Dropping in to say "Hi!"

Hi People! How've you been? Well, I know how YOU'VE been, because I've been checking into all my favorite blogs. But I haven't updated for weeks, because if the internet is an information superhighway, I've been cruising for the last few weeks in a 1971 Ford Pinto. It's an old, slow, overwhelmed desktop that is very cranky and temperamental. You can't click more than once at a time or else it gets confused and refuses to budge. And heaven forbid you accidentally click on a .pdf!! Go to the bathroom, fix yourself a snack, iron the laundry, then come back and see if it's downloaded yet. It really does teach us a valuable lesson in patience. All the poor baby really needs is some extra RAM, but it's so expensive to upgrade for that model.

A few weeks ago my youngest angel, Natalie, wandered up to my bedroom in the middle of the night and crawled into my bed, lying right along the edge. Of course, it doesn't take a supergenius to guess that she fell out of bed at some point, and she caught my laptop with her foot as she fell. It was stationed on the end of my dresser, where I was trying out The Naked Alarm Clock. I absolutely, positively needed to get up on time the next morning, and sometimes I just don't hear my usual alarm clock. This was set to go off with a jangling, unfamiliar bell at top volume. Foolproof, right? I didn't figure Natalie into the equation...

When I tried to power up the laptop the next morning (and I didn't wake up on time, naturally)there was an error message that read, "No bootable devices...The hard drive is either damaged or disconnected... you are doomed...blah blah."

I was really hoping for "disconnected" but instead it was damaged beyond repair. All my homeschool records, all my Pampered Chef records, all my digital pictures that I hadn't put on Snapfish, all my emails and contacts, all my kids' school reports . . . . gone. What hurts the most was the homeschool records. My kids have to log over 900 hours of school each year, and I'm terrible at keeping paper records. We had several hundred hours logged already on that hard drive and now I GOT NOTHING.

Dell was fantastic about helping me out, though. I even was connected to a live, easily-understandable tech support (she was in the Philippines, but spoke perfect English) within FIVE MINUTES of holding!!

So my two purgatorial weeks of using the cranky old computer are at an end.

Now I just have to be more careful of where I put my laptop.