Find a light switch in your house. A good stiff one, which is just a little hard to move. Now click it about twice a second for several seconds.

That is the sound which came out of my hard drive last night.

Yup. My 5-year-old personal computer is dead. It’s bleedin’ deceased. It’s shuffled off this mortal coil. Etcetera.

Fortunately I backed up everything a couple of weeks ago, just after a virus scare. So all I lost was a few photos and my email archives. Nothing earth-shaking.

I have already, with the help of co-worker Jeremy, put together a shopping cart over at New Egg which I will soon submit, and then, for the first time in about eight years, build my own computer.

But this weekend I will enjoy 48 hours without a computer. Maybe I will read a book, or something.

Consider the above photo.

The blue house on the left is mine. The house immediately to the right belongs to my neighbor Jeremy. Immediately in front of our houses is a row of four new Red Maple trees. Jeremy and I spent most of the day Saturday, and part of Sunday, digging out old sod, digging holes, planting trees, leveling ground, and laying in new sod.

Is It Not Magnificent?

Actually, Jeremy did the lion’s share of the heavy lifting; he had the trees in the ground before I returned home from Saturday morning practice. And he placed them so that, from a certain spot on either porch, none of our neighbors across the street are visible.

So now is the long, breathless wait to see if new leaves come in next spring.

As a side note, the paint job on the blue car to the left of the photo confounded me for a little while, until I realized that the different shades of blue are there to break up the visual outline of the car. The logic there being that if the owner happens to be driving the car in, say, the north Atlantic in late 1942, German U-boat skippers will have a hard time seeing how big the car actually is and which direction it is traveling, and will therefore have a difficult time aiming their torpedoes.

Pretty smart, that fella.