My Dual G5 Mac PowerPC, which I purchased back in the earliest days of this site, passed away peacefully after a long illness on Sunday morning, surrounded by friends and loved ones. It was 10.

Following the wake — which after a nice nostalgic start devolved, to the horror of everyone who witnessed it, into the spectacle of a shelled rat drunk on Tequila Sunrises and Port trying to reverse cowgirl a pair of twin floppy disks — I laid the old boy to rest, then headed to the Apple store to pick up a new computer. This involved high finance, the porting over of data, a discussion of post-2004 advancements in computer technology, and a host of other things I know nothing about and that tend only to confuse me.

When the new computer was ready, restuffed with all the G5’s still usable backage, I brought it home through a rainstorm the likes of which I can’t remember seeing in these parts, then spent the better part of yesterday getting it (and my replacement iPhone) set up — all while taking care of a fiesty toddler, a 9-year-old with a humming bird’s metabolism, and a cranky armadillo who threw at my neck the bottle of Advil I offered him and demanded I “score him some fucking codeine.”

During all of this, my wife has been away on business. And she flies home today. From New York. On 9/11. So I’ve got that to keep me upbeat.

Anyway, thanks to those of you who contributed to the fundraiser while I was essentially offline. If I didn’t thank you in the thread, that’s because I couldn’t get on. Hopefully you received from me an email expressing my gratitude.

If you didn’t, I apologize. You were lost in the shuffle of data, and I ask that you please know that I am humbled and grateful for your continued support.

I will be posting lightly today as I download all the updates, etc., that are required to run software that I installed during the original Shock and Awe; and tomorrow, the memory upgrade arrives, after which I hope to have this bitch running like a finely trained hooker.

I haven’t mentioned it, but over the past couple of years, putting up posts has involved spinning beach balls, sudden browser crashes, an inability to use multimedia in any significant way, and a host of other encumbrances that I hope will now melt away and make this process less painful from a technical standpoint.

From a political standpoint, the pain just keeps on coming.

Because Obama.