Yes, I suspect something like today's headline word could be used to describe many of the aerial rockets and fireworks we watched on Saturday night, expertly camped-out in our lawn chairs on the driveway, but the real reason for using that word has to do with the sounds my trusty laptop made on Saturday morning, when I turned it on...

The old PowerBook has been a champ for about five years (that's a hundred years in computer age), basically never failing to do anything I asked of it. It's on its third battery, needs its third keyboard (I have once again worn off the most common letters I hit with my left hand), and its third operating system or update. It's been fast, reliable, and a pleasure to use. Then it blew up. By the sound of it, I think it threw all eight rods out.

As soon as I complete this short blog, just to let you know what's going on and why I may be absent a bit this week, I'll take it up to a local Apple repair and service place, just to allow them to give me a firm opinion, or perhaps a post mortem. If the second option is the case, the next step will be to have an expert (also known as a geek) dig into the innards and (I sure do hope) rescue the files on my hard drive. Yes, I do back-up from time to time, but I hadn't in a long time and I never even knew of a way to back-up my address book. That, and my photos, are the key things I'm after...

Until then, Barbara has handed me the keys to her second laptop, a fully functional IBM ThinkPad, so I can at least get on-line, get my mail, and even write a quick blog like this, although the keyboard layout is different and I keep hitting odd buttons I'm not used to, which can cause whole sentences to disappear, or move, or scramble themselves. Every now and then, one of my fingers must be brushing some other magic key, because whole new screens open up when I'm typing. I want my computer back!

If it's really dead, the next step will be to do what I was going to do this winter, anyway... I'll just head over to Mall of America and buy a new one at the Apple Store. Once the monetary damage is done to the old Amex card, the process of being fully up-and-running and 100 percent operational will be enormously shortened if I can get the files off the old one. For one thing, I have to get a pre-Denver feature story written and sent out early this week, and when I hit "Send" on my weekly updates or releases I'm firing them off to a mailing list of over 500 people. All of those names are neatly combined in groups, on my old laptop... It would not be fun to have to re-build all those groups, name by name.

Anyway, like I said I've got a busy and potentially stressful day ahead of me, trying to fix this problem and get my "world" back, but I wanted to get this posted.

I hope all of you, here in the USA, enjoyed your 4th. For those of you north of border, I know Canada Day was July 1, so here's hoping that was good, too.

Our tradition of putting our chairs out on the drive, and having the Jacobsens come over to watch the Woodbury fireworks show from there, seems to be pleasantly growing. This time, we had about 15 people out there, along with a nice little fire in Dave's firepit, and the show was terrific. I'd share pics, but they're all on my camera and Barb's back-up laptop doesn't have the software to recognize the Nikon and grab pics off it. Grrrr....

I have my iPhone, fortunately, and that little beauty is what may save me a lot of hassle. It's a miniature Mac, in many ways, so my address book is all on there and I can take decent enough pics with it. I can't imagine writing a press release with two fingertips, on that tiny little touch screen, though, so it's not a savior in that respect.

Speaking of iPhone pics, though, I have a gallery to share with you from our excursion yesterday and I'll do that because, well... It's all I've got! We had our standard Twins tickets for the Sunday afternoon game against the first-place Detroit Tigers, and Barbara wanted to take her mom along to the game. Jean (her mom) just got here for her annual midsummer "escape the Florida heat" trip, and will be with us for about a month, so we all headed to the Metrodome together, and I simply bought a third ticket when we got there.

I normally would just say "we had a great time and the Twins won" and let it go at that, but since I did have the capability to take photos with the phone, I figured I'd exploit that opportunity to give you a tour of the inflated and cavernous monstrosity we will soon be waving "bye-bye" to when Target Field opens next spring. It was a perfect day to think about outdoor baseball, with a beautiful blue sky and temps in the upper 70s, but we had to trudge up to the giant white pillow that sits atop the concrete bowl, "whoosh" our way through the revolving airlock doors, and enter the bizarre and alien world of the Dome, to watch baseball being played on artificial turf under a white roof (have fun, outfielders!)

I dropped Barb and her mom off at the curb, to give them a shorter walk, then went and parked across the street in our standard parking lot, which is our fave because the only way to exit from it is to turn onto the street that becomes the on-ramp to I-94 eastbound. I strolled over to the ticket window, chose a seat about four sections over from the ladies, and headed in, leaving a gorgeous day behind me.

My seat was okay, not too far behind first base, but I was stuck dead in the middle of a huge section, in seat 20 of a 40-seat row. The guy next to me was a terrific person, and very personable, but he was fully capable of either being or impersonating an NFL football player, because he was huge. Huge in a muscular mammoth way, which made me feel like a sardine crammed into my tiny little seat next to him. I stuck it out for a couple of innings, but then the claustrophobia took over and I had to move...

It was "Armed Forces Appreciation Day" at the game, and all the Twins players were wearing special hats, that each had a different branch of the armed forces on the front instead of their standard "TC" logo. During the Star Spangled Banner, a group of active military personnel from the various branches brought a gigantic flag out on the field, and I managed to get a blurry shot of that, because it was kinda cool. Those were some "goose bump" moments, when the big flag was unfolded and we all stood and cheered for the soldiers who did the honors.

Like I said, it was getting kind of cramped there, though, so after a bit I excused myself (20 times total, to get by everyone in the row: "Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me...") and headed out to the seats in dead center field, since those were the only lower-level sections where a guy could find a couple of empty seats and spread out a little. Barb and I were texting, of course, and I was going to head over to our regular seats because she had let me know that the people who sit in front of us hadn't shown up, but then the Twins put a rally together and scored six runs while I was sitting out there in center, right behind the guy who was operating the camera that shoots the view over the pitcher's shoulder. I figured they were lucky seats, and Justin Morneau hit a home run that landed right in front of me, so I stayed there for another inning and then moved to my third location, over there with Barb and Jean.

The Twins did win, I got to see the game from three totally different perspectives, and we came home smiling. Da Boyce were obviously happy we were home, and they started tearing around the house at hyper-speed, before falling to the floor in the dining room together, all snuggled up like a couple of loving brothers.

It was a good day, and a very fine weekend.

Now, it's Monday morning and I really have to roll, to take the laptop up to the computer doctor to see how bad this is going to be... Wish me luck. One way or another, I've got to get my pre-Denver press work done, and then later this week we'll be heading to Thunder Mountain to start the Western Swing.

Are you ready?

Wilber, out!