I plan these letters out all week. I collect notes, and web links and little turns of phrase and then on Sunday stitch them together to make the weekly letter. This week I had links to Stupid Cop Tricks, Erupting Volcanos, and other stuff. It was going to be great. Then IT happened.

I was watching TV, (something educational like Planet Sheen or Phinias & Furb). Marsha picked up my computer to check the NCAA bracket standings. Apparently the Big Ten (which oddly enough currently has 12 teams in it, and by 2015 I believe it’s supposed to expand to 27 schools) is doing well this year with pretty much everyone in the conference that can hold a basketball in the tournament, except for Minnesota that is. She went to the CBS page where the big interactive NCAA standings bracket chart is. The page started to load and then stopped, she waited, and waited, Finally she tried to stop it but she was locked out. Marsha handed me the computer. I tried to stop the page from loading with no success. I tried to kill the browser, with no success. I realized that the system was completely frozen so I did a force restart. It wouldn’t boot.

OK this was looking bad.

I put in a system disk and booted the machine to the DVD. I ran a utility to repair the drive. It told me the drive was unrepairable. You know things aren’t looking good when the utility says I need to back up my data, reformat the drive, and start over. I started to back up the drive but then the utility said that it could not read ANYTHING off of the drive.

OK this was looking very bad.

At this point I knew there was a 50-50 chance the drive itself was toast. A couple of years back I decided I needed more space and so picked up this humongous hard drive on sale at NCIX.  Maybe I should have spent the extra $12 and gone with a little better one. Anyway, I went ahead though and reformatted the drive, reinstalled the Operating System, and once that was done I held my breath and rebooted.

It came up with no problem.

So the next thing was to restore my data from the backup. I do a backup of the whole system every few weeks and This Is Why You Should Too. I plugged in the backup drive, found the most recent copy, clicked start and went to bed. I have a lot of data so it took around nine hours to restore my stuff.

In the morning all of my stuff was back. All of my bookmarks were back. All of my music, and pictures and writing and drawings were back. It was like the crash had never happened.

Almost that is. You see the latest backup was from a few weeks ago. My notes for this week's letter were lost. This is why you're getting this disjointed missive with only a couple of pictures.

And that’s why I don’t like NCAA March Madness.

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Other things have been happening though. Yesterday I pulled the lawn mower out for the first time. It’s a battery powered, self propelled, beauty that we got last fall. We saw it discounted something like 75% at the end of the season and agreed that it was too good a deal to pass up. If I remember correctly Marsha pointed out we needed to get it because we would need a bigger mower for the big yard at the new place and this was a great deal. I think I said something along the lines of “Are you mad women? I’m not working right now. We shouldn’t spend any money on anything. I don’t even want to buy food.” So we went home with the mower and I’m very glad that cooler heads prevailed. The trouble was that winter rains set in right after that and I hadn’t had a chance to test it yet. Now I have had a chance to use it and it works great. One charge did the whole back yard. If it stays reasonably dry today I’ll do the front.

Word for the week Soroptimist:
I ran across someone who identified themselves as a Soroptimist. I don’t know what a Soroptimist is. I don’’t know what a Soroptimist does. I don’t know if there is a particular set of Soroptimist beliefs. I just assume they must follow the writings of the Marquis de Sorop..

Doug & Marsha

PIX: Crocus spotted in our road this week.