Full House...

For the last 2 weeks we've had a FULL house; DH's mom, sister and 2 kids, aunt, 2 cousins and 1 friend, and another aunt, uncle and cousin. At highest capacity we had 16 people staying in our house! Yikes. The friend went home last week so now it's just 15 which is still quite a few sardines to squeeze into our modest 3-bedroom. We and our 3 are crammed into our bedroom (older 2 sleeping in the closet, lol), DH's mom, sister and kids are in Geo's room, aunt & uncle are in Gigi's room, other aunt, her two kids and cousin (from other aunt and uncle) on the floor in the living room. It really hasn't been too terrible except that the first week we were almost all hit with a nasty stomach virus. I think our nephew brought it with him because he was sick early Sunday morning (they got here Friday night). Then Monday night Gigi and I both were dealing with it, then DH, etc., and one by one the dominos began to fall. It was not a fun time between not feeling great, laundry mountains every morning to deal with (bleugh!), and having to try to keep the house somewhat moving (washing dishes, feeding people who felt like eating). I really hope to not repeat that any time soon!

Hurricaine Gustav had the majority of our company in a tither because it was heading straight for their island (Grand Cayman), and with Ivan still a recent and terrible memory, they were right to be a little concerned. But thankfully it is just a category 2 (at the moment) and, according to our favorite carribbean hurricaine tracking website, the winds were high, but no storm surge (or very little) and limited damage to buildings and vegetation. They seem to have weathered it well. It still remains to be seen whether or not the relatives will be able to leave Sunday morning as planned or if they'll have to wait for flights to get up and running again.

School starts on Monday. I'm not at all sure I'm ready, but that's the plan for the moment. I registered Geo for 2nd grade and was very pleased indeed to find out that the local education department will let me email his attendance this year instead of driving or mailing it in. YAY!!!

I had quite a bit of success reclaiming images from my SILs messed-up drive. I didn't get nearly all the pics she had had on there, but according to a computer shop she had taken it to, the pictures were not retrievable so I guess I showed them! I used PhotoRec to get as many pictures as it would find for me and now, at least, my SIL has pics of her daughter when she was a brand-new baby (they were lost before), and lots of other pics which were supposedly "gone." I just wish I was able to get more... Oh well, some is better than none!

Next on the docket is to do one last pass of my hard drive (probably with PhotoRec) to make sure I didn't miss anything, then reformat it and begin the rebuilding process. After that I need to retrieve stuff from our backup drive, then work on DHs crashed hard drive (likely a casualty of our network "bug"). Then (or maybe sooner) I'll set up backups to make sure my data doesn't get lost again! People, for your sake and because I wouldn't wish this on anyone, please back up your files!!!

My school progress is slow but sure. I was about to start on Module 5 when my books arrived so now I'm doing the book readings that I missed for Module 3. It's all about grammar and it's an awful lot of stuff for my brain to absorb. I've read through it all, highlighted lots of things and now I'm typing my notes into my handy-dandy KeyNote software. It will be much easier to find things there, if I need to review, than to try to find things in the book! Then I'll be back on to Module 5 (with bits of Mod 4 here and there when I feel like it. It's all about computers and so far has been booorrrrinnng so we'll see). We had a Medical Transcription trivia constest on our last Thursday night chat and I came "this close" to winning against an advanced student so that made me feel pretty good. It was right that she won over me tho, it would not have done for a wet-behind-the-ears newbie to beat her! (But I did come close, lol). With all my computer problems I haven't been able to practice my Colemak keyboard layout lately so for now I'm still only qwerty. Oh well, maybe soon.

Crash!

Went my data hard drive. Grrrr! It was working fine one minute and the next it was giving me an error that a file was corrupt or something so that I couldn't access the drive. Then when I rebooted, Windows told me the drive wasn't formatted, would I like to format the drive, Yes/No. Nooooooo!!!!! So all day I've been researching ways to get to my files that I'm sure are all still there. Not sure what happened. I don't think there was a power surge or blip, the computer wasn't dropped or otherwise damaged... All I can think is maybe a virus did this, but I do have an AV program on my computer and it's up-to-date. Sigh. The drive is listed in the Windows Explorer tree but doesn't do squat when I click on it. Just gives me the "not formatted" error.

So I'm running a free program called TestDisk and it has finally told me that my boot sector is bad. I'm in the process of trying to repair the boot sector. It also told me that my backup boot sector is ok so if this doesn't work I'll try to copy the good boot sector over the bad, see if that works. I just want my files, people! A word of caution to the wise (let them who have ears hear!), please back up your data! I was "this close" to copying a zip backup of my important files to a dvd when this happened. Wish I had gotten around to this sooner! If I lose everything on my disk I will be very discouraged. I did backup the documents a few months ago, but I've made a lot of changes to files and created new files since then, I would really hate to lose those. I'm praying that this works!

For backup, I'm using Back2Zip to backup my important files to .zip every night (or at least once a week!) and Cobian Backup (or I will be when/if I get my files back!) to back up my zipped files to an off-site FTP server. We do have a backup disk, but it is somewhat out of commission as well at the moment.

Moving Thunderbird

I tried just backing up my profile and then replacing everything in the new profile folder with everything from the old profile folder, but that didn't work. Finally (and for future reference) what did end up working was the advice given here. I copied my old profile into Documents & Settings/user/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles, then opened up the profiles.ini file and redirected it to look at the name of my old profile. Then I was able to delete the new profile. Et voila! It's all there :) Whew!

Dry night

This morning I heard noise in the bathroom and I just thought it was one of the older kids going potty, but DH told me that Eli was trying to go potty. So I got up and sure enough, he was standing on the step stool, turning on the light. I helped him get out of his one-piece jammies and took his DRY(!!) diaper off and he ran over to the toilet. He wants to be able to pee standing on the ground (not the step stool) just like his big brother so he tried and tried, but I told him he's not tall enough yet. So finally he listened to me and stood up on the step stool. The last wet diaper he's had was Thursday morning. Not bad!

The other funny thing that he did this morning was to go around singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," except he only says "twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle" but it's very obvious what he's singing by the tune and timing.

To reformat or not to reformat, that is the question.

My computer has some major issues, possibly virus related, we're trying to rule that out (i.e. I can't load McAffee, Adaware crashes when I run it, the keyboard layout that I installed is gone and I can't reinstall, can't do a windows update...). If DH can't find the cause, I'll probably be facing a reformat tomorrow. Lovely.

A good day

Eli did really well today in the potty training arena. I put him in regular undies for church and took some dipes and extra pants in case of an "oops." I took him potty before Sabbath School and then again just before church. I also had to take him out a couple more times during the service and once after church, before potluck. He peed every time and pooped a couple of times. He kept his diaper dry during his nap and then sat (for a long time) on the potty after he got up and ended up peeing and pooping a very nice amount (isn't it funny how we moms can get so excited about stuff like this?). Then he kept his pants dry and clean the rest of the afternoon. Oh! and he kept his diaper dry last night too. I hope tomorrow goes as well.

Hiccups

I noticed the baby hiccuping for the first time yesterday :) I've also in the last 2 or 3 days felt the presence of relaxin which I am not too happy about. My hips and joints (especially when I sit too long) get to really hurting! It's about right I guess, the first 3 months are, in a word, Bleugh!, the middle 3 are smooth sailing, the last 3 are pain riddled months with decreased mobility thrown in to boot. Oh well, it's all for a good cause!

2 steps forward, 1 step back

Yesterday morning Eli woke up with a dry diaper which I thought was a pretty big deal. But then he proceeded to poop on the floor later in the day so a big step back. Today he had one #2 accident (in underwear this time, whew!), but one really good on-the-big-potty success and he's been dry consistently during the day for the past few days so we are making progress. He also does well when we're out and lets me/us know when he needs to go potty. Potty training is not for the weak of heart, let me tell ya!

Computers, bah Humbug!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not entirely sure that I could survive without my computer (well, I might be able to, but there would be some serious withdrawals), but sometimes they get on my last nerve. Last night after a reboot, my computer got to the black "loading Windows" screen and stopped, said there was an error with a file in the system32\config folder, "corrupt or missing." Uh-oh, that didn't sound good. I didn't really know what to do so I tried calling DH who was working, but he didn't answer his phone. I popped in the Win2000 disk and attempted a repair, but it didn't seem to do any good. DH worked on it some when he got home, but I still had to do one more fix this morning before it would finally boot again. But a lot of my drivers were gone so they had to be reinstalled. Our internet was down for a couple of hours this morning so I couldn't use that to aid in reinstalling drivers. Plus, there was something wrong with my computer and even after the internet came back up, I still couldn't get online. Finally, after powering down the modem and router for a loooong time and shutting the kids' and my computer down completely and restarting, internet was back. But there have been other weird gliches and it might take me into next week to get them all ironed out. Grrr. If I had the money, I'd be gettin' me a mac!