Whitman boys.

So my Mac died. My precious Mac mini, a gift from Mom, went belly-up. The folks at Apple had to replace both the hard drive and the logic board. By the way, in a mini, that is two of only three components, excluding the case which has no moving parts. At retail prices, the replacement of those components plus labor would have exceeded the price of a new unit. Scary. Thank God for warranties. Of course, if it died out of warranty, I would get an Intel-based Mac and played Oblivion without the attendant hassles of playing it on PC.

But I am back, and back in the saddle. Thanks to Senuti, I even have my (legally purchased from iTunes) music back on my hard drive. And this makes an ideal opportunity to go ahead and make the Mac what it was intended to be: the home of all images, videos, etc. All I need to do is figure out how to make the pics on the PC accessible over the Mac’s wi-fi connection, and I am golden. I will report back.

PS the Gus remains cute. The first two times he ate mashed peas, he made an expression of excruciating horror and did a whole-body shudder. That was days ago; now he likes them. On to carrots!

I’m one of those people who believes you can’t really tell whether a newborn baby bears any resemblance to either parent. I mean, TDW* and I were pleasantly relieved to see that The Gus had small, close-to-the head ears, but then again, both of us do, so you can’t really say he has “my” ears or “her” ears. But lately The Gus is starting to actually resemble people. Here, he looks like my Uncle John:

Here, meeting a maternal grandmother for the first time, he seems to be saying “Dang, this family talks loudly!” Which is true.

Here’s just a cute pic:

And another:

* The Darling Wife, of course

The darling wife and I had been washing the filth off of The Gus using only water to this point. He has been getting riper, though, and the pleasant perfume of defenseless baby that used to rise unbidden from his scalp, summoning all sorts of protective instincts, has been replaced with a kind of pervasive dairy (is dairy the right word when it is people milk, not cow milk? anyway) funk. So we got the Mustela imported-organic-easy-on-baby-non-soap, and washed him with that. He was delighted, and smells better too.

Then, displaying little insight, we got him nice and clean before giving him “solid” food for the first time. The American Pediatrics Academy recommends only breast milk until age six months. Both our mothers, of course, started us on rice cereal at age two weeks. So, TDW* and I subtracted two weeks from six months and came up with five and a half months–hey, that’s now! Besides, he was in the cooker for an extra couple of weeks, you’ll recall, so in a sense he is already six months. But anyway, the predictable result is that he now smells like a clean baby who has has his whole body dipped in rice cereal:

Have a close-up:

*The Darling Wife