"Incredibly stupid!" I thought as I perused my left hand before the pain set in. Well, that's not really what I thought, and a long ways from what I said, but my mother reads these pages occasionally. I had been loading Linux 7.2 on my test system in the basement while I was carrying a few things down there from the upstairs computer room, trying to bring some semblance of order to my lair. I'd noticed that it seemed to be locked up as it was loading the second disk, so I sat down at the keyboard. I smelled something hot, and there was the CPU sitting right there, so I held my hand over it. Yep, the CPU was indeed hot. As I was bringing my had out from the frame, the pads of my index finger and middle finger brushed the CPU. Just brushed them, I thought. Just for a millisecond, I though. I held them up to look closer and I noticed the smell of burning flesh. That's when the pain really hit. So I spent about an hour with my hand under running water, and the rest of the night with my fingers in a baggie of ice water. It made sleeping pretty hard, since I had to sleep on my back. Then, about 02:00, just after I'd finally drifted off, we had a wonderful thunderstorm. Well, it would have been wonderful under more pleasant circumstances, as it is, it just woke me up again. I don't think that I really went back to sleep until 04:00, and I sure didn't get up on time. Amazingly, my fingers are doing much better that I expected them to... they're only painful when they get too warm, like holding a cuppa coffee. Other than that, they feel like they've been dipped in paraffin. Really hard to do venipunctures, those are the fingers that I use to locate veins. There is fluid under the pad, it kinda looks like a really thick blister, especially on the middle finger. The index finger is a half-blister... the pain that I still have is on the periphery of the blisters. Weird. So anyway, I don't really know why the CPU is heating up so much on that MB, but I need to figger it out... unless, of course, it's already ruined, which is a distinct possibility. I haven't really felt like messing with it since then. Work today was pretty light this afternoon, so I kinda volunteered to go home early... so I left about 14:30 and came home and laid down, and slept until 18:30 or so, waking up off and on. I'm hoping that I will be able to get to sleep tonight and that I haven't screwed up my schedule.... I'm taking call on Sunday for the tech that took call for me several weeks ago when my back went out, and Andy is going to get the clutch fixed on the truck this weekend. And I really need to get some yard work done this weekend, too. Today was a beautiful day, but I had to sleep, dammit. I could've been outside piddling around... the yard is lettered with branches that the maples have shed throughout the winter. I also need to get some grass seed.... So much stuff that I need to do and I'm not getting any of it done, dammit. Story of my life.