We have an electronics gremlin...I thought bad things only came in threes??

Here's a list of what we have been dealing with, mostly in the past 5 days:

*Kyle's PDA (5 years old) only works if you bang it really hard on the table

*The internet stopped working. At first we thought the whole computer (5 years old) wouldn't work, but when I unplugged the internet, I could do things on the computer. Which is good, because I was turning on the computer to back up our photos since we've moved here. Luckily, after a couple hours of troubleshooting on my own and with our internet provider, here I am
online again.

*The VCR (1.5 years old) we have given up on. It works, per se. But the tracking is always off and static lines go through it constantly. We decided to graduate from the 90s and we aren't replacing it.

*The Wii (6 months old) won't read any discs. Luckily, it is still under warranty, so I sent it FedEx with a prepaid label and we should have it back in 2 weeks. This may have been Johnny's fault. He was trying to play a DVD in the Wii. Then it stopped working. Hmmm.

*The DVD player (1.5 years old...same machine as the VCR) stopped working. Right after the aforementioned Johnny tried to play a Wii game in the DVD player. Riiiight. No connection, I'm sure. Luckily, all it took was a few shakes (see the PDA entry) and it works again. Except.....

*Today the DVD player (yup, same one) decided to give up. You can still hear the sound, but there is no picture. You can push the button to switch to the VCR side and watch videos, but like I said, it's junk too. You can watch TV, but we only get one station on our antenna well enough to not hurt my eyes trying to see through the static.

So where does that leave us? Thankfully the computer works again. So we could watch some TV on the computer, but our internet is touchy. Sometimes it'll let ya. There aren't a lot of kids shows I know of on the internet. There are all those games online, but the computer chair is also my scrapbooking chair. I don't like to share! :D What's that? We could watch DVD's on our computer, you said? That reminds me:

*Last night we couldn't get our DVD rom to acknowledge the presence of the disc we put in.

*What about our portable DVD player? We left it in Utah when we were there last month. We're going back for Easter, so that's a month away.

And while we're at it, three more--

*Our external hard drive (8 months old) hasn't shown up on our computer for about a month. The light is on, the plugs are in, but we can't get it to work. Doesn't exist, according to our computer. We use it for storing shadow copies of our photos and we have all of our music we like to listen to saved on there. Moved it off the computer and onto this "handy" hard drive. Hah!

*Kyle's emailed me today to say that his cell phone battery doesn't keep it's charge. He bought it on our move 6 months ago. Hopefully this is under warranty and we can get a free replacement on this, too.

*Our digital piano (6 years old) has 2 or 3 more broken keys. We got two replaced about a year ago. Apparently, we qualify for a free total keyboard replacement...but there are no local repairmen.


What else? Please tell me our turn is over!