Exceedingly Mundane

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!