Naturally Optimistic

Got my desk cleared off (miracle!) Got my lap top, external hard drive & video camera connected so I can FINALLY dump the video from our camera (since AUGUST IS WALKING now!) Can't get the video camera to show up on the computer = can't do ANYTHING. Argh.

My computer died today. As in "can't find your hard drive" died. I'm very, very sad. I only hope that I still have the photos on my camera of Dahlia that I had not yet saved on my work computer. It really REALLY sucks. Not in the budget for a new computer, guess that iPhone is on hold and I will go nuts if I have to work on this DELL for very long. But mostly, sad about my photos. I'm taking it in on Monday, but I'm pretty sure what they're going to say (and then I'll give them $59! Hmph!) :( Feel free to send computer contributions my way.

I haven't been using my laptop very much because the router got screwed up and wouldn't let us on (the desktop) any more (about a year ago) and that caused much frustration with me & my husband and so finally I just gave up and yanked it and said forget it. Then I had Dahlia and thought - wow...wouldn't it be nice to be able to be sitting WHEREVER she is and be able to use the computer? But I was to lazy/annoyed/dumb to figure out how to set-up the router...again. Besides when I set the one up for work it took days and extra tech support people and calls to the Philippines so I was not anxious to do it again. Then I decided it'd be much easier to jump on my neighbors network (Hi Anna!) and that worked pretty great - except when they dumped me off. Ha, just kidding. I think sometimes their router & my computer don't play nice and that's annoying. So with about 2 weeks left in this house, I decided to take the bull by the horns and set up my own network. A...

Pretty mellow today....the usual morning routine - up, shower, dress, get baby up, bathe her, dress - breakfast for both of us - then on to whatever we've got going on. We were on the phone with Apple for a long time today trying to figure out the wireless connection nonsense. (solution - get another Mac and dump the dell + linksys router! Amen!), we sent 3 packages - which entailed wrapping, packing & walking to the post office to send. I watched the rest of "21" which I enjoyed, I finished my book (After Dark) and started another (Gods in Alabama). I did some work including tweaking our WAB listing (for festival submissions) and final listens on soundtrack tracks. I tried a new recipe (eggplant parmesan - review...pretty darn good) and now I'm knitting & watching men's beach volleyball. Someday Dahlia will have her blanket. Tomorrow's Friday! Tomorrow we send off the soundtrack for duplication. Saturday my parents come to town. Sunday we have anothe...

Yesterday I drove the sick computer (steve's Dell) to Apple Valley (160 or so miles south) to have my cousin's boyfriend take a look at it and see if he could save me $300+ and fix it. We sat from about 6:15pm til it finished up at 12:45am!!! Paul tried several things initially that just didn't work due to all the viruses & spyware that had infected that machine. Ultimately he had to remove the harddrive, install it as a slave on his computer, remove all of our files to his computer, put the harddrive back into our computer and reinstall the operating system. Now it works like a charm! We *hopefully* didn't lose any files or photos and now our system is really running a lot better & faster...and the desktop is so clean! Whohooo! Paul also installed a virus program that is *top notch* and will continually run in the background as well as some adware software to catch nasty buggers before the get us to the point of no return...again. I also got to visit my adorabl...