First...I'm going to be SO spoiled by the cable modem upstate. I am once again reminded how slow my modem can be. ARRRRGGGHHH!!

But I didn't sleep last night...grrr. I got home 4am, and wrote yesterday's entry until 6am-ish...then was hungry. I actually made that sandwich for myself. Unfortunately, my parents were up by that time and I ended up hanging around with them for a few hours.

Funny story....my mother has had a Zip drive for a few years. It gets a lot of use and started to click all the time and not read the disks anymore so she looked into replacing it. Well, she just got a new one. She was going to try to get the old one fixed, but Dad and I managed to talk her out of it.

Ever wanted to know what was inside one of those things?

We started with the "maybe we can fix it" idea. Maybe we could! Dad's handy and I have talent at verbally abusing machinery until it does my bidding.

Zip drives have lots and lots of very tiny parts on the inside.

Dad figured out what was wrong with it once I told him how a Zip disk worked. Just a big floppy...it's got this thing that looks like a record inside, and a little arm moves around while the disk is spun around. The Zip disks have this dual sided thing going on, and the little arm has contacts that go on either side of the disk. The little contacts on the bottom half of the arm had fallen loose and was hanging off.

So Dad pulled out a huge magnifying glass with a lamp on it. It was on this spring-covered boom that he hooked on the desk. I found it amusing and took pictures of my dad futzing with the Zip drive's innards. He managed to Krazy Glue the little contact back on to the arm, but then his finger got stuck and tore off the entire connecting wire.

We had a good laugh over that, then he focused on just putting it back together and seeing how it all fit together.

"Where the heck did THAT come from?"

I took a nap at 10am...which wasn't so bad since I hadn't gone to bed at all the night before. I slept until 2:30 when Mom asked if I wanted to go to BJ's.

BJ's...the wholesale food mecca.

I like food. Big fan in fact. I showered and dragged my tired ass along with them. I got a big bag of chips, those honey mustard pretzels I love, and B-B-Q Pork sandwiches that are ready in the microwave in 3 minutes from frozen. ;) I have no shame anymore.

Just eat it, there's got to be calories in there somewhere.

I got colored pencils too. I like colored pencils.

After BJ's, my parents and I were planning to go to the local Italian restaurant (Sal's). My Aunt and Uncle called and wanted to go to dinner too...so we had a nice trip out. I had a lobster pie...it was GOOD but VERY filling.

My Uncle thinks mp3s are a really really cool idea...so does my Aunt. It's lots of fun.

I have to find the current market price of 3 tons of Tungsten for them. No joke. They want to make a new keel for their sailboat out of Tungsten. They live on a sailboat and sail around all over.

My family IS full of odd characters...yes.

My mother was having trouble getting the flatbed scanner working, and I said "I'll take it." She said "Okay" and my mouth dropped open and hung there for about thirty seconds before I realized what had happened. "Wait...really?"

Scanner is coming back to Binghamton with me. Sweeeeet!

But now it is time to eat something bad for me and watch that two hour Voyager special my parents taped for me because I don't get UPN in Binghamton.

MOV-IE MOV-IE MOV-IE MO-VIE MO-VIE MO-VIE!