Let Down by my Trusted Servant

Travis and Katie have been enjoying the chemistry kit which their godmother gave Travis for Christmas. I was proud of Travis for carefully following the directions in his mixing, and Katie was very creative in using ingredients from around the kitchen (so as not to use up the stuff in her brother's kit) to make the mixtures bubble and smell different. Nothing exploded or burned, which disappointed Travis a bit but pleased me.

This may be my last post for a while, as my hard drive seems to be dying. Actually, I noticed a new little icon in the bottom left hand corner of the screen at least a day or so ago, but I didn't look at it closely until today. Ominously, it says "A drive is failing. Try to back up data immediately." "Try," of course, being the operative word. I Thought I had a great back-up system in place, with an external hard drive set to back up my data every evening. It was even supposed to restore my whole system "at the touch of a button." Sounds great, right? But I checked it today and was dismayed to see that it shows Zero restore points, and refused to create any, no matter how I begged and pleaded with it. After consultation with my computer guru baby brother, I ordered a new hard drive from a company in California. Several hours later I spoke with my brother again and realized that I had ordered the Wrong Kind of hard drive. So I called the people in California to switch my order, only to find that they had already Sent the thing out. Wouldn't you know. So I am feverishly if not constructively worrying about all the data which I may be about to lose and Ed is telling me not to worry because he is sure he can easily just plug in a new hard drive and hook everything up (Ed is slightly less computer savvy than I am, but has tremendously more self confidence. Which may come in handy. And at least he isn't telling me that he can fix the thing with a well placed hammer whack.) But our roof tarps are still holding and we have decided that Emma's agonized and incessant yowling is a sign that she has reached puberty rather than that she is sick and needs an expensive trip to the vet. So it could be considerably worse!