Good morning, and I'm in hell. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Quite the intro, eh? I'm not in gardening hell, though — I'm in software hell.
I'm actually typing this Friday morning at work. My home 'puter is sick — maybe by posting time it will be running, but I'm not counting on it. Not quite sure what happened — first it burped, then it farted, then it came down with the vapors.
With lots of effort and head-banging I got my data files moved to an external drive before the 'puter went into a coma. Well, except I didn't get a chance to double-check on my e-mail box. Cross fingers.
As of this morning — Friday, that is — the Mister had done some hardware repair and it was booting up, kinda. Except Windows was demanding to be "activated", the 'puter couldn't find the Internet connection, so I was still screwed.
And no new pictures; the photo of the tulip is from two years ago.
So this morning (and by "this" morning, I mean Saturday morning, not Friday morning), I may or may not be on my own 'puter. I may be conducting Garden Blogging from the Mister's 'puter. Or one of Da Boys 'puters. Which is rather like driving someone else's car: it doesn't feel right, none of the controls are in quite the same place, and the owner keeps demanding it back. Besides, it really, really confuses the pooties when I use the Mister's 'puter: I am not supposed to be sitting there! That is not my place! Zasu comes and mews at me until I move -- and she's not a talker; proof of how upsetting it is to find the wrong person in a chair! She won't even get in my lap when I'm at the "wrong" 'puter; and 'puter lap-time is one of her favorite things.
Or, if I am on my own 'puter, it means that I'm preoccupied with swapping out discs and re-loading all my software. And it won't feel like my 'puter, because I won't have yet remembered, or accomplished, all the software tweaks I had before — rather than comfy old slippers, I'll be wearing brand-new high heels (and, as I never wear heels, it is very, very awkward).
But, despite being in computer hell all week (and I had more hell going on at work, thanks to having to upgrade Quickbooks, and finding out that we couldn't get a new chip for our postal scale when the rates go up next month, meaning I've had to shop for a new one, and Pitney-Bowes won't return my goddamned phone calls, and... ah, I need some Fukitol!), I actually did get some stuff done in the garden. I mean, I had to do something while running yet another — and another — scan disc to enable me to retrieve data off the fucked-up drive. And besides, since my 'puter was sick, I didn't spend time on dKos, following the Pennsylvania primary far more closely than it should have been followed.
We did have some great weather — sunny and warm, not too windy. I got the compost bin re-loaded, and did more yard clean up, including bailing out all the crap that had collected under the back deck. Oh, and found a mouse drowned in a bucket (another bit of meat in the compost bin).
I've even managed to get every single plant I bought at the nursery in the ground Like, wow! Usually I manage to kill at least a couple by leaving them sitting in the sun without water, before they make it from nursery, to car, to house, to ground.
The fruit trees are all in bloom, and the lilac is getting close -- the bleeding heart is blooming, which means the lilac bush can't be far behind.
But mostly, I've been consumed with saving my data, and getting my poor sick 'puter fixed. And today — well, the forecast is for cooler temperatures and not so pleasant for working outside, so perhaps it's a good thing that I'll likely be occupied with getting my software re-loaded, and re-tweaked; kinda like unpacking the boxes when one moves.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?
[Sick 'puter update: well, it's up and running -- including a connection to the inter-webs. Ended up calling Hell (whoops -- make that Microsoft) on the telephone to do the registration that way. Now I'm in the midst of getting my programs running again like they should: although I managed to salvage most of my settings, a lot of them need tweaked as they were looking towards a D: drive, rather than the C: drive. And I keep losing things because, with all the copying and moving and salvaging, I now how 3 normal.dot's in Word, and I have to figure out which is the right one. Spent a fruitless hour looking for the disc for Quickbooks; this morning I discovered the reason I couldn't find the disc was because I downloaded it from on-line; found the set-up file and got that re-loaded. Now I'm trying to get it re-registered because, well, I can't remember the goddamned password, and for whatever reason the e-mail that's supposed to let me back in is taking forever to arrive.
Oh, and I have to find the Windows tweak that keeps the goddamned pop-ups from the constantly popping up in the "Notification Area" on the task bar. One of the best tweaks I ever found.
Kept most of my e-mail box settings and address book data; only problem is that, while I still have the old "trash" and "junk mail" and "sent" folders, everything is gone from the in-box. Not sure how that happened.
Computers: they will make life so much easier.