Our Week Of Birthdays

It’s been so long since I’ve blogged…the holiday has been busy and festive, plus having a broken computer doesn’t exactly help!

IMG_0722_small.jpgThis week is momentous around the Horne household because all of our children have birthday milestones. Sunday the 29th our son, Jonathan became a big boy of two. Today, Jan 3rd, Nicolas is six months old. And Sunday the 5th will be Abigail’s 4th birthday.

There are both benefits and downsides to all of this happening at once. Admittedly, it is rather exhausting to come off Christmas and immediately celebrate two birthdays on either side of the New Year. I feel badly for both the kids and the family members who have just celebrated Christmas. It seems Abigail’s and Jonathan’s birthdays are going to always be rather overshadowed by the “most wonderful time of the year”!! Thankfully, no relative has yet done the “here is a combined birthday and Christmas gift” move we hear so much about!! (Thanks to all of you!)

On the upside, conveniently, we get to take all three kids at the same time to the pediatrician for their 4yr, 2yr, and 6mo checks. Is that fun or what? Thanks to Jay for going along on this family outing!

Also on a positive note, since Jonathan and Abigail are still young enough to really appreciate it, we held a combined birthday bash for them again this year. They chose Thomas the Tank Engine as their party theme and despite tornado warnings a few hours before start time, all the guests (and the cake!) made it for the festivities. Click here for a few more pictures of the fun.

Thank you to everyone for making A&J’s birthdays a wonderfully fun time again this year!!

Computer Woes

Two days before Christmas, our home computer started acting odd, in a very destructive way. DLLs started tipping over, the OS became unstable, and files became corrupt. Did I mention all this happened after I had just finished touching up our photo for the Christmas card we were planning to print the next day? Can you guess which was the first file to become corrupt?

IMG_0782_small.jpgNo problem, I thought. I have two disk drives, each with two partitions. I zip up all my data and back it up on the OS drive’s second partition, and I use Norton Ghost to regularly take an image of the OS which is then stored on the second partition of the data drive. So I rebooted into Ghost and laid down an image of the OS, figuring some crucial file had become corrupt and was wreaking havoc.

It didn’t work. The computer melted down again. At that point, I tried just about everything. The errors were completely random, but things got to the point where I couldn’t boot the machine, let alone reinstall Windows. After hours of work over several key holiday days, I took Tricia’s advice and handed the computer over to Best Buy to have all the hardware checked out the day after Christmas. $60 later, they told me all the hardware was in tip top shape and I simply needed a clean install of Windows, which they were willing to do for an additional $60. I almost hit the guy.
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