Exceedingly Mundane

The proverbial good news – my laptop arrived home today, from the repair center. The video was out and they apparently replaced the LCD bezel (whatever that is), and the system board. It arrived safe and sound, and appears to work.

The proverbial bad news – for some unapparent reason, they felt the need to wipe my hard drive and restore the PC to “system defaults”. Which means like new out of the box. So, all of my programs, all of my data – GONE. For no apparent reason. I can understand that they might have needed to load new drivers for a different video card, but come on. They erased everything. My programs, my emails, my photos, my documents, everything for the last 10 months. All gone.

I am SO not a happy camper right now. It’s going to take me dozens of man-hours to recreate most of this. Some of it I won’t be able to get back because I didn’t have it all backed up. I had the biggest stuff (photos, etc), but because it broke just a day or so into the new year, I didn’t have the previous month’s worth of stuff backed up. Or my email folders, which is my bad, but still. Who thinks to backup their email folders on a regular basis. So, if you’ve emailed me in the last 10 months, sorry. It’s gone too.

Ugh. Send happy thoughts my way, please. I desperately need them. 🙂

I think I better go find some chocolate, before I get started. It’s all gone. All of it.

Well, well, I am surprised! My laptop broke over a week ago, and it took them almost a full week to “overnight” me a box to mail it back in. I assumed that it would take equally as long to repair it and “overnight” it back to me. I appear to be wrong, thank goodness! HP received my laptop on Thursday afternoon, apparently repaired it, and mailed it back to me today (Saturday). My tracking info show that my laptop should arrive home on Monday. I hope so! I miss that little thing 🙂 I just hope my data is all still on there!

In other exciting news, I just went out to the mailbox. I was ecstatic to find my check for the Blingo prize I won back in December, thanks to Dawn! Woo-hoo, gotta go do a happy dance now!

Hope you all have a great weekend!

Well, it’s been a tough time at our house lately with computers. Did you notice I was gone for over a week?

Last week, I was happily surfing on my relatively new HP laptop. I got a blue screen (which I’ve gotten before), and it wouldn’t come back on. After trying several things, we never could get anything to come on the screen except for a couple of vertical colored lines. We tried external monitors and TV’s, but nothing. I placed a service call, since it’s still under warranty, and after trying more things, they determined it had to be mailed in to a service center for repair. I’m glad it’s under warranty, but I hate being without my laptop. Furthermore, they’ve already warned me that the service center will most likely “return it to system defaults” – which means wipe my hard drive. I’m not happy about it, but maybe it was just a warning. I will say this – the shipping box that they were to have “overnighted” to me took 6 long days, 4 business days to arrive. I don’t call that “overnight”. I imagine I’ll be another 3-4 weeks without my laptop.

Which was enough to go wrong, but less than 12 hours later, our website server died. We own and operate our own family website, that we fondly call “Hambones”. It has all of our blogs on it, my photos, my recipes, and various and sundry other computer related “stuff”. We had to buy a new hard drive for it (great, that wasn’t in the post-Christmas budget!) and then Tim had a time getting it all going and data reloaded. We’ve been down a week, but many long hours of Tim’s hard work have finally paid off, and we seem to be back. I lost a post and some photos from the day the server died (we back up every night, so we lost whatever was done during the day), but still. We’re back. I had a post in draft, in my head, called “It’s Dead, Jim”, but I wasn’t sure everyone out there was old enough or geeky enough to get the Star Trek reference 😀

Maybe I’ll have some time to blog soon. You’d think with a whole week of no computers whatsoever, that I would have gotten a lot of other things accomplished. Like cleaning, sorting, organizing, purging, decluttering, things like that. Even reading, my very favorite thing to do. However, this is not the case. There’s something about the anxiety level in my life when I can’t access my computer. When I can’t get my reminders to show up on time to dentist appointments and haircuts. When I can’t remember whose birthday is coming up because all of those things are stored on my computer. When I can’t get to my photos to gaze fondly upon them. You’d think I’d get a lot accomplished, but I tend to wring my hands and wish fervently that this had not happened. Not that it’s the end of the world. It’s just one of those things – I can willingly go a week with limited or no computer time. But force me to do it, take it away where it’s not in the realm of possibility, and I go stark raving nuts. Yep, I’ve stared at the TV a lot, and flipped channels till my thumb is blue. But get something done like cleaning out and repapering the kitchen cabinets shelves? No way, Jose. 😀

Hello Blogland! Hope you’ve all had a great week and will have a super-fantastic weekend!

I have now officially taken the longest break – ever- on my blog. I am wanting to get back into blogging, but I’m not sure I remember how! 🙂

I hope everyone has had a great holiday season. Tim and I have had a really good Christmas. We got to see all of our family, on both sides, over the course of several days. We got to spend our first ever Christmas morning in our own home, opening presents. In all years past, we’ve always gotten up and traveled on Christmas day and we had to open our own presents to each other on another day. So, that was very nice and very “Christmas-y” to me! Tim got me a new telephoto lens for my Canon Digital Rebel. I can’t wait to play with it more! I got Tim a lot of little stuff – some gadgets and toys, some golf stuff, some clothes, a movie, and things like that. A nice Christmas all around.

I’m looking forward to getting the rest of my Christmas decorations down, and trying to get back to normal. I always love Christmas, but after it’s all over, I’m usually yearning to get back into a routine. I thrive on routine, you know I also need to take some time to get my blog “back to normal” and get back to my red look. 🙂

I’m struggling with what to cook this week, but hope to be back tomorrow or later with a menu of sorts for the week. I also *still* have some book chatter to talk about. I think I’ve also just about decided to join a reading challenge. This is something I did a year or so ago, then decided that challenges really don’t fit my reading style. But I do like them, they’re fun and I like to participate, so I’m going to give another one a try 🙂

Oh, and I hope to get a little more “down time” in over the next couple of days. We have some movies we want to watch, lots of football, then I’m going to do my best to persuade Tim to join me in a ritual I’ve loved doing for years. I love to work jigsaw puzzles this time of year, between Christmas and New Years. Here’s a link to the photo of the one we did last year, which also happened to be my very first photo post for my nearly completed Project365 photo blog project. 🙂 I’m looking forward to wrapping up that project as well, and that feeling of accomplishment for completing something that was quite difficult at times. But, I persevered 😀

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas to all of my friends and family out in blog-land. I will be checking in some over the next few days, but I don’t plan on posting much of anything else. I am going to take a break and enjoy the time with Tim and my dad, who is here at our house for a couple of days. We plan to go see my sister Gail on Christmas Day, then over to see Tim’s parents next weekend. I’ll be checking in some before the end of the year, probably with a Christmas update, and also some book chatter.

I hope everyone has a wonderful and blessed holiday. Merry Christmas, everyone 😀

I’ve been jumping up and down for the last couple of hours 😀 Wanna know why? You can go read the entry entitled “the best bad dream I ever had” over at Dawn’s blog (“Thoughts from Along the Broken Road”). Or I could just tell you!

Dawn won big at the prize-giving search site called Blingo. It’s just like Google, but they give away prizes every day to their members. I signed up way back in 2005 and won several nice little “small” prizes. I won some iTunes gift cards and some movie tickets. Tim signed up also, under my id, and so if he won, I won also. That’s the way the Blingo system works. If you win, then your “friend” wins (whoever you signed up under). WELL. Unbeknownst to me, my dear blogging friend Dawn had signed up under my id. So, if she wins, then I win. Are you starting to figure it out now? Dawn won their biggest prize last night – she had a 1 in 350,000 chance of winning her choice of a Dell Computer with 22″ monitor, or $750 in cash. She had a bad dream last night and got up to do some blog reading and surfing. Lucky for me! She used Blingo to search, and she won. And since she had signed up under my id, and she was signed into the Blingo system, I won too! I’m still in total shock. Well, except for the jumping up and down and random squealing that I do every few minutes. It’s starting to bug Tim, I think! I got my choice too, and I also chose the cash. Such an awesome thing to win, right here at Christmas.

So – many thanks to my dear blogging buddy down in Florida – Miss Dawn! Thank you so much Dawn, for searching Blingo in the middle of the night, and for winning us both such an awesome thing right here at Christmas!

Oh, and if you haven’t signed up for Blingo, click this button and sign up under me. Maybe we could both win something sometime 😀

I’m not going to play along to Menu Plan Monday this week, although I do have to cook some this week! Tim is out of town some on business, so I won’t have to cook for a couple of nights. I didn’t really plan a menu last week, but I did really good. I cooked every day and we only went out to eat one night – on Friday, our traditional date night. We went to our favorite Mexican place. Tim had a combination fajita plate (chicken, beef, chorizo and shrimp) and I had shrimp enchiladas. We splurged and had some guacamole, so I was a happy girl!

I got on the ball last week and got some shopping done. Yeah! I was gone one day from 1:20 to nearly 10 PM that night. Believe me, I was worn out! I got a lot done, though, and I also ordered a bunch online. I have 4 orders coming over the next few days, and I love it. I love getting packages in the mail and I love knowing that those were presents I didn’t have to go out and pound the pavement for. I do have a few more gifts to go, most notably for Tim. He wants us to get a new stove this year, but gosh, that’s hard to wrap and put under the tree!

So, my plan for Monday is Christmas-related. I hope to get a lot of wrapping done today. I hope to start on my Christmas cards. That and a ton of housecleaning and laundry are my exciting plans for the day 🙂

Oh, and I still hope to do some blogging this week. I’ve had a ton of trouble lately with my laptop and I just haven’t had a lot of time to try to fix my computer, still blog and check out your blogs. My Google Reader is at nearly 375 new posts, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that. I’ve never actually hit that “Mark All as Read” button, but I may be getting close. I still have a book-related blog post I want to find time to write, and talk about some books I’ve read lately. Hopefully later in the week! I’m also planning to ask a couple more Christmas-themed “Question of the Day” this week. They’re basic questions, but I always think it is fun to see what everyone else thinks and does at their house for Christmas. 😀

Have a great day, everyone!!

I had planned to either blog today or ask another Question of the Day. I’ve asked two Christmas-related QOTD this week, and have really loved reading everyone’s answers! But I don’t think I’ve got enough time to sit down and compose a “real” blog post. I spent the morning running errands, then my dad came by for lunch and a long visit, and now I have laundry to do 🙁 We’ll watch the NFL game tonight on our just added NFL Network, so maybe I’ll have some time to catch up on some things. I have some books that I have read recently that I wanted to do a quasi-review of, as well as talk about new books 😀

Alas, things are just too busy this time of year. Tomorrow (Friday), I actually hope to start my Christmas shopping. I am so behind this year. Usually by now, I’ve gotten some things bought, maybe even half of the gifts. And I would be contemplating whether to do more shopping or start wrapping. At this point, I just want to try to go shopping and find some things.

Hope everyone is having a good day and a great week. Enjoy this holiday season, and go hug someone you love 😀

Today is Tim’s birthday and I can’t let a chance go by to wish my darling husband Happy Birthday at my blog. I wrote a post about him last year (click here for that one) and one the year before that (even shorter, that one is here). Believe it or not, Tim doesn’t read my blog! I usually read the comments to him later, so he does get them. He works on a computer all day and sometimes half the night, and keeps our website and our blogs running, so he doesn’t really spend a lot of his spare time playing on the computer. He likes to play golf in his spare time! Which is what we did yesterday, as part of an early birthday present for him, I went with him to the golf course. We took Beau this time, for his first ever trip (pictures here). Tim also got to use his present I bought him, a Sky Caddie.

I’m going to do my best to see that he has a good day. But then again, I try most every day to see that he has a good day. Tim is the best thing that has ever happened to me and the best part of me. He works really hard to take care of me and Beau, and to make us happy. I could go on and on about him, but suffice it to say, he’s a great guy and I’m so very lucky to have him. 🙂

So, Happy Birthday Sweetheart! I love you 😀

I’m not feeling inspired to come up with some kind of a blog post today, so I thought I’d post a photo of Beau. I took this one a couple of weeks ago and thought it was so cute. Well, I think most every photo of my puppy is cute, but you get the idea 🙂 He likes to roll on his back and pull up his two front paws – this is his sign that he wants his belly rubbed! He does this a lot when Tim or I walk by him in the kitchen. You know, I’m posting this photo here, but I really need to be posting photos over at my Project365 blog. I was about 10 days behind, then posted 5 days worth of photos, but now I’m about a week behind again. Sigh. Maybe I’ll catch up soon!

I am staying pretty busy with catching up on things around here. Any spare time I have, I’m working on rebuilding my iTunes library. I blogged about my disaster here -but basically I deleted my entire iTunes library and am slowly trying to reload all of my music. I had a backup I had made months and months ago (ahem, like 9 or 10 months ago), which was woefully out of date. I’ve probably spent 8 hours so far trying to rebuild my music and playlists, and I still have a ways to go. A long ways 🙁

On the Christmas front, we’re partially decorated, but that’s it. I haven’t bought the first present. I don’t even have any ideas for anyone in our family. I don’t know where to start and I’m slowly starting to panic. I haven’t done Christmas cards and we haven’t done the outdoor decorating. Just my tree and Snow Village are up. I’ll probably post some photos in early December over at my Project365 blog.

Hope you all have a great day!

Just a word to the wise… I thought I’d share some tidbits of wisdom here tonight.

Please note – if it’s late at night and you’re tired, and you happen to be plundering around on your Vista laptop, trying to find out why it keeps locking up and giving you a big ole blue screen… Do Not, I repeat, Do Not, go into Explorer and start looking around. If you did, you might mistake two entries for Music as a duplicate of one another. Not one being a folder and one being a Link or some such Vista nonsense. By deleting one, you are not cleaning up disk space. When it says you are deleting nearly 8 Gig worth of music, stop and do not click “OK”. When it then says that this is too much data to be placed in the Recycle Bin, do not click ok, allow, yes, proceed or enter. Because then you will erase every.single.entry in your iTunes library. And be sure to NOT try to hook up your iPod to said Vista laptop afterwards in order to try to sync it back. Because iTunes only works one way and you’ll overwrite your iPod with your newly zapped, empty, nada iTunes library.

Just saying… you might want to take note of this in the future.

Me, of course, I would never do this. I wouldn’t feel like a total eejit if I did do something like this. I would not have to dig out my (hopefully) old backup copy of iTunes and try to restore it. Because you know, I would never go nearly A YEAR without backing up iTunes. Not me.

It’s a good thing I can put my hands on all of the music I have purchased in the last 8-9 months. Of course, any of the free songs that I have downloaded would be gone. Because I wouldn’t think to back up those. Just saying.

OK, that concludes your Public Service Announcement for today.

P.S. Originally I planned to blog a bit about our weekend, but that’s just gonna have to wait. I seem to be really busy with life and not with taking or posting photographs over at my Project365 blog. I’m {gasp} over a week behind over there. At least I’m attempting to get something posted here every few days. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up some soon. Have a great weekend! 😀

Still busy here, but having a blast. Tim is on vacation all week, and my sister Gail came Monday and stayed 2 days with us. She’ll be back tomorrow (Thurs) with her family, and my dad will drive up, for the big day. Or maybe I should say, the “big meal”. Because after all, Thanksgiving is mostly about the food, isn’t it?!

Here’s what we’re having tomorrow:

Cheese and Crackers for an appetizer
Turkey
Gail’s Squash Dressing
Cranberry Sauce
Broccoli Casserole
Sweet Potato Casserole
Green Bean Bundles
Rolls
Pecan Pie
Creme Brulee Cheesecake

Hopefully, we’ll all get to watch a little football, before or after, and maybe get a little exercise in after eating. I’m hoping to either get out and walk a bit, or get out with the guys and watch them hit golf balls in the backyard. I know the weather should be pretty good tomorrow – we’re expecting a line of thunderstorms to move through later today and drop our temps from the high 70’s to the low 50’s. It should feel more like Thanksgiving tomorrow 😀 Hopefully, the rain will be gone and we can all get out and get a little bit of fresh air and exercise after the feasting 😛

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I’m not posting my regular “Menu Plan Monday” post today. I haven’t really got a menu planned this week, nor do I have a lot of motivation to make one 🙂

We had a really busy but fun weekend. Tim went deer hunting on Saturday, and Beau and I went along for the ride. I spent the day with my mother-in-law and niece, which was fun. We went shopping 🙂 My father-in-law shot a deer and sent my dad home with a lot of deer meat. Tim didn’t shoot one, but he will. He usually waits until December or even January before he shoots us one. He likes to go and see his brothers, dad and friends and hang out. 🙂 Sunday was busy with church, football and running errands. Unfortunately, our Saints did not play well and lost their game. Tim was bummed the rest of the day.

We watched a couple of movies from Netflix. Our viewing time has dropped dramatically lately, and probably won’t pick up this week. We finally saw “Miss Potter” which I really liked and Tim suffered through with quiet grace and dignity. We also watched a really old movie called “The Spitfire Grill” that we liked, but it certainly didn’t end like we wanted.

Tim is on vacation all week. He usually takes either this week off or the one after Thanksgiving (his BIRTHDAY week!) to go deer hunting. It’s so warm that he wants to go play golf some, then maybe hunt later in the week. I’m hoping to get him to help me some around the house. We’re having my side of the family here at our house for Thanksgiving this year. This is the first time we’ve had it here since my mom died over 5 years ago. I hope I remember how to cook a turkey! 🙂

So, I’ll be busy all week, most likely running around “like a chicken with my head cut off”. Cleaning, cooking, shopping and what not. I don’t imagine I’ll have a lot of computer time this week, so if you don’t see me for a few days, don’t worry 🙂

As for the menu, we’re just going to have a couple of easy meals early in the week – things like loaded baked potatoes, waffles and turkey bacon, maybe tomato soup and grilled cheese. I’ll spend a lot of time on Wednesday PM cooking, so supper won’t be much. Thursday evening we will have turkey sandwiches! Friday and the weekend are totally up in the air.

Hope you all have a great week and a very blessed, happy Thanksgiving. I know we both have so much to be thankful for 😀

We’re about through painting here. I forgot how much I dislike painting, especially the tedious detail stuff. I don’t mind just rolling a large surface with paint – it’s all the nooks and crannies, crevices, corners, moldings and stuff I don’t particularly like… Well – on second thought, I just don’t like any of it really! The prep work, the actual painting, the clean-up, ugh.

Some of you sweet people left comments and were under the impression that we were undertaking a large scale outdoor painting project. Not so. We have a brick house, and have some external surfaces that did need painting every year or two. Tim was always responsible for that, so about 3 or 4 years ago, he decided we needed to put vinyl siding on our house. Which alleviates almost all of the painting (for him!). We have vinyl everywhere except some trim and the outside doors. So, that’s what we were painting.

Our exterior doors are French paned doors – 15 lovely squares of glass with small panes in between. Well, it’s one large sheet of glass, but you get the idea. Lots of detail and small spots to paint. We had all white doors, trim and “sidelights” as I call them. Now, the door is a dark brown and the trim is still white. I’ll post photos later today or tomorrow over at my Project365 blog. UPDATE , they are up now (here and here). 😛

Here’s the color we painted the doors – a dark brown. It looks more chocolate in this photo, but you know how paint is – it gets darker when it dries. I told Tim when we opened the can – now I know why I picked this color – it looks like liquid chocolate! Being the chocoholic that I am, that must be why I went for this color! It looks good enough to eat, hehehe! Oh, and it’s called “Boston Legacy” and we got it at Lowe’s.

I’m tired of painting and ready to do something else! 🙂

We’ve been busy bees around here. Too busy for me to spend ANY time on the computer, and really too busy for me to be doing my regular household chores. The dirty clothes and dirty floors and dust-covered furniture are starting to be very apparent 🙄

What have we been doing, you ask? Well, yesterday we planted the last of the pansies and also put out some mulch. We started prep work on some exterior painting. Tim is the painter in our house, thank goodness. I remember now that I don’t like painting. Actually, intensely dislike would be a much more descriptive term! 😀 Tim doesn’t like it either, but he’s better about sucking it up and getting the job done!!! 😀 We bought new locks and deadbolts for our outside doors and decided to paint the doors a different color. So, yesterday we did the cleaning, scraping and sanding prep-type work.

We got up right after sunup today (no walk, wah, I’m NOT a happy camper!) and started doing the primer coat. Tim is hoping it dries enough today to get the first coat of the new paint on. We’re having to leave the doors open, so it’s really weird to have all the outside, normally-locked doors wide open. Not to mention that Beau is rather baffled as to why the doors are left open, yet he’s not allowed to go in and out. We tried chaining him for a while this morning, and he was happy, as long as he could see us. When we were inside or at a different door, he was barking constantly, as if to say, where are you, where are you? He can’t run in and out because a) we’re painting the threshold over the door too and b) we don’t want his hair to get all in the paint!

I probably won’t be posting as much here this week. I’ll be posting some photos along over at my Project365 blog later on in the week. Hope everyone is having a great day and a great week!