uhm.. not my fualt.. I swear....

Ok, really, this last big gap was not my fault... at least not entirely.
Early last month, the fan in my computer died.. but I didn't know it, at least not at first.
Then the system started overheating and it would shut itself down, which was really my first clue that something was wrong.. but, it was just a fan, no problem, I've changed fans before, heck, we've built several machines from spare bits over the years, so there shouldn't have been any problems..
except, apparently there were.. Somewhere in the mess of all this, the dead fan caused some sort of fatal error and seemed to have fried my motherboard or some such.. anyway, the computer was dead. Dead, dead, dead....
*sigh*
I got by for a little while using my step daughter's computer and my husband's really old laptop (ie really really slow..) But I really needed a new computer, so we started looking and hoping to find something. I was in town for some National Guard stuff and, as luck would have it, Best Buy was having a really great sale on something that would do for me. Not top of the line, not as expandable as I'd have liked, but it would do, and I could afford it on the small budget I had to work with. So I brought it home, hooked it up and hoped for the best.
It ran Vista, so hoping was for a lot of things. I really like XP, I don't recall ever getting the blue screen of death with XP, however, I got very, very familiar with it again that first week after bringing home my new computer...
After a week and a half, I'd had enough. The stupid thing was just terrible. Apprently I'd gotten a really bad install as all it did was crash, crash, crash, and crash some more. Eventually it got itself stuck in a bootloop that I couldn't get it out of so I just boxed the whole mess back up and took it back to the store. Thankfully they exchanged it with no problem and the new NEW computer has worked just fine.
So now I'm trying to piece things all back together. My old hard drive seems to have survived (though odd things seem to have disappeared from my bookmarks folder when I moved that over...)

And, in other news.. we actually have an expected return date... yay!!!! I'm still not supposed to give out "too much information," but I think I can safely say that he will in fact be home before Thanksgiving :)