End of Silence

An awful lot going on in the Trentham household these days.

I spent last night putting together the coffee table that I picked up while in Houston on business last week. The Wife’s quite taken with it. I thought she was going to sleep on the sofa so that she could be near it.

The Boy’s finishing up his second week of swim lessons with the City of Austin. He’s really enjoyed it. We recommend it highly. He’ll definitely be going back, but next time we’ll register early enough to get a pool closer to our house. The closest one had the classes canceled because there weren’t enough people signed up. The La’s crawling all over the place and can now stand on her own for about a minute. She could be walking before the summer is over.

My PC still isn’t functioning properly, but I’ll probably post some new pics tonight. I’ll just have to store the pictures on the old drive for now until I can get it working. It’s pretty clear now that both drives are intact, but for reasons I can’t explain, the computer keeps wanting to boot from the storage drive instead of the original drive that it’s been booting from since I bought the PC 6 years ago. I don’t know what it was about that lock up that screwed up the BIOS, but I’m still uncertain how to fix it. There are a few things I’m planning to try as soon as I have the time.

I can’t remember if I already mentioned it, but my f**king ISP is still screwing up billing and have been for most of this year. I finally got them to clear up the original problems only to find that they had double-billed me again. How hard is it to charge someone the same fee once a month?

Lastly, I’ve been working on a site for my parents condo for the past few months, but haven’t had much time to devote to it. I’d say it’s about 75% of the way there. Hopefully, I can get some time to finish it up soon.

I still don’t have access to both drives on my home pc. Both seem intact, but I just can’t get the machine to boot with both connected. Things have been crazy at work for the last couple of weeks, but I might have some breathing room this week to finally get it sorted out.

I finally got to try out the new cable modem around 9:00 last night after getting the kids to bed. I hooked it up and tried Mary’s email first. Everything worked fine and she didn’t lose any of her mail, so apparently the Time Warner rep screwup was minor. I might also add that they called me this morning to make sure that everything was ok. Nice service.

I assume everything is fine with my email accounts as well, but I’ve been unable to check. I rebooted my machine and started up Outlook. I had to go into one of the email accounts and change the password since it changed when they re-created the main account. As I tried to apply the password change, Outlook went to check the email for that account. It locked up. It’s not unusual for Outlook to lock up on me while retrieving mail, so I simply reset the computer. Lily started crying. I went to deal with her, expecting to come back to a Windows XP login prompt. I came back to “No active partition. Operating system not found.” Uh oh. After running Norton Emergency disk and some of the Windows XP Recovery stuff from the CD, it seems clear that my computer no longer recognizes my boot hard drive. I’ve got two hard drives, the original that came with the machine and one that I added a couple of years ago for extra storage. The original contains the OS and most my programs while the added drive contains most of the important stuff. If the original is in fact hosed, it means that I lose email and not much else. I’m hoping I can resurrect it. Between the modem and this, I must have some sort of increased static charge or magnetic field or something.

The bright spots are that it appears that MCHost finally credited me back the extra money that they charged me and the Mavericks managed to prolong the agony one more game for the Spurs. We’ll see how they do tomorrow night.

We were in Dallas for Memorial Day weekend. We returned to find out cable modem out. Tech support decided it was either my modem or the line. The modem is the original one from at least 4 years ago and apparently no longer supported. I brought that one in and traded it for a new one this morning. I’m hoping that fixes the problem. I tried emailing my home account from work when I got here and it bounced telling me that the user account doesn’t exist. I’m on hold now trying to find out what the hell is going on.

Other than the Internet access problems, it was a good weekend. I got to go to the Mavericks-Spurs game on Friday night with my dad. We saw Identity on Saturday night. I give it a B+. We also got some great pictures of the kids in my parents’ pool. I’ll post them as soon as Time Warner decides to fix my access problems.

Happy anniversary to The Wife and I and a belated Happy Mother’s Day to all of the moms out there. My mother was in town for the weekend. We went to Hoover’s for Mother’s Day brunch yesterday afternoon. The Wife and I both had the smoked pork tenderloin with raspberry chipotle sauce. We all shared a slice of banana pudding cheesecake and a slice of sweet potato praline cheesecake. I think I was partial to the latter of the two. I think we got some pretty good photos of the kids. I’ll try and post them tonight.

In addition to the Hoover’s trip, The Wife and I managed to sneak out on Saturday night for an early anniversary celebration. We started out at the scene of the crime two years ago, the San Jose, for a drink. We moved on to the Stephen F. Austin bar where we watched the Mavericks beat the Kings in double-overtime and then one last quick one at Casino. We watched Le Pacte des Loups last night. It was mediocre. I give it a B-.