Wonder if this is what I will be saying in the future while on my way home from a trip!

HP Lappies decided that the week that I am travelling and need it to take notes on it (it is a funky tablet PC) and of course it decides now is a good time for the harddrive to start to fail. It all started on the plane on Monday morning and has not stopped since. Takes the lappie over 30 mins to boot and longer if I want to do anything with it.

Turns out that the harddrive has some bad blocks (as opposed to happy or good blocks?!) and it is on its last leg. I am getting the same error in the event log every 7-8 seconds... which can't be helping things!

Only fix that I have found is a new harddrive, which luckily is on order now. That still leaves me with a machine that barely works and I need to type up all the session notes from the day on it. I went to Best Buy after leaving the site and got an external drive so that I can back everything up just in case the whole thing dies on me before I get home and I am backing it up now. Although I am typing this from the lappie and it is ok... seems that as long as I do not hibernate or power it down I may be ok... fingers crossed I do no experience a blue screen of death! And if I do, then I have a client customer I should be able to use to type any notes up on. Sigh... never easy is it?!

First of the weekly appointments was today. All is well.

Also, today was SciPubs' last day in the HMB. We will be in the new faculty tower now, and although my office will not have the detritus of decades ground into the carpet and walls, I will have a less interesting view. Mike took some shots that illustrate my point.

Nonetheless, the natural light is what I value more than the view, cos we -are- talking about an office where I -will- get work done.

Or at least where I will try really hard to get work done until Blobby makes that impossible.

Good night!

Last night was fairly productive for me. We went over to Neybors house to help resolve some technical issues and for Angel to be fed. Sherri then tried to help me install the car seat but somehow Angel, with her mac and cheese, jumped into the car while we were looking at the instruction manual and installed the damned thing herself. Sigh.

I then went off to restock booze supplies then went to the court house to try and reschedule my court date (for speeding ticket and failure to show insurance ticket). I actually was lucky and got in to see a judge very quickly and got the insurance one dismissed and the speeding ticket reset for 90 days, to allow me to take defensive driving... which will take that one off my record. From there I headed over to my parents place to check that the mattress we have for the craddle fits... which it does. Off to Kroger for some late night grocery shopping. Back home to try and pack up the hospital bags for Angel and for me. While all this errand running was going on Angel was working... which she did most of last night, and Cammie was helping her organize her papers, was acting as a drill sargent, trying to get her inline and trying to get her to bed, and also acted as an alarm clock when needed. All this was very stressful on the poor cat as you can see below, and she has disappeared off to bed this morning and I doubt I will see her all day!

Angel's department were kind enough to host a little shower for us yesterday afternoon. The last time I was there it was for the shower prior to the wedding and they are right in the middle of packing up for a move to their new building (happening this week/weekend).

Got some very nice gifts. Angel certainly has some very nice people in her department even if they were not all there!

Here are the photos of the shower... Baby Shower - MDACC

The showers are done, so we spent 2 hours at Babies R Us last night picking up the rest of the items we think we'll be using. Once home, after our lovely Chick-fil-a dinner, I finished up by shopping online at a Amazon, BabyCenter Store, and Target.

It was good to get all everything brought home or ordered, in the sense that we want to minimize our inconvenience to ourselves later, but for now, I think these things wear Mike and me out a little. Guess that means we're definitely not having any of that "nesting" craziness going on.

Our to-do list still has a few chores left: organizing what we had been using as a linen closet to use for the baby stuff (and putting all the linens somewhere elsewhere), doing the first load of baby laundry, setting up the car seat with Sherri, and maybe a few other things I can't remember right now.

Second of three baby showers was held in Beaumont on Saturday night. Hosted by Regina Rogers. We drove down with my mum as well as Randy and Leah (neighbours of my parents) on Saturday late afternoon, stayed until about 10pm then drove home... getting stuck in traffic on the way back because the highway was closed due to a serious accident.

Prior to the shower we (Angel and I) had dinner at Raven Grill on Friday, one of our local favourite places for a quiet meal. Oh, I did also get my hair cut on Friday afternoon, but no worries, I only had an inch or two removed from the back, and an overall cleanup on my hair.

Sunday Angel went out for a girl's lunch while I napped at home and worked on, some of the photos from the baby shower, which are now online...

Baby Shower at Easys

Throughout this Cammie has been stuggling through, feeling the weight of the world on her back! If any one has read any Discworld books, you will understand that the Discworld world is ultimately perched on the back of a giant turtle, but what you may not have known is that that turtle is perched on the back of Wabbles! Such a heavy load!

...with different flash types!

Cats must be like Asians... they don't take good photos with direct flashes... indirect seem to work fine... Oh and she talked throughout the whole process... directing me, telling me how to take the photo, making sure I got her good side, etc!

I had thought all this was behind us, but nope... more complications this week.

Background: We have(had) AT&T for the home line but we only wanted local service... but they have been charging us for long distance for months (we should have been paying closer attention to the bills). I also have AT&T for my home office line. I had a complete nightmare trying to get my line moved over from my parents place when we first moved in. It actually took over a month for AT&T to get it moved properly and another month for me to fight the charges they were trying to impose on me cause they were idiots... see below for recap of previous posts...

• Appointments completed early?? NAHHHH...
• Phone nightmare..
• Another AT&T screwup
• Service Industry Woes...
• Could it be... another AT&T Screw-up?
• Could the end be in sight?
• WOooooooo HOOOooooo DAaaaaa
• AT&T...
• As Mat Cauthon would say...

Update: We decided to move to Comcast digital phone service as it would give us an overall break on costs since cable, internet and home phone would be under single bill. The install was scheduled for 5-8pm on Monday. Guy arrived around 5:30 and left a little before 8pm. Complications? You bet! Having two lines wired into a single jack threw him for a loop and that took ages to figure out. Finally he got it working so but I lost the ability to pick up both phone lines on my office phone and the doorbell, which runs through the home line, no longer works. No huge deal on either one. I saw that the digital phone box thing could deal with two lines and I tried to schedule to get my office line on same box (saving HP money) but the work order had not been closed so could not do that... yet. When we were sitting down to relax a little before I went to class last night we started to see that channels we had no longer worked. I called them and the guy I dealt with was an idiot. He managed to completely turn off all our cable boxes for over twenty minutes. It took me calling back and getting someone else to help, and finally we had everything working again.

WHY oh why can these things just not be easy for once????