Happy Happy Joy Joy!

Wow! I'm so happy to be back! I've had a heck of a time with the computer, then the internet. I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to be back online! It all started with a virus--per the Geek Squad. I'm not so sure that was the problem. I had to pay $130 to have them clean sweep my computer and promise that it would be running better than ever. NOT! They would fix it, and I'd bring it home and it wouldn't work. So I had to haul it 70 miles--one way, I might add!--for them to fix it again, and bring it home and it wouldn't work. This went on for forever! At one point, they had it for 8 days doing a diagnostic. Guess what? It wouldn't work when I got it home! I had to take it back up there, and they sent it off to the repair center. They had it for 2 weeks and replaced the motherboard and the processor. My son happended to be in the town that's Best Buy is in, so he picked it up for me when it was ready. I set it up later that night, and guess what? IT WOULDN'T WORK! I'd had it by this point, so I packed everything up and took it back. It was rediculous to keep taking it there and it would work there, but not at home! So I spent the whole day there while they ran it through more diagnostics. It was working when I left the store. But when I got it home--you guessed it. It woundn't work! I'm about to have a nervous breakdown by this point! So I took it back up there and they agreed we'd done all we could, and I got a new computer! But this isn't the end of the story. A few days before I took it back to Best Buy, we had a major ice storm in our area. It was horrible! This storm happened Jan. 26, and there are still people down here without power! We were lucky. But that's another story for another time. But with the ice storm came downed power lines and cable lines. And I have cable internet. Naturally! I was pretty patient for the first couple of weeks. Lines were down everywhere, and I knew it would take time to get everyone up and running. By the 3rd week, tho, I'd lost all patience. They sent a contrator crew out and hung my line back up after a week and a half. But I was still without internet and cable TV. So I had to keep calling. And calling. And calling. Two weeks later,they finally sent a local cable guy out and he found the problem in 10 minutes. There was a bad connection on one of the new cables the contractors had put up. Go figure! But I finally had tv and internet. I was so excited! I needed to go to the store, so I did that real quick so I could hurry home and try to establish contact with the world again. So I got home, got on the net and played for all of 20 minutes and lost both the net and cable again! YIKES! That night it finally came back on for a bit, and I checked out Teresa Collins site and printed off her new class kit. I'd been so starved and deprived of the scrapping world for ages, so I couldn't wait to see what else she had going on. But I had to leave for awhile, so I shut the computer down. When I got back on, well, you know the rest! Nada, zip, zilch! So with that, I said, "screw the cable company, I'm getting Direct TV and AT&T internet!" So Friday, I'm supposed to be getting my modem, and I'll be switching to AT&T. It couldn't possibly be worse than what I've been going through--could it?


So this is what the heck has been going on for the past 2 1/2 months and why I've been MIA. I'll be posting a few pics of the ice storm later on, so stay tuned. It's great to be back! :)