I have a good reason for not posting in a while this time. The hard drive on my desktop system went bye bye, taking everything with it. Sure, I have some data backups, but those don't do me a lick of good until I can swing buying a new hard drive. Right now I'm just relieved that I have my laptop and can at least still do email and intrnet stuff. However, I lost all of my email on the old drive, so if anyone has emailed me lately, and still wants a response, please email me again, since I've lost all email addresses as well.

Sigh.

When it first went Kerchunk, my first thought (okay, maybe it was actually my second or third thought. My first couple of thoughts were not pleasant ones) was that I could maybe upgrade my old slow (180) system and just buy a new tower. I was thinking that maybe I could get a decent deal, since all I need is the tower, and not the monitor, keyboard, speakers, mouse, etc... Plus, I could hopefully finance it, since my cash flow doesn't really allow for large expenditures.

Ha. I tried all of the "big" names, and the cheapest they could sell me a tower (and generally speaking I still had to buy the keyboard, speakers, and mouse), was about $700.

[Expletive deleted]

So, the concept of an upgrade got dumped by the wayside pretty quickly. I suppose I can crawl along with my old system a while longer. But in the meantime I still have to save up for a new hard drive. (And the next person who says, "Oh, but they're only about a hundred dollars or so," I'm just going to fucking slap.) And even so, I still lost a shitload of stuff--and I'm not going to have access to the stuff that was backed up until I can get the new drive installed. The thing that is aggravating me right now though, is my Quicken files. I faithfully backed up my Quicken files after every single session, and so after my drive crashed, I pulled up the Quicken that was on my laptop, and attempted to restore from backup. Well, somehow, it's not the same Quicken, and it refuses to restore from the backup that I have. So, I can't access any of my checking account info, and am basically going to have to start from scratch on that.

Sigh.

Oh, and the reason the format on my journal page has changed is because all of my nifty graphics programs for making the new month gifs (as well as everything else) are on the dead hard drive as well.

Sigh. This is so aggravating. I had just gotten to the point where the money was doing fine, where I was getting all my bills paid as soon as they came in, with even a bit left over so that I could attempt a social life. My plan had been to upgrade my system somewhere around next January or so. It seems like such a waste to buy a new hard drive, when in less than a year I'm going to want to buy a whole new computer. Plus, I have no clue as to how to install a new hard drive, so I'm going to have to get (pay) someone else to do it for me. (And the next person who says, "Oh, but installing a hard drive is easy!" I'm just going to fucking slap. It may be easy for you nerdly computer gods who have done it a dozen times or so, but I have no clue, and I'm not going to try to install one while reading a manual.)

In other news, I was a bad guy again for Simmunitions training with the Academy, this time with the night class. That's always a load of fun, but during one of the scenarios, I got tackled on a gravel road, went down hard on my left knee and managed to open up a two-inch gash on it--as well as bruising the shit out of it. After I got home and started to clean it I realized that I probably should have gotten some stitches in it... but it was 11:30 at night, I had a detail at 8AM the next morning, and I had no desire to sit in the emergency room for several hours for what was basically a boo-boo. So I butterflied it shut and hoped for the best. It's actually healing pretty nicely now, though I'm going to have a lot more scar than if I'd gotten stitches. Oh well, scars make you look tough.