What's new in the land of us.

You know what I can't stand? Unexpected expenses. So you can imagine my suprise when this last week our computer decided to kick the bucket. ick. Our wonderful toshiba laptop that we bought 3 years ago (that has been working excellent with nary a problem) started to run slow the last few months. What initially was just a slow computer became more and more of a problem. It got to the point that the computer would barely even shut off and then when you turned it back on it took nearly 20 minutes to load. not good.

Last week we went to download our 4th of July photos and half way thru... the blue screen of death appeared. Panic ensued. We have virtually every photo of Isabella on the hard drive since she was born. All of our Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Quicken files are on our computer. Had we smartly backed up this info? No. (but we thought about it and were even shopping for external hard drives just a week ago-- figures!)

The next morning we call the geek squad in a panic. They schedule us for an appointment for this week and tell us not to use the computer until they arrive here. A week goes by. We are now officially in withdrawls from home computer usage. The geek arrives Weds. morning and tells us the news we least want to hear, "Complete hard drive failure". sigh............

2 hours and $380.00 later we have a new hard drive, an optimized computer that runs better now than the day we bought it, and our old "failed" hard drive in a box waiting to go to Best Buy where we will inevitably have to send it to the Geek Squad City (somewhere in TN) to have them extract the data saved onto our hard drive (pictures and all other important docs) for the mere price of somewhere between $99 and $1300. Yes, you read that right-- $1300 freaking dollars! The price variance depends on how much work it takes and how much data that is extracted off the drive. If there is a bright side it would be that the data is still on the drive and someone brighter than us can lift it off the drive. So I see lots of OT in my future as I save up to pay for all this. We are stuck since the pictures to us are priceless and I would pay pretty much anything to have them back. Lesson learned here? Back up everything you don't want to lose and do it today!

Besides our traumatic computer problems things here are going well. Greg is still plugging along at work, busy as ever. I am back at work full time after having spent much of the last couple of months off on vacation. The weather has been hot here (upper 90s-100s) and without air conditioning has made life a little uncomfortable. We are just now seeing a reprieve thank goodness. Last night we had some cool thunder storms (or as belly calls it- thunter). We took a drive and our camera in search of the ultimate lightning picture. We didn't get the one we were looking for but we did manage to get a couple cool pictures that are posted below. That is all for now, check back soon for more postings. :o)

Oh yeah... if you are reading this Pilavians.. happy 14th birthday Alik! I can't believe you are already headed to high school. wow! xoxoxoxo