I love both of my parents for having such well-developed senses of humor. My dad in particular is never afraid to laugh until his face starts turning deep shades of red and he can no longer breathe. Sometimes, he starts coughing, and I legitimately worry that he will keel over mid-guffaw.

It brings new meaning to that whole I almost died laughing! thing.

The great thing about my parents is that they both crack themselves up all the time. Nobody else may find their jokes amusing, but they have their own built-in entertainment systems in their minds. I'm the exact same way, so I totally understand the benefit of that.

All this to say . . . I could literally hear my dad laughing at himself as he wrote me an email yesterday. I had asked him two computer questions earlier, one regarding my coworker, who was wondering if she should trust her son (Ryan) to uninstall Vista and put XP on her new computer. The other question concerned Photoshop Elements 2.0, the best the church could offer when I complained about MSPaint and told them that, no, Microsoft Publisher was not intended to be an image editing program.

Behold what happened next . . .

From: Me
To: Dad

Okay, this is what is happening to Photoshop. It's still open, but it won't show me anything other than this . . . (See attached file.)

From: Dad
To: Me

Most likely it's because your task bar is on the left side instead of the bottom. Photoshop has tried to minimize itself to the bottom but has become dazed and disoriented because there is no task bar there to hold the launch button. Try trading Ryan your XP for his Vista.

All I could do was to shake my head and sigh, knowing that my father at least brought a smile to his own face if nothing else.