One of the more ridiculous stories I’ve ever told on my blog begins like this:

My husband can fix ANYTHING.

Remember the time that my computer up and died? Well, after buying my shiny new Macbook Pro, my old laptop went upstairs to where technology goes to die: DanO’s office. I don’t mean that he kills technology, it’s just that he never throws it away once it’s good and dead. Like a few iPod’s we’ve killed along the way. Or like the other laptop that’s sitting up there, the one I used in college that is plagued by unexpected, intermittent and CORONARY INDUCING shut-downs from over heating. That’s the laptop that screwed me over so many times by shutting down  at 2am when I was mid-research paper that it narrowly escaped being chucked across my dorm room on more than one occasion. It now sits upstairs in DanO’s office waiting patiently to be scrapped for parts to live on in various computers that are constantly being built.

Speaking of, do you know how many computers we currently have in this house? Six. Six computers, which is two for each human member of O My Family. That’s 5 more than I use. That’s one for every diaper change OBaby gets a day.

Six computers.

To be fair, a couple of them are 6+ years old and at least one of them we got for free. Another one cost us all of $10.

DanO got the itch last month to have a laptop of his very own (his primary computer is a desktop). Sure, we have 2 laptops upstairs, but one beeps at you instead of turning on and the other shuts down. Since I already kind of maybe happened to pretty much blow our quarterly discretionary funds on a rug, a new laptop was not an option. DanO poked around the insides of my old Beeping Laptop computer (one of the SIX. Did I mention WE HAVE SIX COMPUTERS?!) one night and decided that he could just buy it a new motherboard and get it up and running again.

(Although I didn’t really give chase when we were dating, and he pretty much had me at “I love kids”, I have learned  over these last 6 years that DanO’s persistent streak runs deep. It also comes with a heavy side of WillingToTryAnything.)

$80, a new motherboard ordered online, and many, MANY beeps later, Beeping Laptop was really no better off than she was in August. Except DanO was not fooled. He deduced that the new motherboard he bought was the problem, not something else in the computer. Then, an expression washes over DanO’s face that I know all too well. It means he is hatching a plan. I didn’t really follow the stream of consciousness declaration that followed about how he will resurrect this computer, but I did catch the words “convection… heat… [and] bake”.

I smile and nod.

I kept smiling and nodding, all the way to last Saturday as my husband was wearing oven mitts and pulling the Beeping Laptop’s old motherboard out of my Mother-In-Law’s convection oven.

He took the fresh-baked motherboard (?!?!?), placed it on the counter, and started using an embossing heat gun on a certain portion of it (basically a high-temp mini-hair dryer).

I do not possess adequate words to express how badly I wish I had a picture of that moment. DanO in his parents’ kitchen, beovenmitted, waving a paper-crafting tool above a green board with metal dots and lines all over it.

Then, despite my nay-saying and repeated “you’re kidding, right?”, DanO pops the Baked Motherboard into the Beeping Laptop and Lo! It came to pass that Beeping Laptop booted right up as if it hadn’t been dead for 6 months! Windows 7 start screen and everything!

In case you missed that, here is the summary: my husband can raise a non-functional, Beeping Laptop from the dead by baking it.

This is why I keep him around.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 1:20 am and is filed under Life With The Os. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.