Last night we discovered that our plumbing system left for the weekend without giving us a note.

Somewhere down there a blockage caused our whole house to backup, despite hours of heroic efforts from Shelley with snake, steaming hot water, and bottles of chemicals.

So we called a plumber to take care of it, and he employed a power snake that seems to have done the trick. It's one of the joys of home ownership, I guess, but it's the first time we've had such a problem.

And in other bad news, my iBook came back from the shop yesterday with a new logic board, but the OS is still acting funnily enough that I'm pretty much forced to completely wipe the hard drive and re-installed it from scratch. This process takes a couple hours, not counting the hours backing up everything, and the additional hours that will be required to re-install applications and there settings and preferences.

Sigh.

I had hoped to spend a fun couple of days learning to hack Mac applications so that those not normally scriptable could become scriptable, so that then I could make them do automated processes like go through a whole slew of panos and stitch them together overnight. Ah well, I guess I'll make that happen later this week.

The weather has been rather cold all weekend too, so I've not given my bike a much-needed bath.



On the bright side of things, I've gotten to play lots of Asteroids while my Mac reboots and re-installs, and -- of course -- the plumbing could have waited to next Saturday to fail, when we had a half dozen people here playing games with us.