It wasn't an expensive laptop. It's 2005 vintage, that I bought used some ten years ago.

But it's the machine I play games on while I'm eating, so I really miss it. Not to mention the saved games. I replaced the hard drive a few months ago and just bought a brand new battery for it.

I tried to wash and dry it. This ritual bathing trick worked when I upended a glass of ginger ale into a laptop during a bumpy flight, but didn't work this time.

I looked around at potential replacements and didn't see anything I really liked, so I hit Ebay and spent a little under a hundred bucks to buy a lightly used same-model laptop. I'll swap in my expanded memory and disk drive, and with luck, keep on playing.

And, I have a machine worth of spare parts.

Which turned out to be a good thing. The new laptop arrived with a dead monitor backlight. A few emails and the seller agreed that it was dead, and he'd refund me the money.

This is, IMHO, a very good response. Better than I really expected.

A message later, they suggested I open the box and twiddle with the cables.

I'd been holding off introducing the box to a screwdriver in case the vendor wanted it returned and would call foul if I'd opened the box and violated the warrantee. After all, violating warrantees is one of my favorite hobbies.

But, now I had PERMISSION to run amuck! How much better can life get?

Twiddling the cables is easy, and did nothing. Swapping the graphics card with one from my cat-ified laptop didn't help.

But, the cats urinated into the base of my original laptop, damaging keyboard, motherboard and such. They didn't dump on the display.

A few more screws, unsnarling some cabling, and I had my old display hooked up to the new laptop.

AND IT WORKED!

I swapped in my memory upgrade, my battery and disk, and it boots up with my saved games, and everything works.

I sent the vendor a message letting them know that I'd resurrected the laptop with the aid of parts from my zombified machine and was happy to pay them for the unit they'd shipped.

In the end we settled for half what I'd paid.

To make up for destroying a laptop, Mark taught me to play cricket.

You probably know cricket is the British version of baseball, more or less. Part of the game involves a pitcher (bowler) trying knock over three sticks (wickets) while a bats-man tries to protect the sticks by knocking away the ball.

There's some rules about running back and forth and being tagged out as well, but the US lost the genes for fully understanding cricket when we drove the last of the Tories into Canada.

Mr. Mark, being a cat, likes to sit on my work surface and oversee what I'm doing. He's a believer in the clean-desk policy (I'm not) and takes it as his responsibility to remove any small object from the desk with a gentle swipe of the paw.

While I don't believe in a clean desk, I do aspire to a clean floor. Thus the robot cleaners that I would prefer not get tangled with whatever Mark has relocated to a lower potential energy state.

So, I picked up the object and tossed it onto the desk.

It never made it. Mark, bats-man superb, batted it away before it reached the desk.

Another pick up, another toss, and another success for the defender.

We played this game for almost ten minutes. I'd make a snarky remark about how easily cats are amused, except that I was the bowler.

I did get plenty of bending and stretching exercise.