Monday, January 26, 2009

"Ice, ice, Baby..."

And believe me, it "sucks, sucks, Baby"! Yep, the winter storm is coming through and decided to spit on Enid. I left the office and went to my car and found about 1/8 inch of ice on one side and about 1/16 inch on the other side. Sounds like such a tiny bit doesn't it? Yeah...I was scraping my little arms off for about 20 minutes and hadn't really made even a dent in it - then God sent me an Angel. Rusty, one of our Maintenance guys, came out to salt the sidewalks. I thought it was strange that he came over by the car and poured a little pile of salt near the curb. And then he showed himself to be that Angel I mentioned. He told me to stand over where he had just salted so I wouldn't slip and fall, and proceeded to take my ice scraper and scrape my windows front to back! When he was done he stayed and made sure I got into the car without slipping, and asked if the other ladies from the office area had left yet. I told him they had not and he said he would go in and get their keys and warm and scrape their cars so they would be ready when they left.

Yes, Virginia, there are Angels. And one of them is named Rusty.

Thank you for sending one my way, Lord. And St. Peter, when you record today in your book, please make sure to put several VERY LARGE check marks next to Rusty's name. Sounds like a deal to me Guys - you send him the blessings and I'll send him some cookies! *G*

Saturday, January 10, 2009

"Time has come today...."

Okay, not a total emergency but definitely something to take care of. The current computer is slowly leaving us. Within the past few months we have experienced 2 "organ" (hardware) failures and it is slowly sliding into total system shut down. Not to mention the fact that it is truly a dinosaur in tech years. Luckily we placed it on "heart-lung bypass" after the first failure so all important files are on separate external hard drives and all important programs are backed-up. We also budgeted for the time when we would have to choose its successor.

That time has come today. The local Staples had a good deal on an HP machine with a 750 Gb hard drive, 8 Gb of RAM, SuperMulti DVD burner with LightScribe, a graphics card with 256 Mb of dedicated memory, and running the Windows Vista OS. The currently running computer has 256 Mb of RAM total! This new one should fly! *LOL*

Of course, we also had to get a new cable modem since the current one is not compatible with Vista and we had to upgrade the Microsoft Office to 2007 for the same reason. Staples did throw in the HP printer though - not a bad deal considering the curent printer is approximately 12 years old and the cost of one black ink cartridge for it is more than the cost of both the black AND color cartridges of the new printer. It's still a deskjet, not a laserjet, but I'm totally okay with that. My little deskjet has been an absolute workhorse. And it was free too at the time! Can't complain.

But the new puter is ordered and will be in on Thursday. Oh, and they are also going to set it up in the store. Once we pick it up all we will have to do is plug it in, connect the external drives and modem, make a few modifications, and fire it up. Much better to let them download the 4 hours of updates and install the full version of Office than for us to spend time doing it.

The only thing I'm unsure about is how long it will take to get the email program back up and running. We're currently trying to remember the passwords we used and such. If nothing else I will have the hotmail and gmail available so I'll still be accessible over the net. And I'll let everyone know as soon as we get the email straightened out of course. Right now it's kinda like Christmas all over again....I can't wait!! *LOL* I'll keep you posted!

Friday, January 2, 2009

"When the moon....

...is in the 7th House..."

I saw the coolest thing the other night! On Tuesday, Dec. 30 there was supposed to be a conjunction in the night sky where you could see three planets and the moon. We went outside just after sunset and lo and behold...we saw them!! It was exceptionally cool! First you had to find the crescent moon in the Southern sky...then look slightly to the West of the bottom tip...and there was Venus! It's so bright and pretty, it looked like a diamond sparkling up there! Okay, so then you were supposed to draw a line from Venus towards the Southwest directly to the spot where the sun went down and there they were! Jupiter and Mercury right next to each other riding just above the horizon! Jupiter was brighter than Mercury but not as bright as Venus of course. Mercury looked like a tiny reddish light sitting there - Jupiter sparkled a little but like I said, nothing like Venus. I was so amazed at this sight - I just thought that was the neatest thing ever! *L*

Oh, and since I'm not really fond of "resolutions" - I've made an "agreement" with myself that I will try to post once a week, circumstances permitting. I may have to do it once every two weeks now and again but hopefully I won't have to drop to posting only once a month. Hmmmm...but even that would be better than lately. *hanging my head in shame* All in all - I really intend to try and post more often. But we all know about "the best laid plans of mice and..." ... Totos!