Home

We made it home around 8:30 last night all in one piece and (as far as we know at this point) with all the stuff we left with. The apartment survived our absence along with most everything in it. The one exception was the wireless router. It was acting weird the last day we were here, but I wasn't sure if it was the router or the wireless adapter built into Debbie's laptop. My hardwired connection seemed to be working fine, just the wireless that was going all wonky. When we got home last night, there was no connectivity on the main system. It couldn't even see the router, not alone the internet. So unplug the cable modem, unplug the router, count to ten, plug the router back in and wait for all the status lights to go green. Huh. No power indicator, no wireless indicator and all four of the activity lights for the hardwire ports are solid even though only one of them has anything plugged into it. Unplug the router again and count to 20 just to be sure. Plug it back in. Same result. Curse loudly. Unplug. Plug back in. Rinse and repeat because we all know you can fix things by swearing at them and repeatedly doing the same thing that isn't working. Except this time no amount of swearing, plugging and unplugging was going to make this thing work. Pull the router and connect directly to the cable modem, cycle the modem and the internet pops up all nice and pretty. Crap.

I contacted the company that shipped the thing and they are all like "Woa, dude, so sorry, we're all over this thing" so maybe I'll have a replacement some time next week. Maybe. I was supposed to receive instructions on how the exchange works "shortly" at 9am this morning. I'm hoping they just ship a new one with a return label for the old one and a letter saying that if I don't mail it back in n days they tap my credit card for the second one. And hope and reality rarely coincide. Especially in the PC world.

Other than that, not much going on at the Frost Manor other than collecting, installing and configuring all the apps I need to get back on track since tossing Vista overboard and loading Win7. Most of the time has been spent pawing around in my e-mail and all the folders on my Drobo looking for activation codes. (You have any idea how many places a file can hide in 1.5 terabytes?) Those are all being collected in one place so I can find them easier next time. Although I'm sure that where they are now made perfect sense when I put them there months or years ago, even though today I have no idea what I could possibly have been thinking. With luck that process will be complete today and I can spend tomorrow getting caught up with a month's worth of accounting that's been piled on the floor next to my chair since we moved in. Unless I decide to veg out in front of Hulu and Facecrack all day. One of those will definitely happen.

Onward!