Apple Ipod White Screen of Death

I stared it down and I kicked it's ass. Yay me. Oh my god. This evening I heard Ellie start crying downstairs and I thought she had really really hurt herself. She is generally the most serene child, sanguine, is the best word to describe her personality. So if she's upset, something is horribly wrong. I met her on the staircase. She was wailing, large snotty sobs, and holding her non-responsive video Ipod in her hands. It appeared dead. She was bereft, she was holding the lifeless carcass of her best friend and was looking at me like I should know how to give it the breath of life.

She worked so hard to earn most of the money to buy this techno marvel. She stayed with Grandma after her by-pass and vascular surgeries for weeks on end last summer. Ellie did everything for Grandma that her self-centered and emotionally immature spouse (yes, my own father and more's the pity) should have been doing for his wife of more than fifty years. Instead, dad sat and leered at her from across the room, angry that she was sick and no one was going to fix him a sandwich because his damn hands have been painted on for the past fifty years. I do not exaggerate and I do not tell a lie. I could go on about his deficiencies, but he is so extreme, everyone thinks I'm making it up, but I'm not, he's a jackass.

So, Grandma made Grandpa feel guilty enough that 10-year-old Ellie was covering all the duties society usually ascribes to the able-bodied spouse, pillow plumping, foot rubbing, keeping her company, helping her out of the goddamned recliner so she could hobble to the bathroom. I'm not kidding, he grunts like he's been asked to cut off a toe if she needs help getting up out of a chair, and that we're all saps to help her because she's manipulating us and how else is she going to get her strength back if we continue to baby her. Oh my, seems like I'm stewing in my own caustic pool of resentment and I digress, back to my victory over microprocessors.

My dad pitched in the extra $150 (no shit, the man is made of money and he actually took Ellie's $100 she had saved from helping YuYu with her homework all last year, bastard, really what's a hundred to him?, oh there I go again, father issues? not many) and they went to Walmart and bought a white video Ipod. She has lovingly loaded it with Zack and Cody and Hannah Montana and she prizes it above all else and all others, even me. I do not want to know how she would answer if she was given one of those ethical dilemna questions: your mother and your Ipod are teetering on a cliff, you can only save one, who would you save? I pretty much know I'd be people paste.

So I calmed her down, explained about one-year warranties, made her blow her nose, calmed her down again, more nose blowing, very dramatic, "but Jordan got a scratch on his and it just quit working, sob sob sob." She was really beside herself, but I got her to understand that we could send it off to get fixed, it might take awhile, "how long?" she almost started crying again, but she would have it back no problem.

But I couldn't go to bed without trying to fix it, how hard could it be, the screen was glowing, it was just frozen. Couldn't be that uncommon and it turns out it's not and the condition has it's own nickname: white screen of death. Good old Google:
"ipod video common problems blank screen." Ta Duh, and the step by step by step fix on a non-Apple support page dedicated to helping hapless middle aged parents in the middle of the night walked me to promised land. I am a hero. I gave it CPR and it lives again.

For a brief moment this evening, she would have picked me to save on the edge of the cliff because she thought her Ipod was irretrievably broken. Tomorrow morning when she sees that I saved her world from falling apart around her ankles and her Ipod is fully functional once again, I go back to being people paste at the bottom of the ravine. Oh a mother's sacrifices. Epic.

Okay, off to be the toothy fairy. YuYu lost two teeth yesterday and today, finally. She is not at all like I was at that age, yanking them out with a good hunk of gum still attached, but just needing to have them gone. And, of course, I didn't start losing teeth until the fourth grade, so I was a little more motivated than most.

I'm high tech and low tech mom tonight.