Where's the oinkment

**pulls out a fresh tissue**

Missed me? I missed you :-)

I got sick - a flu thing. I couldn't talk, I couldn't swallow for days. I'd drag myself out of bed and pretend to take care of business then crash back into it wishing I could stay there. I had high fevers, MS spasticity for Africa and at times couldn't walk, stand or lie down from the pain. My legs gave up along with my voice and I got a wee bit stuck one morning when the kids were asleep and I couldn't "do" for myself and needed help but couldn't get anyone's attention.

It wasn't great so I am going to get a personal alarm that will wake the dead which probably means it will wake sleeping teenagers as well.

Old people, young people, everyone still wanted a piece of the sick, middle aged person's pie and the plate came up empty.

Highlight? The sexy doc at the after hours clinic where I ended up being taken when I couldn't cope and a chest infection was looming to go with the throat infection.

Two weeks down, my anti-b's have run out, my chest infection is almost gone and I can almost talk without straining a foofoo valve but dayam, it's been a rough few weeks. I've barely even walked outside, let alone achieved any gardening.


Other selected items of importance:

Wacko Jacko snuffed it and so did Farrah Fawcett. So did lots of other people around the world, but they weren't famous so I can't tell you who they were.

Thomas has an abscess on the side of his face by his whiskers but decided doctoring wasn't required. It's almost gone. He also decided that eating at only one residence wasn't enough so has been dining in style at the neighbours before coming home for dinner and bed with Ads. Except for one night when staying by their fire was preferable to cold tootsies in the frost.

Frosts have been extreme and a pain in the bum washing ice off the car in the mornings.

I finally bought a new oven, but I haven't had a chance to get a sparkie to come and install it yet.

Best of all, I finally got to see the new Star Trek movie and it was GOOD.

At least I didn't have swine flu - I have no idea where I would have stashed all that pork.

In his own words

**pulls out a fresh tissue**

Adam came out of the kitchen tonight and said this;

"I hate cat food containers. No matter where you go in the room, the cats on them are looking at you".

I would have thought that was a good enough reason to get off his butt and put the shopping away, eh. He's right, though. I think it's a conspiracy...

4am wake up call

**pulls out a fresh tissue**

From this



to this



All I had to do was elbow him in the rib and he was all lovey dovey.

No wonder I can't get any sleep at night!

Pouring

**pulls out a fresh tissue**

It's a beautiful sunny day outside and I am sitting inside fixing the kids bloody computer. It fell over with a virus a month or so back, a nasty one and I just couldn't be bothered cleaning up the mess left behind when one of them visited something dodgy on the net and Avast let me down and didn't stop the infiltration of cyber-germ warfare. They have been forced to use the old, slooowww dual boot linux/XP box in the meantime and I finally got sick of the whining and started fixing it.

And fixing it.

And, well, you get the picture.

Their trouble free, goes and goes and goes old Compaq box just didn't want to go. I got the damn thing working fine except for a small problem of damaged components that wouldn't open ports to the outside world - ie no internet. It wouldn't let me repair them. Replacing them didn't work. I couldn't restore their disk image because Ghost couldn't read the hard disk.

It wouldn't even let me reinstall XP. Bastard thing.

So I took the hint that their main drive isn't a happy camper, stripped it back to the chassis and rearranged all their hardware, cleaned every nook and cranny of it, replaced all the proprietory Compaq screws that only a butter knife will undo with proper screws, replaced the CD writer with a DVD writer, put another spare hard drive in as a master drive and now, finally, it is installing XP like a good little computer on one partition of the drive.

Then all I have to do is move the data on partition #2 to another drive, format it, repartition the disk to be full size minus a small pagefile partition and reinstall all their multitude of games and apps and God knows what else.

A couple of days pissing about will have cured the whining, whilst the fighting over whose turn it is on the PC will crank up again.

A girl just can't win.

I think I'll go hide in my room and write a shopping list - it's time to replace my nearly 6 year old generic PC with a new, built by me jobbie and consign this one to being a movie and music network media server tucked away under my desk and thus free up a shit load of hard drive space on all the machines.

All I gotta do is figure out how to pay for the components... and not fuck it up during construction!