waterlogged (on and off)

Woke up this morning to the sound of Stone Jackson Jr. plodding into my room my like the proverbial bull in the china shop. This here is what little man likes to do when it's 6:30 on the dot! He comes in and makes all sorts of noise, hoping to wake one of us up so that we give him the green signal to "Go on, git! Go watch some television you varmint!"

I always know when he is about to come in as I hear the hinges on his bedroom door swing wide open every morning. My wife keeps telling me to WD-40 those bad boys, but I refuse. I like the advanced warning that it gives me! Cheap and effective. It's all about preventing an unknown interloper from attacking you in your home.

Anyhow, my son comes in and I peep my eyes shut tighter pretending to be asleep. A few moments later, my boy dumps an entire glass full of water off of my wife's nightstand. I'm thankful that I recently had stopped piling up my library books on the ground there, as they would have been destroyed. Grumbling my wife gets up, grabs a towel, and dries up the table and carpet the best that she can.

A minute later, I turn to grab the cup of water on my "nightstand" and in the darkness proceed to dump the entire damn thing on my laptop that is sitting on top of the desk. I kick off my covers, my wife directing me from her side of the bed, 2 piles of laundry smack dab in the middle acting as a border between Nueva Jacksonia and Stonetown. "Grab a towel! Turn on the bathroom light! Grab the laptop! Brush your teeth! Put the seat down!"



I glare at my boy . I glare at her . I glare at the cat. I glare at the towel in my hand. I glare at the cup. I glare at the accursed computer for not been made of sturdier non water fearin' stuff.

!@#!@#!#@ and other unmentionable and undecypherable exclamations come from deep in my soul and to my tongue. It's like being full of the Lord in the middle of a Baptist Church, but much, less heavenly ...

I dry the bucket full of water off the chair, table, unplug and wipe off the laptop and set it on the kitchen table to dry. I remove the battery and jab a finger in its direction (no, not THAT one) and growl, "I'll deal with you later..."

I try to go back to sleep, but between the boy and my stomping, Little Princess is now awake. There is no going back now ... Damn! Sleep, is just a fading memory. Well, more like "Sleep" . As in, I didn't get any last night because baby girl kept kicking me in the face and kneeing me in the back, you know, the usual. That's her way of letting her daddy know how much she wants to snuggle up and loves him .

I call my wife later in the day while she is at work.
"Yup, I think the laptop is toast. I tried to plug it in and it made this weird sound like a cross between a drunk drowning in his own drink and a weak car horn underwater..."
"Why don't you just put the laptop in front of the fire place to dry it out?"
"Hmm. Okay. Roger Wilco little lady!"
I grab the laptop, take out the hard drive and plop that bad boy in front of my fireplace for about an hour. I sort of forgot about it for a while ... Come back and the thing is hot, hot like, Frodo's Ring on Mount Doom hot.

Arrrgggh! I curse to myself, "first I drown it, now I melt it, bloody hell!"

I wait for it to cool, I pop in the hard drive and battery, mutter a quick prayer, and wait. I'll be a coonhound's ass kicking uncle if that son of a bitch didn't fire right up. The laptop looked at me with a gleam in its cybernetic eye as if saying, "is that the worst you can do old man?"

Normally, I would have cut that bastard down to size, but figurin' that he had suffered enough in one day, I was magnanimous in my mercy and let him live... for now.