Angela Law

animal lover, gardener, knitter, and gourmet cook
 
food & drink, tech

wine & computers

Last night, I took a break from the disaster which is Brian’s laptop and we bottled two batches of wine–a Chardonnay/Viognier mix and a Riesling. The Riesling was superb! I pretty much stuck to it all evening, but the Chardonnay/Viognier was pretty good, too. I’m looking forward to drinking it in the future. So there’s another 50 or so bottles of wine for my racks.

Brian’s new hard drive came yesterday, so I’ve been trying to get his laptop back in order. I’m not quite sure when I became the IT wizard around here, but I guess we all have a cross to bear. I was having all kinds of problems getting our wireless access point working with the laptop yesterday, so I quit working on it and started from scratch this morning and at least he has the internet now. I’m currently installing all of the windows service packs. When that is done I’ll have to assess the rest of the damage–there are still some drivers I need to install, but I can’t seem to find them on the cds that came with the computer.

I just hope to finish it up this weekend because I’m ready to move onto some other project.

tech

step away from the computer

This has not been the week for computer hardware at the House of Law. As mentioned before, Brian’s laptop hard drive died over the weekend. He took it to a company that does data recovery, but they were not able to do anything with it. Someone he works with has done data recovery before, so he’s going to take a look at it tomorrow. But we’re not holding out much hope.

After that debacle, we thought it might be a good idea to get an external hard drive in order to facilitate backups. Circuit City has a deal where they’re practically giving them away, so we picked one up there yesterday. I got it set up in a matter of minutes and started backing up files. The copying of files was going to take a while so I went upstairs to do some other stuff. After a bit, I went back downstairs to check on the progress and some sort of error had occurred. After this point, I was not able to see the hard drive on either of our computers. And, to top things off, the power button would only turn the unit on, not off. So, I went back to Circuit City today and exchanged the defective drive for a new one. I’m currently attempting another backup. Hopefully this time it will work.

So, if you are having computer problems this week, don’t ask me for help.

celebrations, miscellany

the weekend thus far

I was off work yesterday in order to set up for a garage sale at my parent’s house. Every year, Portage has a town-wide garage sale day (aka “White Trash Day”). Not to imply that all garage sale shoppers are white trash–that certainly isn’t the case. However, I saw a large enough share of that demographic today to justify my alternative title.

The sale went ok. The rain held off until after 1:00, so most of the shopper traffic had dissipated by that point. We made a couple of bucks, but no where near as much as the last garage sale a few years ago when I sold all of Jake’s baby stuff (playpen, high chair, etc.)

While we were gone, Brian had to fix a leaky pipe in the laundry room. Unfortunately for him, it took most of the day. To top things off, his laptop’s hard drive appears to be, for all intents and purposes, dead. So, he was using my pc to check his email and whatnot. While he was on my pc, he found some incriminating evidence as to what his anniversary present might be. Then, I received a package in the mail today that made things look even more incriminating.

Brian is a stickler for giving/receiving presents on their proper day. But, all of this was just too much for him, so I suggested that we exchange anniversary presents today. He agreed. As it turned out, he didn’t quite get what he was hoping for, but was still rather pleased with the results. I got him a print from an artist he really likes, Ric Stultz. He was thinking that he might have been getting a painting from the guy, but given the price of the print, I don’t think we could afford one of his paintings.

I kind of knew what I was getting for my gift, too. Yesterday, he had to run to United Jewelers to get a few pieces of my jewelry fixed. He mentioned to me that our credit card was coming up as expired there even though it isn’t expired. So, I knew he must’ve gotten me a piece of jewelry because they don’t normally charge us for the type of thing they were fixing yesterday. I got a gold box-link bracelet, by the way. Nice!

books

black friday

This is another one from James Patterson. It was originally published as Black Market. You’ll find when his books were originally published as another title, they’re from his early works.

I started this while we were on vacation and read almost all of it. But, for some reason, after we returned home, I never seemed to have the time to read it. Too busy with other things, I guess. So, I made a concerted effort this week to finish it up.

Long story short, this was a book about a government conspiracy that turned on the government. I liked it. It was written in the same style as the majority of his books. I happen to like the majority of his books, so that’s just fine with me.

This concludes my James Patterson marathon.

celebrations

erin’s shower

Today, I went to Brian’s cousin Erin’s bridal shower (which is why my birthday celebration was yesterday). She’s getting married in September. You can read all about it here. The shower was at the Pleasant Valley Country Club in Connellsville. Luckily Brian drove me there (and he and Jake hung out at Erin’s parent’s house during the shower) otherwise I never would’ve arrived. The directions I got off the internet did not seem to be correct (plus I can get lost in my own house. my sense of direction is that bad). Win some, lose some, I guess. Usually the internet does us well, so I won’t complain about this one time.

Anyway, the shower was nice and Erin and Justin sure made a haul. They won’t be wanting for much once they set up a house. Jacob is in their wedding. That should be interesting. This will be his second wedding. The first one was right before his 3rd birthday so he was too young to argue about it. I hope he cooperates. He really likes Erin and Justin, so we can only hope that will help. After this wedding, he will have been in as many weddings as I have been in (not counting my own). Who would’ve thought I’d have such a popular son?