...you can say that again.
Yesterday was plain awful—
But that's...not now...that's then..."

Worrying about Schuyler only was the start of the day. My mind was constantly on her, so when we went out to JoAnn and Linens'n'Things I found it hard to collect my thoughts about what I wanted.

Anyway, I decided finally to buy the Crosley 4-in-one player. I have a stereo system and James has a turntable, but neither play 78s and I wanted to play my mom's records. We hadn't thought of a cart, so we got into line behind a man with James holding the player and me holding James' new fry pan and a couple other things he'd picked up, since we had a 20 percent off entire purchase card. The player was bulky, so for a moment, since the line was so long, he rested it on a display of boxes.

Then the man in front of him moved, so he shifted around to move forward in line, only to find that a woman had cut in front of him. She was tall, blonde, and in a white suit, with sunglasses on.

James said politely to her, "Excuse me, I was next in line."

She stared at him with this lofty, haughty expression and said nothing.

Still polite, he raised his voice a little. "Ma'am, I'm in line after this gentleman. The line-" he pointed to the person behind us "-is back there."

She continued to give him this stare as if he were some bird that had pooped on her shoulder.

He repeated, quietly but firmly, "I am next in line after this man."

She bridled and said, "There's no need to be so ugly!" and moved into the other line!

So it's "ugly" now to politely inform people that you were already in line and that she should not be cutting in? Geez louise... I guess she figured that if she looked down her nose long enough at us, we would quail under her superiority. Yeesh.

In the meantime, I had, minutes earlier while pulling up my pants, managed to drop my cell phone in the toilet. It barely got wet (the inside between the phone and the battery wasn't even damp), and I wiped it off and washed the case, but it went berserk for at least an hour, saying it was charging when there was no charge plug in, and other nonsense. I held it up in front of the car vent on the way home and then left it open in our bedroom near the fan to dry out. Everything was working by the time we got home except that the ring still sounded muffled, but that seemed to have worked out by bedtime.

So we get home, we have Dragon168 for supper, play with the Webkinz awhile (miniature golf had a bonus for an hour, so I played three games), talk to Schuyler about everything, pet Willow. About ten p.m. I put Star Wars on, since this is the anniversary and there have been news reports everywhere.

Now on Sunday night I have disk manager set to defrag my hard drive at 10 p.m. Presumably it started to do this. About the time R2D2 was meeting Ben Kenobi, I thought of something I wanted to look up and had forgotten previously, so I got up and went to the computer.

There was a popup window on screen with some type of mysterious message about a runtime error 202. I clicked okay and noticed that my AVG icon in the taskbar was greyed out and all my icons in the quick launch toolbar were blank. What the...?

Of course I did what you do first: I rebooted.

"Invalid system disk."

To paraphrase Gwen DeMarco: "I know those words. Those are not good words."

OhmyGod. I hadn't done a backup in at least a year.

To make a painfully long story short (since we were up till 2:30 a.m.), James used the Win98 boot disk to get it to do scandisk. He told it to fix all the files.

When it got done fixing the files, all of Windows98 was arranged in directories called DIR00012, etc., and nothing worked. So he reinstalled Windows98, the video driver (because he had to), and Nero, and we spent the next hour or so after that copying off files.

I guessed we'd have to buy a new hard disk, supposing sectors had gone bad, but scandisk had showed absolutely no bad sectors. I ran defrag and we looked through all the little files. We could find not one bad sector on the C: virtual drive (where I have Windows installed). All the other files were intact.

So what? Windows98 imploded?

Anyway, neither of us could sleep this morning. After 5 1/2 hours sleep, we dragged out of bed, James reformatted the C: drive (my hard drive is divided into ten virtual drives, with different things in each one), and he installed Windows2000. (So there, Rodney. I'm not using a ten-year-old operating system anymore. This one is only seven years old. It's...seasoned, as Hilary Booth would say. <g>) It networked almost immediately, Firefox and Word still work (although I get an error message first on Word), but I have to get to e-mail through the web and my darling WordPerfect is at present inoperative.

As long as I can work on Wednesday without driving 56 miles, I'm happy.

Oh, and Schuyler was chowing down again while we were computing this morning. She's preened several times since yesterday, and this morning regaled us with a few chirps!

Still worried about the droppings, though...it's a Mommy thing.

Labels: accidents, birds, computers, pets, shopping

----------------------------------------------------------------
. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:27:00 AM

Comments: Post a Comment