Because life is never dull over here...

Good grief, where do I start?  I am starting to think that if my life was not so chaotic, I would not be terribly interesting... but I would be perfectly okay with less interesting these days!!

First of all, we lost our PC just prior to the holiday season thanks to a lovely virus my husband received via facebook.  Argh.  So all of our personal books, our farm books, our pictures, my writings, our home videos... gone.  Just like that. 

You are likely asking yourselves the classic question that has been sprinkling this life lesson... "didn't you back things up?"  Nope.  Because just like taking a shower, spending time doing administrative stuff such as backing up hardrives, etc... would always get put on the backburner.  The rare occasion that a spare moment would come up, the questions were usually "hmmm, do i take a shower, do I try to make a 'backup' meal, do I try to catchup on the books, etc... "  As you can imagine, backing up the computers was seldom the winner of the many, many options.

And now I hit my head against the wall (while still smelling not-of-flowers) for delaying taking care of that.

So one blow... fine.  We can learn to live with that.  Thankfully we have our handy (and wonderful) iMac to fall back on.  Or should I say "had"?

Yesterday was no walk in the park.  We had an emergency doctor's appointment for Anika as we were suspicious of another bladder infection, could not get any of her pee in a cup for further testing because I stupidly forgot to tell her to "hold it in" while we were at the bank just prior to the appointment!  So we go for lunch, give her water, cut Ethan's meal I had to make before we could even leave the house to drive Izzy to school, nurse Sivana... then back to the doctor's office to try to collect more urine from Anika.  (Seriously, if I get my hand peed one more time, I am going to chuck that blasted specimen sample bottle at someone's head!  Okay, okay I won't but suffice it to say I am truly tired of trying to catch urine from a stream that is going in every which direction!)  Anyways, still did not collect enough urine.  Have to come back tomorrow as doctor has left for the day.  All of this BEFORE 1:00 pm.  I won't bother telling you about the rest of the day except for this phone conversation with Duane at about 4:30 pm as I am leaving the bank with Melina off to pick up Isabel before heading back home.  "Hey Hon... where is the programs CD that the Mac came with?"

Moment of silence as a sinking feeling begins to squeeze around my chest... "Why?"

"Because I've got tech support on hold while I look for it.  Where is it?"

Squeezing feeling getting stronger... "but WHY?"

"Because the Mac isn't working or even booting anymore."

Please, dear God, not another blow today.  Maybe tomorrow or next week but please no more crap today... please?

Nope.  God has far too much faith in me and I will certainly be speaking with Him about this at those pearly gates someday.  And hopefully He'll still let me in!

Anyways, I finally get home after a full day of running around only to chow food down and send Duane off to the other end of the city with our Mac hoping beyond all hope we did not just lose everything on there, too. 

Oh, what is that?  Did I learn from my PC incident and back up our Mac? 

Nope.  Not yet! 

I know, I know... you would think I would have learned!!  If it's of any consolation, I HAD ordered a 1 TB external hardrive for exactly that purpose... I just haven't received it yet. 

I really, really think God is laughing at me up there. 

So how am I able to update this blog, you might wonder?  Oh that is a fun aspect to this story, too.  We have an ancient laptop (and by ancient, I mean there are tiny people working inside of it driving Flinstone cars to make it work).  I managed to hook it up; however, I am currently watching the mouse cursor moving across the screen randomly as I type this, and it will likely take me about five minutes to get it to finally click on "publish post".  In fact, it will be my luck that I will finish typing this, try to coordinate clicking on "publish post" as the cursor goes zooming by only to accidentally hit "delete". 

So if you are reading this, I was successful in my physics skills.  But suffice it to say, I cannot check emails (at least not without spending twenty minutes just trying to log in).  The security settings on this thing are so ridiculous, I cannot open a single web browser window without five different alarms going off... DO YOU KNOW THIS WEBSITE?  DO YOU WISH TO PROCEED?  ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO SEE ITS CONTENT?  WE DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS SITE!  Seriously?  You don't recommend my own blog?  Sheesh!  And I thought cookies were supposed to be delicious naughty treats!  I have never disliked anything so much given that these supposed cookies are the source of my web problems!  Not only that, but I am positive I have gained five pounds just LOOKING at the word "cookie" so many times!  So for those of you who email me directly, I am afraid I will not be able to respond until we can get our Mac back.  Its hardrive is apparently toast and not even a tablespoon of butter can make that any more appealing... sigh.

I am trying to chalk this up to a lesson in detachment but when your brain is barely able to manage the chaos going on around you, it is such a blessing to jot down thoughts, calendar events, personal notes and to-do items in a central location (such as a computer) to then allow your brain to forget those things to make room for the attempts at managing the chaos around you.  I think that was a serious run-on sentence... (this is where I apologize to my highschool English teacher who likely cringes when he reads some of these hasty posts... thanks for loving me anyways, Mr. Kroeker!!).

Let us hope this finds you all doing well (and clearly with working computers if you can read this... hooray for you) and may this be your reminder to BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!  Doing so is even more important than personal hygiene, apparently!  So before you brush your teeth tonight, do yourself a favour and backup whatever is most precious to you on your computer!

Sigh.

Hope this finds you all doing well... and now to see if I can win at this game of "try to click on the 'publish post' button."  Wish me luck!!