And for my next trick. . .

Honestly, I did not wake up this morning and say to myself: "I think I'm going to blow some sh*t up today." Seriously. Please keep this in mind:

So I've been chatting over e-mail with Cindy (big shout out) about scrapbooking and my absolute lack of talent therein. Yesterday she e-mailed some resources and encouragement so I thought that today I would take break from knitting and attempt some scrapbooking. I have two in progress: one for the KidZilla and another to document our life in Ireland that my SIL gave me for Christmas. Very cute and just waiting to be cropped and cutesied and all that jazz.

So I was putting together a super-cute little layout (is this the lingo, Cindy?) about how John and I met (I LOVE "how did you two meet" stories, and I assume this will be passed on to our offspring) and I just HAD to print a picture of us with the tandem bike from back in those days.

And here's the rub. . .We had not yet plugged in the 4X6 photo printer that we got with our awesome Kodak camera. (If you stumbled across this blog somehow, a note of explanation: we are from Texas living in Ireland and the electric current and plugs do not match up. You have to have an adaptor or convertor or both to make things work). It had a box attached to the plug so that was the adaptor, right? I mean, it worked for the computer so it would work for the photo printer. Makes sense.

Sure it does.

So I plug it in, eagerly awaiting the lights to come on the printer and start boogying with my print job. Except that ALL the lights come on and the "adaptor" makes a gentle "poof" sound and smokes starts coming out of it.

And I am laughing hysterically.

For some reason, this is incredibly funny. I may have just blown up our photo printer, but so what! It's a good story. Actually, I did blow up the photo printer and more, but more on that later.

So I e-mail John to let him know what his genius wife did. Let's all forget the fact that my dad was a master electrician for, like, 100 years. It's certainly not genetic.

Then I discover that my computer power source is not working. Nor is either socket in the office corner of the dining room. Nor does the computer plug work in the other corner of the dining room. So I think I have done something horribly wrong with with computer a/c cord. If I blow up the printer, no big deal, I can go to the pharmacy and get things printed. If I blow my computer power then I am disconnected from THE WORLD until it's fixed. Have I mentioned nothing is fixed quickly over here?

So I start to panic and call John and try to laugh it all off. He says to contact Dell Ireland, which I do and I just want to FREAKING talk to someone because I am panicking and the call center has been outsourced to India. The lady and I cannot understand each other and I am yelling the model number to her on the phone and she tells me that the models are different between countries and I yell that I will figure it out for myself and hang up. After a frantic search for the UK adaptor at Dell USA and trying to figure out the comparable models in Ireland, John calls and suggests that maybe I blew ALL of the sockets in the dining room and to try another room.

Um. Yeah. I hadn't thought of that.

So, like, it worked. Tee-hee. Call it a blonde moment. Whatever. Anyway, my laptop is working again. (Huge sigh of relief)

Oh, and I was not the first person to blow up the Kodak photo printer. Another family did that two weeks ago. John just forgot to mention it. So if you work for Kodak, fix the darn power source so that it doesn't look like an adaptor that can take up to 240volts or watts. Whatever. This is just way too technical.

Can you even wait to see what I'll do tomorrow?

Oh, and if you live in Houston, try not to freeze your fanny off!