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.

I wish that I had a “real” menu to post this week. But, with Tim being out of town some on business and hunting the other days (before deer season ends around here), I’ll be alone for dinnertime almost every day this week. Which is ok by me, because that means less cooking! But it doesn’t make for an interesting post. 😀

The general idea when Tim is not here for supper is that I don’t cook. I don’t know how those of you who cook for one do it!!! I can’t seem to bring myself to cook when it’s just me. I can barely cook some days for the two of us, but most of the time I do, and I enjoy it. 🙂 Tim is a great guy to cook for. He likes to eat, always says something nice about what I prepare, and is always open to trying something new. When it’s just me though, I’m happy with something simple. A bowl of cereal or oatmeal. Some popcorn. A can of soup. A Lean Cuisine. Easy and no cooking required. This week, I plan to eat some leftover Chinese food for supper one or two nights, breakfast food one night and probably a Lean Cuisine another night. I’ll probably get back to cooking later in the week or next weekend, but right now I don’t have anything planned.

That said, I thought I’d ask a menu-planning/cooking “Question of the Day“: Let’s say you participate in Menu Plan Monday, or you occasionally browse online for recipes. What do you do when you find recipes you might want to try one day? Do you print them out and file them somewhere? Do you save them to your computer? If so, how and where do you save them (to a Word document, a cooking program, an email folder, etc)?

As for me, I do a mix of those things. Sometimes I go ahead and print them out. They get put in one of my infamous and ever growing “piles” in the kitchen or office. (The piles are for placing in a binder I started last year but am already behind on 🙁 ) Sometimes I go ahead and put them in my Mastercook software, in a “to-try” type cookbook. But, the majority of the time (and overwhelmingly so, probably 95% of the time), I put them in an email folder called “Recipes”. Which is great, except those are stored on my laptop that died. Which is supposed to be delivered back home to me today. So, we’ll see later today if I’ve still got all of those recipes, and a thousand other things, I had stored on my laptop. Sigh. 🙂

Leave me a comment and let me know what you do when you find a recipe online that you might want to try. And, have a great day!

I’ve seen this on a couple of blogs, and goodness knows, I normally love these little quizzes. This one, however, couldn’t be further from the truth!!!

What Stacy Means

You are the total package – suave, sexy, smart, and strong. You have the whole world under your spell, and you can influence almost everyone you know. You don’t always resist your urges to crush the weak. Just remember, they don’t have as much going for them as you do. You are a seeker. You often find yourself restless – and you have a lot of questions about life. You tend to travel often, to fairly random locations. You’re most comfortable when you’re far away from home. You are quite passionate and easily tempted. Your impulses sometimes get you into trouble. You are usually the best at everything … you strive for perfection. You are confident, authoritative, and aggressive. You have the classic “Type A” personality. You are very open. You communicate well, and you connect with other people easily. You are a naturally creative person. Ideas just flow from your mind. A true chameleon, you are many things at different points in your life. You are very adaptable. You are a free spirit, and you resent anyone who tries to fence you in. You are unpredictable, adventurous, and always a little surprising. You may miss out by not settling down, but you’re too busy having fun to care.

I’m neither restless nor do I love to travel. I’m the epitomy of a homebody. 🙂
I’m the polar opposite of a Type A personality. I’m perfectly content to be second, or third, or last. 🙂
I don’t connect or communicate well with others, especially at first. I don’t have a creative bone in my body.
Free spirit? Hah! Adventurous and unpredictable? Double Hah! These describe someone else with my name, but not me!

It was fun though, go check it out and see what it says about you!

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’m still easing into the New Year, how about you? I haven’t done a lot of the things I want to do, to start the new year off right. I hope to get back to a *much* healthier eating routine, and hopefully back into some exercise soon. I am behind on getting the house clean, so once I get a handle on that, I need to start on my new year things. Little things like a new calendar, new files for the new year, cleaning out last year’s files and clutter, etc. Backing up files and photos from the computer. Also on that list is a new devotional.

I bought and used a Guideposts daily devotional last year and I liked it. I have a copy of “My Utmost for his Highest” by Oswald Chambers that I am thinking I might use this year for my daily devotional. I need to get to the bookstore soon and see if I can find one I like better, or one geared more toward women or something. I’m really not quite sure what I want to use this year. So, I thought I’d throw this question out and see what you guys had to say.

So today’s “Question of the Day” is about a daily devotional – do you have one that you use? What brand or company or person authored it? Do you have a new one for this year, or a favorite from years past? Do you have an online devotional that you use or a site that you reference? Do you get a Scripture or thought every day by email? Do you have something else you do or would recommend? Leave me a comment and let me know. 🙂

Happy 2008!

I don’t have anything monumental to report on this New Years Day. Another new year (or as I like to say, “another day in paradise”!) It seems they are flying by at record speed!

2007 was a good year for us, and we’re looking forward to an equally wonderful 2008. We are very blessed and so very grateful for everything we have. Tim and I have each other, we’re healthy and happy, and we have Beau to keep us entertained. Tim has his golf and I have my books to keep us occupied, and we enjoy doing most everything else together. What more could you ask for? 🙂

I thought I’d start off the year with a quick and easy “Question of the Day:” Did you stay up last night to ring in the new year? Did you immediately go to bed after the stroke of midnight, or are you just a party animal?!

For us, we stayed up. Chris and Elizabeth came over to hang out and work on our annual New Years jigsaw puzzle with us (picture soon, when we finish!) We made it till midnight, and we even sat up later playing Text Twist on the computer (new high score for us, yeah!). As you can tell, we’re not big on partying or celebrating. 🙂

So, leave me a comment and let me know – did you stay up or not?!

Happy New Year to you!