averygoodun42 | Home Again, Home Again

The leaves are starting to turn again, and the weather has become perfect. The air is dry without the bitter winds that will appear in only a month. Life's been good, though exhausting. We got back from our trip to Colorado a week ago, and although it was great to see everyone we did, it felt like a giant marathon, and my energy is only starting to come back.

It's funny. I don't like it here in Nashua, but when we left Colorado a week ago, we were headed for Home. I looked forward to being in my yellow living room, and sleeping in the clouds of my bedroom, and putting Babe into his crib in his very own room, with two doors to shut between us. It wasn't so much our possessions that I missed (though I will admit the computer was sorely missed) as the aura we've created by living and adapting this space of ours into a place we're comfortable in. I'm not done adapting, but it's already got our imprint on it, and that's what I missed.

It was nice to come home and find the basement had not flooded while we were gone. It was a little dank, and the crystals have grown a bit more, but overall it was as we left it. The only disaster that occurred happened after we got back. While DH was putting Gareth to bed that first night, I went down to turn on the computer to look up something on the web. Everything seemed normal until I tried to close an MSN pop-up when I opened the (supposedly pop-up free) browser. The computer froze. After waiting a bit to see if it was just thinking long and hard about the problem before it, I decided to go ahead and press ctrl+alt+del to force the issue. The end task screen came up, and it reacted to my pushing the proper button, but when the second, "are you really, truly positive you want to end the task this way, or just wait around for the machine to figure it out" screen came up, and I pressed the impatient button, nothing happened. Nothing happened. I pressed ctrl+alt+del a couple more times (I think five times, just to be sure the computer got my message) and then decided it was time to go to bed. I left the computer to figure it out on its own.

When I got up the next morning (far too early for my taste), I went to check on the state of the computer hoping that it had at least progressed to the blue screen, but no luck. When I turned on the monitor it was just as I had left it the night before. Needless to say, I pressed the emergency restart button.

When it started up, it seemed sluggish. It went from task to task at a snails crawl, and then it stopped. It wanted me to insert the start-up disk.

What start-up disk?

I looked around at our cd's and zip disks for a couple moments, and then, having no luck and little patience, I decided to try my luck again. Checking the disk drives to make sure there wasn't anything interfering with the start-up, I pressed the emergency button again.

It seemed faster this time, going through the start up regimen fast enough I couldn't catch every step, but then it stopped again. It still wanted that infernal start-up disk.

Deciding it was way too early to start swearing at the computer, I gave up and went back to bed, taking a snoozy Babe with me. As I drifted off to sleep, I tried to remind myself to pawn the problem off onto DH when we got up.

Several blissful hours later, DH woke up when Babe started using him as his personal climbing wall, but the sweet, sweet man took Babe with him and left me to sleep a while longer. So it wasn't until after noon that I remembered the fate of the computer.

Now granted, the computer has been through a lot. It's been moved at least five times, and one of those times it rolled onto the frozen ground from the back of the truck, but it had suffered all that with nothing more than a slight grumble. Now, after a two week vacation, it was just refusing to work. Talk about ungrateful machines.

Anyway, while I fed Babe, DH went down to check out the problem. He was down there quite a while, and since I didn't hear any swearing or punting going on, I was hopeful that he had coaxed the computer out of its funk and it was happily purring out Bronco's web pages.

Humph. I came down and the computer was leaning out of its rack while DH was still trying to figure out why it was misbehaving. A short while after that, though, I came down and DH was sedately looking through his inbox as if nothing had ever been amiss.

Then he told me the D-drive was gone.

Fortunately, most of the D-drive was just copies of the C-drive, except for DH's resumes and our music files and a few other things we can't remember at the moment, but are sure to miss in the near future. Unfortunately, we never did get around to backing up the D-drive. We had the disks, and I'm sure we had the time, but we never got around to doing anything about it. We silly twits.

I had backed up a few things of mine, such as the newsletters and other writings, on a zip disk. Deciding that it was better to be safe than sorry, I inserted the zip to back up my more recent work, and... nothing. Normally when the zip disk is inserted the drive starts up and a window appears with the disk's contents. No window appeared, though the drive's light was on. I figured that it wasn't working, shrugged, then pressed the button to eject the disk. Nothing happened. I pressed it again with the same result. Then I vaguely remembered pressing the button had no effect before, and needing to select "eject" from the file menu of the zip drive's window to get the disk out.

Uh-oh.

I started checking around the computer, looking first into "My Computer", then at the task bar, then into the more unlikely folders, such as "My Documents", and "Elizabeth's Stuff". Nothing. I used the Find function on the Start menu. It found many things under 'zip', but most had to do with Zip Genius, which is a totally unrelated program for compressing and uncompressing large files. I checked under 'zip drive' and found nothing. Finally, I searched under 'zip 100' and found what I was looking for. Hallelujah! I happily double clicked the file hoping my problems were solved and I'd at least be able to eject the disk from the drive, but then a nasty little autocratic "dialogue" box popped up telling me that the computer couldn't find or access the folder needed to open the file.

Oh bleeping hell.

I looked around some more, but whenever I found the right path, that rude little box kept popping up telling me I was wrong: the zip folder did not exist. It was as if the zip drive had found itself in mortal danger and decided to move, wiping the computer's disk of any trace of its former identity, and making sure it got an unlisted number wherever it relocated. Damn paranoid zip drives!

Ach well. We have learned our lessons though, and will be backing up our C-drive any day now.

Anyway, other than that, life's been pretty tame. With any luck, and a lot of will power I'll be finishing up the house painting before the weather gets cold, and maybe before long we'll be able to replace the flooring in the kitchen, living room and basement. I can always hope, because that will make our place much more comfortable, and imprint ourselves upon it even further.

Cheers!

Elizabeth and DH (Babe would have contributed, but he's still asleep)