Most of the things I could have said for the last week were omitted because I've had my computer off a lot of the time. I should get something set up on my phone to inflict maximum damage on you people.

Wednesday I broke my work laptop's mouse, so I shut down my personal computer and moved its trackball over. That kept, barring wasting ten seconds moving it back, me from using my computer Thursday and Friday. On Saturday I overcompensated by getting two mice and a trackball. I did the west suburban computer store triple play: MicroCenter in Westmont, Fry's in Downers Grove, and CompUSA in Naperville. I got two clearance mice at MicroCenter: one very ordinary Microsoft mouse, and one Kensington mini-mouse (but not micro-) with a retractable cord. Later I got the Kensington Expert Mouse, which is a four-button trackball plus a scroll ring. So Saturday night and Sunday I was back up.

Monday morning was the great Chicago storm, which both was and wasn't. It wasn't more than 30 minutes of rain, five of them heavy. But those five minutes of heavy rain came in a storm front that supposedly had hurricane-force winds that took out power to almost 870,000 area customers at one point. I had just sat down to work and got about twenty minutes in when it happened. Power stayed off for a little over 13 hours, coming on just as we were settling into a hot bed for an uncomfortable night. We were lucky, judging by reports that 350,000 of those customers were still down at 11:00 AM yesterday and 250,000 at 11:00 PM. I did have to throw out most of what was in the refrigerator, despite it not being opened, but the restoration was quick enough to give everything in the freezers passing marks.

Yesterday everything was fine here, except I was busy making up for missing a day of work so I didn't get to do anything personal.

All that downtime saved you from hearing about things like my Green Lantern dream, in which my only power was to set things on fire, which I mainly did to women that wouldn't get out of the way when I was shopping for skirts at the mall. I was less hero, more transvestite misogynist pyromaniac loner that happened to drive a green station wagon. I had no sidekick, because I had no friends.

To save another post, because it's Wednesday: 235.8, still under 100 when I remember to check.

My on-call week starts in a few hours. It looks busy. I know I'm up all night Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, at least.