The worst timing
It’s been about three weeks since I’ve been needed overnight at my brother’s… my sister-in-law was on vacation over the holidays, and RC took vacation last week. While it was a nice respite, being able to sleep in my own bed every night, I’m now out of practice. The girls were SO excited to see me, even the four-legged one – you’d have thought they hadn’t seen me at all during that time! And they were terribly cute, playing “let’s dress up and pretend we’re playing in the snow”. Wia has such a big imagination for a three-year old, and Emma follows right along behind her.
Yep, they were cute until bedtime rolled around. Wia took the opportunity to get up no less than 10 times… “I need a little drink of water”, “I need to make a stinky”, “I need to take out my ponytail”, “I need a little drink of milk/juice/more water”. I finally had to threaten a spanking, and fortunately it worked, because I don’t think I could follow through with it.
But poor Bailey suffered the most… she’s now 15 weeks old, and is 99.9% house trained. She’s so good – she lets you know when she needs to go out, and will even come and get you if you’re in another room. But she still takes a long time when she needs to do her business, and I wasn’t paying attention to the cues tonight. I sort of hurried her back in after she squatted, and didn’t give her time to… you know. Wia and I finished up her evening ablutions, and came into the kitchen to get a sip of water, and there it was. In the middle of the living room floor, a steaming pile of Aunt Amanda’s Mistake. Poor puppy. She was so embarrassed; she just stood by it and kind of whined. I felt terrible. Thankfully she forgives easily.
Backup
I am afraid that my almost-8-year old desktop has given up the ghost. It worked for about 10 minutes lastnight – long enough for me to print a rabbit adoption contract and get some info from the internet – and then in the midst of installing the latest version of Java it just sort of went “eh”. The screen went all wobbly, and no amount of Ctrl+Alt+Delete-ing mattered. Unfortunately, I haven’t backed up files on that PC for some time… I’m going to try one more time to see if I can get it to boot up (I tried several times lastnight, and while it looks like Windows starts up, nothing shows up on the screen). If I can’t get it to work, I’ll take out the hard drive and try to recover the data. None of it’s very important stuff… just pictures and various and sundry other files. The desktop was supposed to be my backup for the laptop, but it’s obviously not reliable.
Now I need to find some other way to backup the laptop so I don’t lose anything else. I was looking at the Seagate FreeAgent Go because of all the pretty colors, but I don’t really have any great need for portability. The FreeAgent Desk comes in sizes up to 1.5TB (I can’t even IMAGINE filling something with more than a terabyte of data), and is not portable… I just need to figure out something.
This poor, pitiful Gateway has been limping along for at least the last 3 years… I upgraded the memory about 6 years ago, and then I upgraded to XP (it came with Me, if that tells you anything), and then I replaced the hard drive about 2 years ago. I’m kind of tired of messing with it at this point – I’m out of expansion slots, and the ones there aren’t really widely supported anymore; it came with a CRT monitor that I really wanted to replace, but just never took the time; and my laptop was configured to be a desktop replacement, so I don’t really need both of them. Now I have to figure out how to dispose of the thing… but I know there are tons of resources online for how to dispose of electronics.
January fail
Oops. I forgot to post yesterday. You know, I’m not going to beat myself up about it – I mostly participate in the non-official months because the accountability for posting is helpful, so it’s not really a big deal that I missed one measly little day.
I was thinking earlier this week about my resolution to be more financially responsible, and I kind of decided that for this month, that would mean not buying anything new. I hadn’t really put it into practice, and now I’ve blown it. After a bloody nose every morning this week thanks to the dry, winter air, I broke down and bought a humidifier. It was on sale for $29.99, and it came with three additional filters, so it was a pretty good deal. I could have ordered replacement filters for the ancient humidifier I have in the closet, but I’m not sure it would still hold water since it’s been several years since I last used it. Not to mention that it would cost more for shipping than it would for the filters, and I just can’t deal with that! I figure I’ll either sell it in a garage sale this spring or donate it to Goodwill.
On top of the humidifier, my toaster died this week. I don’t eat a lot of toast, but I need it frequently enough that I needed to replace it pretty quickly. Hey, I have a whole package of english muffins languishing uneaten in the cabinet! I can’t let those go bad, can I? I didn’t buy a fancy-schmancy model… I don’t need more than 2 slices at a time, and I don’t toast a lot of frozen items, so I didn’t need anything with multiple settings.
In addition to those things, I bought a new planner for my purse, and these really cool new Post-It Pockets. I always get the urge to get organized at the beginning of the year, and I’m sure these will work for a while, but eventually I’ll neglect them entirely. I figured I could at least stuff receipts in one of them – I’ve got to keep better track of what I spend on the foster bunnies this year. I almost always have a pile of things that need to be filed, and I can use one of the others for that. The third… I don’t know yet what I’ll use it for, but for now it’s stuck to the side of the kitchen cabinet.
I think I’m done… maybe I’ll just start not buying anything new on Monday? I’m just so tempted… Target has a bunch of new home decor stuff, I’d like to buy some more Wild Thangs, and I’m really wishing for some new houseplants. But for the sake of financial stability and home improvement, I’ll suck it up.
