Saturday, August 30, 2008

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.

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