Sorry about that little disappearance (Sunday and Monday) - it wasn't planned. Sunday, I was on the computer at my usual time, early morning hours, and had written a long post ramble about the grand Christmas that we had. When it came time to post it, my computer suddenly started acting weird; clattering very loudly and not letting me send anything over the modem. I brought up Word to try to save the writing, but that was unresponsive. I checked system resources and it said 100% of CPU resources were being used.
I only had one internet session going, Outlook and Outlook Express going - it shouldn't have been using much CPU capacity at all (to put this in perspective, I currently have all of those things going, plus and extra internet session running and am only using 4% of CPU capacity right now).
I got everything closed and shut the system down. I was railing at myself because with the racket coming from the CPU, I figured my hard drive was fried. And, I hadn't backed up my stuff for 1 1/2 months. Now, that's not a complete disaster; I could recreate last month's info for Quicken, but I was extremely irritated.
I let the system cool down completely, then opened up the case and blew out all the dust inside the power supply, the CPU, memory etc. This time, I made sure that I had the entire system unplugged from everything though (unlike a couple of years ago when I totally fried the system blowing out the crap).
That seemed to do the trick, but since I rarely blog if I can't do it in the morning (an attempt at self-discipline), the only things I did was back up all my important stuff then get online to order the 2005 Norton Internet package (firewall and virus protection). Then I went to Amazon.com and spent a gift certificate that I had gotten for Christmas from Wichi Dude and Dudette (which I will talk about in a later post - or have talked about in a post you have already read, because it will be above this one).
Then Monday, we woke up to 6" of snow (actually, it was a total of around 8", but I had already swept that away the evening before). I had two pet-sitting missions that morning and the drive was a bit on the slow side. I had to shovel walkways and porches at both places (didn't have to, but that is something that I do for my customers). I got home a couple hours after I had left, started a fire and began shoveling all the pathways here. All that took me until 11 AM, so my window for blogging was past.
At noon, I left for my next round of pet-sitting duties and went down into Hillsboro for groceries. After unloading and putting the groceries away, I filled the woodrack on the deck and then went on to perform various domestic chores until it was time to leave for pet-sitting duties at 4:30.
It was such a busy day that I never even turned on the computer to check my email!
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