the following:

Thank go swimming
Go church
go temple
spot
Christ
amen

It is quite fun to see her progression of prayers. In her earlier prayers she would pray to go swimming and then would immediately stop her prayer to tell us she needed to go swimming. We would agree and ask her to finish her prayer. She would continue her prayer but would again ask God to go swimming, and then quickly stop her prayer to tell the family that we needed to go swimming. One night this happened at least 5-6 times. It was quite humorous.

Needless to say she is funny. She is quite perturbed if she is not the one that prays each time a prayer is needed.