Now I’m not complaining, in fact I’m very very happy but I think my boyfriend got his holidays mixed up. Last nite, the eve of Halloween, I came home to find a couple of very unexpected, very amazing gifts for me. It was like Christmas in October.

What might those gifts have been? Well I’m glad you asked!

The first gift was adorable. It was an Artoo-Potatoo. What is that you might ask? It is a Mr. Potato head R2-D2. This goes with my Darth Tater and my Spud Trooper. He’s cute as hell…

Now even better than the Artoo Potatoo was the second gift. Something I first heard about from Karsh at blackgayblogger.com. It was something that when I saw it, I just had to have it. It was such a surprise to have it just sitting on my chair in the loft last nite… the SLANKET. If you are too lazy to follow the jump.. a Slanket is an amazing product. It’s a lovely over sized fleece blanket with SLEEVES! No sh*t. Now you can be completely covered and still have ur digits free for typing on your computer, or playing DS or even arts and crafts! I love it. It is so cool. It’s the perfect gift for the gomo in your life!

So as I said, I’m not complaining, I’m kinda glad he mixed up the holidays…now where is that bag of candy?

This weekend was a busy one. Friday afternoon my sister went into labor and Friday evening, she gave birth to my nephew Griere Cole. He was delivered at 8:24pm and weighed in at 7lbs 9oz. We spent most of the weekend with my sister, her husband, the new baby and my family. I’m so excited to be an uncle! I’m exhausted and going to bed!

Once again, behind in my blogging… No excuse, just lazy.

An update on the situation of my black MacBook. If you don’t remember where we were, you could read this, this, this, this , this and yeah this!

Go ahead, I don’t mind waiting.

Back? Good let’s continue. So as my last post about this said, I was going to the Apple Store and I did. I left work a bit later than I wanted but made it to Suburban Square in time for my appointment. I walked in to the spacious store which was surprisingly busy for a Friday afternoon and walked up to the Genius Bar. I looked at the two geniuses there and you would not believe my luck. Yes the guy who I had a problem with back at the King Of Prussia store is now a Genius at the Suburban Square store. At first I just thought it was him, but it was obvious he recognized me and I for sure recognized him. I could tell by how he was speaking to the person at the bar that it was so definitely him and I was livid.

I refused to speak to him and asked to speak to the other Genius there, Andy. Luckily they honored my request and I began to explain to Andy just what had transpired with Apple and their claims that my MacBook looked like it had been thru World War III and he agreed that my MacBook hardly looked as if it was in bad shape. He did however tell me that the lid being out of sorts was my fault “no matter how accidentally”. He said he’d be happy to try to adjust it as best he could. He made quick work of checking my MacBook in and was very polite about it.

Monday afternoon, they called to say it was done. Tuesday I picked it up and it was fixed. They got the case 95% straightened out, the Ethernet port is fixed and the screws are back. While picking up the black MacBook, we put the White MacBook in for it’s loud fan. I also complained about the track pad button to which the Genius replied. It doesn’t matter your top case is defective, we will be replacing it! WOW.

Here’s hoping i can get it back by this weekend and get everyone back to normal!

Yup, I missed two milestones. My 3rd year anniversary of this blog (October 2!) and my 1000th post (Not Just Good, Great), which is ironic since today is the day I’m off to see the “Genius” to see about the MacBook experience that started in that post.

I’ve also racked up 520 comments (REALLY?), and I missed the 500th comment which was Pinoyboy’s comment on the MBX vs. BootCamp post.

What really blows my mind was this time last year, I was posting about my 500th post or my 2nd year anniversary, wondering which would come first and then bang… in another year I doubled the amount of posts? What the heck?

Anywho… I just wanted to write a quick thank you to those of you who read and comment on this blog! If it wasn’t for you… there’d be no point in blogging!

I know, feast or famine right? I don’t blog for a week then I blog 7 times in two days, well so far… it’s gonna happen

I forgot to mention all the Apple stuffs that happened this week… like… the fact that Apple now has 6.1% of the US Market share making it the fourth in the US. Now that might not be the best but remember they’re worth MORE than Dell now and they keeping moving up. They sold 1.6M Macs in the quarter and 8.7M iPods, each represents more than a 30% increase over the same quarter last year. They posted a profit of 546Million USD on Sales of 4.84Billion USD. This means for the year, a year where they completely switched from the Power PC architecture to the Intel Architecture, they sold 5.3 Million Macs and 39 Million iPods. 2007 looks strong for Apple.

Now some articles I read that I’d like to share…

Apple seeks rights to iPhone Trademark - Good news for some
Apple should give up hardware, license OS X to Dell - WTF?
IE 7… less than 24 hours until the first exploit. - Big surprise!
Analyst clearly see a Mac resurgence - Well damn, it’s about time!

Okay… that’s enough of that!

Finally, the last post of the catch ups…

Yes friends I’m sick. I picked up something either on the FECAL TUBE (aka Airplane) or in the city. I’m feverish, achy, coughing and congested. And it’s NOT been a good time to be sick with what’s going on at work. Sigh.

I called off yesterday in hopes that a day of sleep would set me right, but it didn’t. I tossed and turned all night and woke up again this morning feeling a bit worse for wear. I slept until almost 2pm and when I woke, I felt a bit better. It’s gonna be early to bed for me tonight and I’m going in tomorrow even if I’m dying.

Sigh. Being sick sucks.

So, as mentioned before I got my MacBook back from Apple, supposedly unrepaired. On Friday night I opened the battery compartment to put my hard drive back in the machine and noticed the the three screws that hold down the top case to the frame are missing. Well as you can imagine I was livid.

I called Apple on Monday evening and complained and I even got to talk to a Customer Satisfaction Rep who was very nice and encouraged me to take the machine to an Apple store to have it looked at. She told me that if they don’t feel the machine looks abused, they can over ride the original diagnosis and have it repaired. I just want the screws back and the Ethernet port replaced.

I told her how much I hated Apple stores because of my bad experience at the King of Prussia store. The rep, Dawn said she’d do me a solid and call the store on Thursday evening to alert them I was coming in. She said she’d explain about my last experience with a Genius but not about my MacBook so I could get a fair and unbiased evaluation.

I’m off to see them tomorrow and see what happens. Wish me luck.

And it continues…

So three men in a hotel room, I was kinda concerned that we’d keep each other up with our snoring or disagree about lights and TV watching but we all fell asleep very quickly and Pinoyboy woke me up about an hour before the alarm went off which was actually very nice. We talked and reminisced about the previous day. When the alarm did go off and Roseld awoke, the early morning banter was lively and possibly my favorite part of the day. We did manage to get three guys in and out of the bathroom and ready to go in under an hour!

We headed out to meet Roseld’s friend Iju at East of 8th. We had a nice brunch with a very nice person. Iju was cute and stylish and very very jovial. She of course LOVED her some Pinoyboy but hey, who doesn’t? Midway thru brunch, Pinoyboy and I nipped out to meet up with evilBuddha and say hi. We talked a little too long and our food was on the table getting cold. My breakfast burrito was yummy and I wish I had gotten a mimosa but I didn’t.

After we said our goodbyes to Iju, I realized I left my brand new jacket in the hotel room! Sadly, I dragged my boys back up town to get my jacket. After that it was already almost 2pm. We unanimously decided to skip the Digital Life show (yes it is WHY we went!), and do some SoHo shopping. Bloomies, MoMA and a few other quirky shops and the time became 5pm, so quickly. We decided to haul ass out of the city but that wasn’t in the cards. It took over 90 minutes to get into the tunnel.

The trip home always takes forever and Pinoyboy and I did not arrive back at Chez Moi until almost 10pm. Catching up with the boyfriend and some food from Sheetz capped off the evening as we were all exhausted and we had to be up at the crack of dawn to get me to work and Pinoyboy to the airport shuttle.

It was one of the best weekends I’ve had in my life and I owe it all to my friends who made me feel special and loved.

You guys rock.

Click pic for a larger version.

Continued from the last post…

Well having been up until 4am, yours truly completely slept thru his alarm clock and we got off to a late start. It was my intention to be at Roseld’s by noon, instead, we didn’t even leave my house until 1230pm. Bah. The drive up was great, good chatting, lots of laughing and one thought going through my head over and over, “I wish he lived here!”.

Once at Roseld’s we quickly got on the road and headed to New York. It should have taken just under two hours to get there but it took about 3. It took so long to get past the construction on the New Jersey Turnpike that there was no way we’d make it to the Digital Life show and to dinner with Mike P before he had to head out. So we decided to hit the hotel and check in and then head to Chelsea to have dinner with Mike P. We met up with him around 730pm and we had dinner at Mary Ann’s Chelsea Mexican Restaurant. We did a podcast over dinner and we all had a great time watching me get tipsy off some sangria.

We said our goodbyes to Mike P and headed over to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame to have the craziest thing, a Ice Cream Baked Potato! It was great and we had such a good time the three of us just shooting the shit. We headed next to the Apple Store, Fifth Avenue for two purposes, one for Pinoyboy to get a Product (RED) iPod Nano and to meet one of our Podcast fans…KEVIN. We had a great time checking out Macs and waiting for Kevin, who was about an hour later than he expected but it was no problem cause when we met him, he was so nice. We chatted and snapped some photos and then decided to walk up Fifth Avenue and check out all the fashions, Pucci, Gucci, Ferragamo, and Versace. We didn’t start the fashion stroll until well after midnite so by the time we all decided we were hungry and not ready to head back to the hotel, we couldn’t find a place to eat. After way more walking (with some very sore feet!) we discovered right across from the hotel, Maison, 24/7 French restaurant.

This place was amazing. I had for the first time a Lindemans Framboise, a raspberry flavored Lambic Ale. It was delicious. I loved it. The French onion soup was also top notch. We ate, drank and laughed and had such a nice time.

After that we stumbled back to the hotel and all feel into a deep sleep.

Another good place for a break yes?

This past weekend the “gomo” trip that had been in the works for months finally came to fruition. The plan was for Pinoyboy, Roseld and myself to go New York to see the Digital Life show. I for one was very excited to be going away with two of my friends to one of my favorite places in the world.

Pinoyboy flew in to meet me at the airport on my way back from Fort Lauderdale and it was SOOOOOOOO good to see him. It’s only been a short time since the last time I saw him (about a month) but I missed him a lot. This is one of the cruel facts about the internet, you meet great friends who don’t live anywhere near you. This is definitely a prime example of that.

On our way home we decided to stop off at the King of Prussia Mall to get some dinner and do some shopping. I can’t express how wonderful an evening it was. We just wandered around and did lots of chatting and just had a blast. I even bought some clothes, something I’m not very comfortable doing around other folks. I actually had fun shopping! That was all thanks to Pinoyboy. We had dinner at the Rock Bottom Brewery and even went for coffee after at Cosi.

We had a riot of a time at the Cosi, we had the worst waiter on earth. He asked such strange questions, when I ordered a Brownie Sundae he asked if I wanted ice cream on my sundae. WTF? We also had a laugh and a half when he brought the check. The check was 14.82USD and I handed him a 20 dollar bill. I leaned in and told Pinoyboy, if he brings back a fiver instead of 5 ones… I was not going to tip him. Of course he brought back a fiver. Needless to say Pinoyboy left the tip.

We got back to the house and went over my returned, unrepaired MacBook and he agreed that the machine had not at all looked like it was dropped or damaged or that it even had normal wear and tear. I was pissed. We watched the first disc of Fullmetal Alchemist, played some DS and then passed out at about 4am.

Saturday started the trip to NYC, and I think another blog post.