I'm Still Here!!

I could start by asking, what else could go wrong? But I won't. If I did, you might think that I was just whining. On the other hand, I know that each of you has experienced much of the same. The happy news is that I'm now back on the air!

OK, so what's been going on?

Computer crash - One day, my computer decided that it didn't want to boot up any more. The Windows boot procedure reported that a certain file was missing or corrupt. After spending about a week trying to restore a copy of that file and get running again, I finally gave up. The next approach was to buy a new hard drive, and start over by restoring from the factory restore disk. Of course, this puts the machine back into its factory new state, which means that every Windows Update needed to be reinstalled, and every program that I use needed to be reinstalled. What with only being able to work on this in the evenings after getting home from work, this took several weeks to get back up again. As for all my photographs, I was able to install the old hard drive as a second drive, and copy all my pictures to the new disk. I wasn't so concerned about loosing the picture files, since I keep a copy of all of them on a external USB hard drive, and on burnable DVD disks. So, I was quite certain that I could recover them all. Note to all -- MAKE SURE TO BACKUP ALL OF YOUR IMPORTANT FILES!!!

Office furniture exchange - In the midst of trying to get my computer back up again, my wife wanted me to exchange my office furniture with hers. It would seem that it would have been easier to exchange offices, but she didn't want to do that. Did you ever play that computer game Sokoban? This games goes back several years ago; it was a simple game involving a bunch of boxes that you had to push around to get them into the proper places. There were 50 levels to solve, and some of them were extremely difficult. But, not nearly as difficult as actually exchanging furniture between two rooms. In reality, it involves at least four rooms in the house, and more likely every room in the house. And that's exactly what it did. And to start off, all of the computers had to be shut down and moved to a safe waiting area. It took me about two solid days to get the furniture moved. And then it took about another week to get the computers back up and running. And, of course, my wife's computer had to come first. Anyway, both my wife's computer and mine are back up and running. But, there seems to be a lot of stuff left all over the house. The entire household has not recovered yet. So, the job is not yet finished.

Through it all, do you think that I stopped taking photos. No!!! Alright, here two photos from just last night.





So what's next? Well, today I threw my back out, and right now as the sun is ready to set, it's raining real hard to boot. So, no pictures tonight. Hopefully I'll be up and at 'em real soon.