Ice Storms, Power Outages, Technology Trauma and PMS don’t mix!

Yesterday was…a day. A long, frustrating, beat-your-head-against-a-wall day. It started off OK, had to get up super early to have coffee and see my hubby off to work. Generally I enjoy those early mornings, it gives me extra ‘quiet time’ before the Nagging Princess gets up and it’s hurry and scurry to get her amply fed and ready for her afternoon bus. Since we were having freezing rain which eventually turned into all (cold) rain later, her school was on a ‘Modified Kindergarten’ schedule – meaning her bus would pick her up an hour later than usual. Cool! I had been looking forward to the return of one of my favorite new shows from this season, “The Mentalist“, and figured I would be able to relax and watch it with my morning coffee before having to go off in a million different directions once the Nagging Princess arose from her slumber. Best laid plans…

Only about 10 minutes into watching The Mentalist on my DVR, the power went out. Not even for a full 60 seconds. No big deal, usually when we have a power outage, it can last up to 4 hours – I consider ourselves lucky since we live so close to a Volunteer Fire Department I ‘m sure we’re high up on the grid for getting power restored quickly. After I turned the TV and DVR back on, I was disappointed to discover that this DVR was acting like the last one did – the internal hard drive was going out (or at least that’s what Comcast said about this same technical glitch that happened last fall on the other DVR they had to swap out). Instead of having the recently recorded shows I’d been saving the past couple of weeks – including the new episode of The Mentalist – there were only shows that had been recorded 12/17/08 and before – all of which had been deleted by me at some point…so while the titles where there, the actual files were not. I unplugged the DVR and waited 5 minutes to allow it to do a ‘hard reboot’, but still nothing. Of course CBS is one of the few networks that doesn’t have ‘full episodes’ available on their website – only clips of popular shows. So I’m SOL in seeing the first episode of the New Year until it comes back around in a repeat at some point. If it does.

Since I still had some extra time to get some stuff done before the Nagging Princess woke up, I decided to see if my comment section on my blog was still wigging out. It was. Prior comments were showing up randomly duplicated, so I went over to JS-Kits to re-synch the comments and re-upload the integrated template. Bad move. I think JS-Kits is having some hiccups with having just recently acquired Haloscan, so there are some kinks that are being worked out over there. Meanwhile, Blogger was having their own issues, as I kept getting funky error messages and ended up with some widgets deleted from my blog…so I tried to re-upload the previously saved template (as recommended by both JS-Kits and Blogger). Another bad move. It only resulted in my blog being totally whacked out and I had to pretty much start over to get it back to 3-column status and not look like it was thrown together hastily. After about 5 hours of frustration, I finally got the blog back to its original glory, but still have to find out where in cyberspace the comments have disappeared to…and unfortunately, JS-Kits isn’t talking! I am still missing widgets and some things I had on there before – once I figure out what they were, I’ll get ’em back…I’m determined that way! 😉

Now all of the above would have really been no big deal on a ‘normal’ day – I’m pretty even tempered, I don’t get frustrated easily, embrace all challenges… except when I’m in the throes of PMS. Yeah, I know – some people think PMS is an ‘excuse’ us women use when we’re in a bad mood or having a bad day. My brother made the mistake of commenting about it once in front of me and his wife, who also gets PMS, and boy oh boy, you did not want to be my brother that day, he got quite the earful about the reality that is PMS. (evil grin!) At any rate, during this week I tend to be a bit more emotional and, well, OK, I’ll admit it – high strung. So when my DVR messed up and deleted shows I was looking forward to watching, followed by my blog and JS-Kits having major malfunctions, I was not a happy camper. There were curses being uttered (when my Little Princess wasn’t around), there were tears of frustration, there was the urge to slam my head into my keyboard. I had to take a break to go outside and wait for the return bus, and was relieved that the lady who lives down the street whose daughter is also on that bus decided to park in her car across the street to stay warm – rather than hang out on my front porch on her cell phone trying to sound all-important on her one-sided conversation while I stand there and twiddle my thumbs.

So today I’m going to ignore the fact that my comments have disappeared into cyberspace, hope that I’ll get answers soon and maybe they’ll miraculously reappear – at this point I don’t care if they’re duplicated several times over, as long as they’re back! 😉 And hopefully I’ll be able to get done today what I planned to get done yesterday…get caught up on my blog-hopping and comment-leaving, and try to catch up on my EntreCard dropping that I am so behind on…I have been so busy with other things, I have been lacking severely in my regular EC drops – but I’m one of the rare few that actually go to each blog that dropped their card on me to check out their blog and comment on their recent posts…I don’t open a zillion windows and drop 300 cards in less than 30 minutes and go on about my day. I’m lucky if I get 100 cards dropped in a day, and the last few days I’ve been lucky if I’ve been able to drop 50! Yesterday 9 lucky people got a card dropped from me…so today I’m going to try to play catch-up (fingers crossed!). And try to get more of my Christmas decorations down – yep, they’re still up…I think I got about 1/4 of the way done, but still have yet to tackle the tree. My Little Princess is anxious to get the tree packed up and gone, because she really wants me to put up some Valentine’s Day decorations – as she said “We want to put them up early, so we don’t have to hustle to get them up right before Valentine’s Day!” Gotta love her thought process! 🙂 So my apologies to those I regularly drop in on and comment – I’ll be getting caught up before you know it! 😉