Kayleigh used to bang on my old laptop’s lid while it was open.  I don’t think it suffered any problems because of this, and of course, the screen works fine, but I’m always paranoid.  I was hoping she wouldn’t bang on this one, it didn’t have some pretty picture on it.  (The old one.)  But the mirror proved too much for her to resist.  When she was out playing, she was always over here, looking at it, touching it, rubbing it, pulling the power cord out (ugh), etc.  Already there’s a little tiny scratch.  So I figured, ok, suck it up and buy a skin.

Took me a long time to get it done, or at least a long time by my scrapping standards.  I had a different theme in mind but couldn’t find the right photos so I pushed Stacey to getting photos of the kids.  It’s really hard to get good pictures of Kayleigh where she’s looking and smiling – really, that’s a major feat.  I didn’t want to use the last good picture of them, mainly because it’s on canvas and I already see it several times a day.  So I finally got a picture of the two of them, didn’t even have to do any face swaps.  However, I did have to remove my arm and part of my foot from the photo!  My kids for ya.  Kayleigh was constantly on the move, as usual, you can’t keep her attention for more than a quarter of a second, I am not kidding.  And Elijah, bless his heart, was trying so hard… too hard.  He ends up trying to hold Kayleigh there then they end up looking so silly because he’s holding down her arms or legs or whatever and she’s screaming to be released.

Once I got the dimensions right of the file and figured out where they were going to cut the hole for the Dell logo, it was easy, it really all fell together.  I love it.  The only problem is that I got lots of bubbles in it this time.  Been a while since I looked at the old one, but I don’t remember having but maybe one small bubble.  This one has several and a few creases now where I tried to get the bubbles out but it would only go so far.  Not sure why this one should have been harder to apply.

And the best part?  Kayleigh hasn’t beat up my laptop at all since I got it.  She has pulled out the cord once or twice but I think at least once of those times was an accident.  Instead, she comes over, points at herself or lightly touches it, and does her little, “ah-ha-ha” talking thing.  Or “ah-who-who.”  Then she moves on her way…  Score.  This, however, does not solve the problem of if I leave it unattended while she’s out to play that she’ll pick up my mouse and throw it…

I can’t figure out what the deal is, but a lot of the time when I click on something, it double clicks. It’s insanely annoying and frustrating when it does that when I’m trying to control+ select stuff and then all the files open. Or when I close a tab in the browser and it closes two or three. Then, to make matters even more interesting, after it started doing that about a week ago, it started sometimes not clicking at all when I click. So either a single click is getting me nothing or it’s getting me a double click!

It’s driving me nuts but I don’t really know for sure if this is just the mouse’s problem – maybe there could be something wrong with my blue tooth module? Maybe my last mouse didn’t really die, maybe there’s something wrong with the blue tooth. Almost wish I hadn’t thrown it away!

But it’s driving me batty!!!!!

I already use a lot of keyboard short cuts but I guess I need to learn to use my touch pad more when I’m at home. Blah.

Last Wednesday sucked with him in the NICU – actually the whole evening sucked – but it started when he first got in there, walked right up to Kayleigh’s bed and started lowering it with the foot pedal thing, despite my telling him to stop. Halfway through the evening, he decided he was going to see Kayleigh again while in the waiting room and took off down the hall to the NICU like he was just going to go in alone – I had to chase him down. The last thing that night was him crawling around on the NICU floor while the nurse practitioner was talking to me. Another nurse gave him hand sanitizer and my friend took him back to the waiting room.

Oy.

Then tonight, he is freaking out down at my computer. I log in via remote desktop and I can’t see anything wrong. Eventually I go down there and sure enough, despite my creating him his own login and trying to block him from anything and everything but his games… he managed to get into the control panel, open the settings for the video card, and turn the whole screen upside down. What an adventure that was. Do you know how hard it is to get the mouse to go where you want it to go while the screen is upside down? Very confusing! I ended up logging back in with remote desktop and fixing it from there.

Yes, he’s way too comfortable with things he should not be comfortable with! Yesterday, also in the NICU, when I was going to hold the baby, the nurse lifted up the top of the incubator bed with the foot pedal. Seconds later, Elijah says, “Oh, so that is how you lift that up,” like he was making a mental note of it for future reference.

Crazy kid. Really, I think the problem is his exceptional memory. :-P

— We had a flat tire Saturday, just as we rolled in to the Land of the Beyond. Steve was with me, though, so he promptly changed it. He’s been saying for months though, “we need to get new tires, we need to get new tires.” So tomorrow, we’re getting some new tires. Nine-hundred-freaking-bucks. That caused me to faint, too. And I’ll probably faint again when I take the Jeep in for the new tires. Praise the Lord for overtime, huh? He worked Saturday before the tire event. Ten hours. He gets paid for twenty. That freaking rocks.

— We also saw 61+ deer on Saturday. In the wild, we weren’t at a park or anything. That was awesome, and those were only the ones we could see to count. First it was a spike buck (see left) followed by a button buck and two does then we saw a fawn, spots and everything. Then after Steve did some bow hunting and me some nature photographing, a young buck with two does. Then, a mama with some does in one field, another doe in the other field across the road. And then? A whole field of them. Of course, there were more to make up the count of 61, but you get the idea. :)

— Was invited to a friend’s house today, along with another friend, to scrapbook. Our kids played. We scrapbooked. Yup, them sitting there with their paper and stickers and scissors and tape and glue and buttons and photos and and and… me with my laptop. Ha. I did the layout at the left. I don’t understand how they did 3 to my 1 considering I did my 1 faster than any of their 1′s. I guess I really can’t talk and do computer stuff at the same time. Good thing I wasn’t chewing gum, too. I took the photo in the layout today, too. Though one of the boys wouldn’t cooperate, he decided he didn’t want any photos done.

– Picked up my new medicine today: Xyzal. I’m hoping it works for me but I guess we really have no way of knowing unless I can make it through the fall, winter, and next spring in better health than I have been (especially of the last year, ugh). Not that I think it will be a cure-all, of course, but hopefully it will help keep me from getting so very sick and infected so much. Plus, according to the doctor, maybe my sinus cavities are perpetually swollen and therefore imitating a blockage, so this might help with that. But anyway, after our insurance (which rocks so far with medications) and the discount card that the doctor gave me, the medicine was FREE. I know I can’t use the discount card all the time but it looks like if I get a new one when it expires, I can get the medicine free 5 months out of the year. Not bad.

– But apparently, even though I didn’t have to pay for it, I’m still required to wait in long lines and have it scanned and sign for it. I looked at it and was like, “I don’t have to pay? SWEET. Let’s go, Elijah.” Next thing I know, I’m halfway out of the parking spot and the checking girl comes running out and asks if I had a prescription. Instead of, “yeah” I should have said, “what, do you routinely chase after people who don’t stop at the check-out counter?” So I had to go back in and wait and wait until it was my turn. She scanned it and had me sign. They got a nice squiggly line for their troubles. I always thought before, when signing, that I was signing because of using my debit card, but apparently not. What am I signing? Selling my soul to the pharmacy??

– One of my Jr High teachers found me on Facebook. Some of you might freak, but he was one of my all-time favorites, his wife, too. I love them. :)

– Um… lots of other stuff, too, methinks but I’ve already bored you enough. :P

I also learned that Gmail messages can be extremely hard to find on the server once they’ve been downloaded with POP3.

So, yeah, yesterday, my laptop totally wigged out, and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I figured that it was due for a reformat anyway, so just had better get with it. It took me forever to backup stuff though (in SafeMode, nonetheless), ’cause I had NEVER backed up any of my 21.1 GB of digital scrapbooking stuff except the stuff I’ve actually bought, that’s backed up on my SSD.

But I’ve done backups with MozBackup several times and have done very successful restores at least twice before, maybe three times. I’ve never had a problem with things not coming together. But this time, for some reason, my backup file had an empty inbox for both of my Gmail addresses that I download into Thunderbird. My SBCglobal was okay, though, and any subfolders. Also okay were the few subfolders under one of the Gmail addresses. But the inboxes (and for that matter, sent mail and trash) were completely empty.

The last backup I had before yesterday was June 10. So, after trying many possible solutions and nothing working, I’ve finally just sucked it up and restored that old stuff and now I have to go through it all again and delete stuff I don’t want (but at least I haven’t lost all those attachments and what not I need). The strange thing, though, was that I had to manually do it because even that stuff refused to re-import with MozBackup. So now I’ve lost 18 days of email to my Gmail addresses. I THINK I have either managed to track down the important stuff or email/text lovely people that I know I had an email from to ask them to re-send. Anyone else, if you’ve sent me some email recently and haven’t received a reply, please re-send as well. I was able to find four very important emails on the Gmail server, and reply from there, though I couldn’t get Thunderbird to re-download them.

So, yeah, people, verify your backups!! You can bet I will next time! I’m also going to be better about emptying my trash more often than, oh, just when I reformat, ’cause that should help on backup size (currently at 2.48 GB), speed, reliability. At least I should think so.

To verify, copy your backup file then rename the extension from pcv to zip and unzip. Go in there and look for the folder Mail, then in there to your accounts, then open the files Inbox and whatever with a text editor and at least see if your stuff is in there! :P

Oh, another thing. Maybe wait a few days to empty your recycle bin and then when you’re like me and you accidentally delete something, you’ll be able to retrieve it rather than losing it forever. Dang it. Yeah, I did that last week, too.

So what sucks the most about reformatting? Mostly just the time involved and especially moving files to back up and to restore. I’m currently restoring my scrapbooking stuff, but once it moves over the network from external hard drive #1, it will already be backed up and ready for syncing whenever I do everything else. ‘Cause you know, I never backed it up before because there was just so much of it. I kept trying to clean it up but never finished.

Bah. :)

Today after class, I got the three of us and B (secretary) some lunch and went to the house/office that I sometimes do computer work at. It’s been a little while since I’d been there, but the printer still wasn’t printing and I had other tasks to complete. They’re switching rooms around so I had to move the daughter’s computer into the parents’ bedroom and the parents’ computer up into the over-the-garage apartment as well as setting up a printer for the lady’s laptop and fixing the printer with the office computer and cleaning the office computer.

I cleaned the office computer and while waiting for the “new” fax/print/copier to install, I went to move the first computer into the bedroom. But, alas, someone had already moved it! It was in the living room in a pile. Somehow, they’d moved it with all cables in tact, still connected everywhere, and dumped it into a big pile of wires complete with two extra mice, an extra keyboard, and some other junk. So the first task was to untangle all of that. How I wished for that computer to be equipped with everything bluetooth and otherwise wireless at that time!

So anyway, finally got that one in place of the other computer and took the other one upstairs and set it up in this tiny area, set up the laptop to print wirelessly… but never could get that printer to work. I took one I was replacing with the fax, etc., and hooked it up to my laptop and it worked immediately. So there’s some problem with the computer, not the printers. This has been an on going problem and I’ve been unable to figure it out. I finally talked her into reformatting. I mean, this computer has been going since something like 2002, seriously. I’m surprised it still runs, given the abuse it goes through from their son who thinks it’s a good idea to install a bunch of casino crap and other things on it each week he comes home from college.

I told B that I was going to hang a sign on the computer. “Dear N, do not touch this computer under penalty of death. If you mess it up again, Val is going to have to kill you.”

On the upside, he does insure I have an occasional job with them. :P It’s just frustrating to keep having to clean the computers off over and over again from the same crap.

The reason she didn’t want me reformatting was because she first of all, doesn’t really understand it, and secondly was afraid of losing software. All they need is Windows, Office, and Quickbooks – they have Quickbooks so I said I will handle the other two. It just needs to be done. So that’s for tomorrow, hopefully it won’t take a terrible amount of time.

So that was my day today. Took longer than expected but Elijah and Sarah handled it well, entertaining themselves with toys and the dog and later the TV. Though I wanted to smack Elijah when I told him it was time to go, to start cleaning up the toys and he looked straight at me and said, “I. Am. Watching. This!” Ugh.

I’m feeling better, by the way. Still have a cough and some congestion but it’s not nearly what it was. In fact, we went out to eat Friday night and then to a store afterward and on the drive down, my right ear just suddenly cleared and the pressure was gone – it was like heaven, I tell you! But then in the store, now being spoiled by my clear right ear, I tried again to clear the pressure in my left (I think you know what I mean, nothing gross) but that only succeeded in re-filling my right ear. And I tell you what, it was so fast and so hard that I actually got dizzy, very dizzy, for about five minutes after that. I almost fell over it threw my balance so bad. But then after a few minutes, it cleared again. Finally now, my ears and that area of my head don’t seem clogged and I can fully hear again, but I just know that the ears are infected so I’m going to try to get to the doctor soon anyway. The medicine he gave me for them last time expired last month, so, yeah.

Well, uh, now I’m just rambling…