Maybe I’m a little hard of hearing in my old age, but I could have sworn I heard Dorian say that “Mercury is in Gatorade” and that’s why I’m having all these computer woes.

Frankly I don’t see how a bit of liquid metal in a sports drink could have anything to do with it unless someone spilled some on my computer, but that seems unlikely because we don’t really keep that kind of stuff lying around.

For one thing, Mercury is poisonous! That’s right.. even if you ingest a tiny little bit it could kill you deader than dead, and that’s pretty dead my friend.

Also, Gatorade is yucky. I haven’t tried any in years but I’d imagine it still looks and tastes like cold donkey piss. So we don’t have any around here.

Today I’m supposed to get the new adapter to replace the one that died. We ordered it late on Friday, which was what they call “Black Friday,” which was a really bad time to go shopping for a new one but we did anyway, but the guy wanted almost forty bucks for the one he had in stock.

This was in downtown San Francisco, and as we left the store to head home empty-handed we looked up from the bustling crowd and saw these two news helicopters hovering over our heads. THAT, my friends, was the defining moment, because THAT was when I discovered exactly how popular this blog really is!

I mean, here they were, following my every move with huge telephoto lenses as I went store-to-store trying to find a replacement adapter. I could practically hear the announcer shouting over the “chop chop chop” of the rotor-blades, “He’s going into the computer store at fourth and Howard now, and we’re all hoping he gets what he came for, because life won’t be the same for any of us if The Rhodester Chronicles can’t get regular updates. Back to you, Jen and Frank..”

There was a cop standing next to us on the corner as we waited for the light to change in our favor, so I casually commented, “They’re tracking me, you know!”

I pointed upward at the choppers.

He glanced up at them and then slowly looked me up and down. “Actually sir, they’re watching the occupy protestors in Union Square a few blocks away. Um, what did you say your name was again?” His right hand brushed against the canister of pepper spray attached to his belt.

“Nothing! I didn’t! Have a good day officer!” The light changed and we scurried home, being careful to avoid Union Square.

We heard later that shoppers ignored the protestors and practically trampled them to get those three-dollar waffle-makers. Not quite as exciting of a story as Rhodester out adapter-shopping on a Black Friday, but there you have it. Back to you, Frank and Jen..

I am updating on Dorian’s Macbook once again, just as I did yesterday, but hopefully this will be the last time because hopefully my new adapter will arrive soon and hopefully I can use my Netbook to catch-up on this blog, my Facebook, and Candace, my favorite model at Met-Art.

I have yet to figure out how to “clear history” on the Mac.

I went shopping with coffeesister recently and spent the better part of the evening in a Target store snackbar while she grabbed a cart and zipped away.

I didn’t sit down immediately though.

As is the usual case, I headed for the electronics department to peruse music, DVDs and crap like that while she headed for the clothes.

I engaged in electronic crap perusal for a good fifteen minutes or more before finally heading to the snack bar.

Only an hour and a half left!

She was still in the clothing section looking for basement bargain deals when I got there. I know this because we have cell phones and I called to let her know where I was, just in case she impulsively decided to grab the first thing she sees and then – HAHA! – check out.

But she won’t do that because we need things, and SOMEBODY in this family has to invest some time into finding them and then carefully scrutinizing one brand of product against another in a side by side comparative analysis to determine what’s going to be the best deal, before returning to the shampoo section just before checking out because we’d forgotten the conditioner.

Yes, I said we, because apparently I can forget all kinds of things as I sit there snacking on muffins, pizza, eggrolls, cookies, orange juice and coffee while judging the fat people who walk by for their lack of self-control.

I must give her props, or kudos, or whatever one must give one’s wife though, when she works so hard to get the best deals AND makes sure we have what we need AND she reads this blog.

Yes, I would certainly not be the best candidate if our two cats held an election to decide which of us was going to go to Target for kitty litter and cat treats.

If elected, I would grab the first bag of kitty litter I see and, upon zipping home so that I could go online and stream music videos, it’d be discovered that it’s made of radioactive waste material with chunks of broken beer bottles mixed in.

The cats certainly wouldn’t go near it.

On the other hand, if she was elected to go get the kitty litter, she’d spend at least a half hour determining which size to buy after first calculating the matrix of sand balance to clay integrity along with the rate of absorption factor.

Eventually she’d settle on the imported cedar chips with alabaster sand that had just arrived from Morocco at only $22.00 for a half pound bag.

The cats won’t go near that either.

After I’d been in the snack bar for a while this last trip, my cell phone rang and it was her, calling to tell me that she had everything we needed.

So  I tossed away my empty coffee cup, orange juice carton, two pizza plates, eggroll wrapper, cookie envelope and one blueberry muffin cup and waddled to the check-out stand to meet her.

The 17-year-old cashier, who REALLY enjoyed following the rules, informed us that she couldn’t sell us the box of Merlot that coffeesister had carefully picked out because she was only 17-years-old and you have to be 18 to sell alcohol to people.

I told her that we’d never really thought of wine in a box as alcohol but, being the good girl she is, she stuck to the rules. We had to wait for the old man to come and ring us up and he walks really slow, so by the time he got there the girl was 18 but he rang us up anyway to make it worth his trip.

We eventually arrived home and got the new Moroccan kitty litter poured into the pan so that the cats could sniff it before going off to pee on our bath towels.

Good thing she had shopped carefully, and bought the right kind of cat pee stain remover.