Scribblings from the Mitchy Side

It's funny, technically every day is Saturday for me at the moment, but the real Saturday still feels special. I love Saturday :)

I'm currently watching the end of the Sunderland/Newcasatle football derby (1-1 atm) and when it's done, I shall scamper to Morrison's and do a small shop, as I'm out of bread and, horror of horrors, milk! I haven't had any tea yet today! *wails* I also have a strange craving for pork pie....*shrugs* No idea why but I'm happy to go with it :)

The rebuilding of the PC continues. The most tedious thing is replacing all the firefox bookmarks. I have GOT to learn to save a back up of my favourites file on a disc or something. Of course, learning to do backups is something I need to work on anyway. Until this PC, I had been really, really lucky with my computers. I can only assume this PC is karmic revenge or something.

Downloaded the next episode of Numb3rs and will watch that when I get back. At some point, I MUST catch up with SG:A, I'm so behind. Maybe I'll download 'em next week. However, I have shiny, shiny books to cuddle this weekend, so I don't want to download 'em now :)

In other news, I have been kicking the cat out of the lounge at night, for two reasons. One, I'm sleeping on the sofa and the cat can be an awful fidget, especially at 3am when he wants fuss and attention. Two, it's a long term strategy because I am tired of cleaning crap and dead things off the sofa and carpet. To this end, I bought him a very cosy cat bed, one that's like an igloo in shape, so he had somewhere warm and comfortable to curl up in the hallway, which is a smidge on the drafty side. He took to it like a duck to water but until today, hasn't stayed in it long enough for me to get a picture. Oh he slept in it, but as soon I walk towards the hall, he'd leap out and scamper down the hallway. I could only assume he felt trapped in it - maybe it reminded him a bit of his cat carrier - but now he's quite happy just to poke his fuzzy snout out when I walk past. I'll leave it a bit longer, so as not to spook him, and then I'll see if I can get a picture. It's very cute :) Which reminds me, I promised cute cat pics, but realised I lost them all in the reformat and deleted the ones of Rob off my camera :( Fortunately all the really important photos are uploaded to Flickr and Photobucket already but it's still annoying, I had a couple of really cute shots. Oh well. I'll just have to stalk him again :D

I did actually let him sleep in the lounge last night and he was very well behaved. He spent all night curled up at my feet, like a furry hot water bottle :) Didn't try and get fuss and attention once. Hmm. Maybe he's learned. I'll try again tonight and see :) But when I go back to my bedroom, he's still being shut out of the lounge, so the cat bed was a good investment. I will probably still shut him out of the bedroom, I do like to sleep with the door shut, but I may see if he's less of a fidget there too. He'd like to be nearer to me at night, he follows me to the bedroom door and looks piteously at me when I shut it in his face. Aww!

I had to resort to another complete reformat and re-install of my PC. No, I still haven't got an external disk drive upon which I have made careful back ups. On the plus side, apart from my email, I didn't have much to lose since it hasn't been that long since I last did this :p And thanks to my shiny, shiny iPod, all my music is safe! Hee!

I've reached the point now where I've got the basics installed and working, and I'm now working on the supplementary items, like games and utilities. If you've sent me an email with any important info prior to today(Hi smokingboot!) could you please resend it? Thanks :)

At least I can get to my beloved internet, which I couldn't do before the reformat - the virus did something very evil to the modem executable files, from what I could tell. Bah. *cuddles her internet*

Tomorrow there will be memes and cute cat photos to make up for the boring techie spam :)

One item though - today I received the most ginormous box of books from jenni411, who clearly spent her time at Bouchercon wisely :D Seriously, it was a fantastic collection and a lot of effort went into it. There's an anthology in there, "Wolfsbane and Mistletoe", which I've had my eye on, and Jenni went to the trouble of nabbing the autographs of as many authors who were there as possible! Hee! I've got Alan Gordon's autograph! Heeee!!

So huge huggles to Jenni, for verily, she rocks :D

I was planning a big, fat entry yesterday, to catch up on what I've been doing besides memes for the past couple of weeks. Alas and woe! My computer's died!

*wails loudly*

It was working fine, nary a hint of a temper tantrum. I got up to feed the furball, came back and was perturbed to note the monitor was blank and its power light was flashing like it does when it's on but the PC isn't. I glared at the PC....it didn't look good. The blue power light was flashing fast and the hard drive access light was flashing in time with it with a "whine-click-click-click" noise, like when there's a stuck key on the keyboard. Except this isn't the keyboard, I'm assuming something dire's happened to my HD or the motherboard.

I couldn't power it down, I couldn't get the monitor to come up, nothing. The only thing I can think is that when I put the keyboard down, I knocked the sleep button and something went wrong when it shut down. Either that or it just decided to go 'splodey bang and die when I wasn't looking. Which, lets face it, is more likely.

TECHIE PEOPLE! I NEED YOUR HELP!!

Any diagnoses out there? What should I do next? Will I have to entrust my PC to *shudder* PC World's techie department or can I attempt to fix this at home? I've got a perfectly working second box, it's a Win 98 Athlon 800 but it works fine. I could use that to access the newer box, assuming there's anything TO access, as there's an ethernet network connection between the two that's already set up.

WHAT CAN I DOOOOO?? *wails*

*clings to all her techie friends and begs for help*

In the meantime, I'm trying (and failing) to get the modem up and running with the old box. In theory it should work, but apparently I need a new version of DUN installed. Gnng. I shall do some research at lunchtime and if I have no joy, I shall ring Demon and see if they can set up a dial up connection for the duration.

Oh and have I mentioned my sky box failed again last week and I've got a technician coming out on Friday? And that my kettle blew a fuse and died yesterday?

I'm scared to use anything in my house now! :P