Catching Up

I’ve had an aggravating two weeks. My computer started messing up, seemingly at random. After a few days of half putting up with it and half trying to figure out the problem, I had to take it to a shop and have an expert examine it. After a couple days, (the shop was busy), the expert informed me that my hard drive was dying.

With a new hard drive plugged in, I spent the next few days reinstalling all my old software — everything from basic hardware drivers, to MS Office, to Acrobat Reader, to Firefox, to Photoshop, to every other program, large and small. And to top off the madness, I lost a lot of data with the old dead hard drive. Oh God, I lost a lot of stuff.

I have an external hard drive for backing up my data, but I never set it up to automatically run a back up. It was easy enough to just manually run the back up before I went off to bed at night, so I didn’t “bother” with setting up an automated system. But what started up as backing up each night, became backing up once a week, then once every couple weeks, then once a month, then once every couple/few months, then . . . lost data. <sigh>

So I’ve lost everything new I’ve created in the past few months — since January. Argh! This is why my posting hasn’t been on time the past couple weeks. I’ve just finished up recovering from this catastrophic idiocy.

Now let me quickly throw out some updates that I’ve skipped in this time.

* * *

Remember my farmer’s tan sunburn? Well, it turned brown.

And my brother doesn’t think I can tan as well as he. (But the rest of me is pretty pale.)

I was considering showing a follow-up pic of my one year after finishing P90X, but what with the Anthony Weiner scandal going on right now, I’d feel kind of like a pervert showing my naked torso online.

* * *

Here’s a pic of my brother showing off his new t-shirt:

That’s his drum kit hauler he’s pointing to. See, minivans can be cool. (At least that’s what he claims.)

* * *

Calfgrit6 has been challenging me to games of Pokemon a lot lately. A couple weeks ago, he pretty soundly thrashed me, and it was like flipping the competitive switch in his personality to the ON AND LOCKED position. He can now read well enough that he can play all his cards without his big brother’s help. He can go through his card collection and choose the best matches for his deck, and he’s proving pretty good at deck construction, as well as playing.

* * *

Pools are open for the season, and we’ve been a couple times. Next week we’ll be at the beach for three days.

* * *

Our boys are in year-round school, and this is their last week in class this year. Starting in July, our boys will be a 1st grader and a 5th grader. I can hardly believe it.

* * *

My t-shirt store is getting visitors and customers, now. Something funny happened, in the stressful meaning of “funny”: By coincidence, a blogger wrote a blog post referencing my store and I held a give-away contest on a message board I frequent on the same day when my store stopped working for a few hours. I wouldn’t have discovered the problem for many more hours if the blogger hadn’t contacted me and told me it was gone. I was fit to be tied for about an hour as I figured out the problem and fixed it.

Then a few days later, another, completely unrelated error crashed my site again for a couple hours. Oh for the love of sanity! Maintaining a web site is hard enough without random crashes stopping visitors and business here and there.

* * *

I’ve at last made a Bullgrit Facebook page. Check it out and Like it if you want to be updated when I make a new blog post or have a sale or coupon for the t-shirt store.

Thanks,

Bullgrit