I had such great plans.  Well, not great plans, but plans nonetheless.

Everything for my Girl Scout meeting was ready, I was just waiting to get the rest of the recipes from the parents before pasting them into a Word document.  It would take me, oh…10 minutes to format 7 recipes into 6×4 blocks, and maybe 10 more minutes to print them out and cut them to size.

I’d also planned to show you pictures of my Christmas decorations, already downloaded and edited on my computer.

My day had been a little aggravating and I’d even hidden from my children for about an hour and half. I got them their lunch and left them to their own devices while I retreated to my room with a good book.  I was really looking forward to going to Catholic Women of the Chapel to discuss our book, continue our Bible study, have some snacks and enjoy some fellowship.

And then I’d come home, refreshed and execute my plan.  You remember, the one about formatting and printing recipes, then sharing pictures on my blog.

I would have plenty of time the next day to have school in the morning, get a haircut, then go to the Girl Scout meeting.

R-i-i-g-h-t.

So what really happened was that sometime around or after dinner, our computer tried to shut itself down.  I suspect one of those automatic Windows updates, but the shut down got stuck.  Lacking a reset button, the only way to unfreeze a completely frozen compter is to unplug it, plug it back in and reboot.  Which Philip did, but the computer didn’t.  Reboot,that is.

Instead he got a very lovely message about a corrupt or missing file and please insert the original start up disk to try to repair right.

R-i-i-g-h-t.

And that would be the start up disk that didn’t come with the computer?  Or the laptop?  Or my neighbor’s computer?  And the other option of downloading it to a floppy disk – to the laptop without a floppy disk?  Yeah.  Not so much.

So at 9:00 at night, there I was, not formatting, printing and cutting recipes and definitely not uploading pictures to my blog.

Fortunately, something is wrong with Outlook Express on the now dead computer, and it does not delete emails from the comcast site, so using the laptop, I was able to access the recipes in the emails, copy, paste and format them and save the document to email to a friend who could print them out for me.

But Philip offhandedly mentioned that I could also plug the printer into the laptop.  Of course, he didn’t actually do that for me, but at least he recommended it.  grumble grumble grumble

The pictures – not going to happen.

So this morning found me under the computer desk, trying to locate which cord out of the thousands (thousands!!) that are tangled up back there is the one to the printer.  Cable found and plugged in to the laptop I waited for the drivers to load.  In the meantime, one of many Jen friends has located a Windows start up disk!  So I’m printing and collating and yikes!  It’s 11:30!  Quickly get the kids lunch then drop them off to a friends house while I get my hair cut.

After the haircut I stayed too long at my friend’s house, because I can never just drop by for a minute, then while loading children into the car, I stepped into dip in the gutter, washing my entire foot with water because, oh yeah, it was raining.  And the hem of pants had fallen down and the whole bottom of my pants was wet.

Back at home I now had only 10 minutes to cut the recipes down to size, slice an orange for the juice we were making and load the children and all my Girl Scout junk into the car.

No time for new pants.

Onward to Girl Scouts and all seemed to go well, despite the fact that my sliced oranges were still sitting on my dining room table.

As far as that start up disk, well, it has the potential to work, but it’s going to take more than just pressing “r” at the first screen like my computer keeps telling me.

Alas, the Christmas pictures are just going to have to wait.

We have a lot of empty houses here on base, which isn’t as bad as you might think.  More empty houses means more room for the rest of us.  Boo and his buddies have been rather resourceful in commandeering the backyard of one of those houses as their HQ.  They were actually quite fond of attacking their sisters at their club – it created quite fuss.  I suggested that the boys move to a different house, perhaps to one on the high ground, thus appealing to their inner soldier.  These are the sons of military officers, after all.

They chose an empty house behind ours.  The advantage is that I can an eye on them right from my computer.  I can blog, I can supervise.  The girls are left alone, the boys have the high ground.  It’s all good.

Over the summer the boys scrounged up various and sundry items left on the curb as people moved out.  They’ve got a couple of wood pallets providing cover from incoming fire (mine?), a table and a couple of topiaries.  Last week I noticed they had even gotten themselves a Weber kettle grill.  WHAT is it about men and fire?

Seeing the grill made me giggle.  It’s like they are all set to bivouac up there.  All they need is a water buffalo and they’re all set.

This is the view of the HQ from my house.

Inside the HQ, looking down at my backyard.  Note the clever use of discarded mop poles to prop up their barricade. Shades of Les Miz?

Here’s their main Area of Operations.  Boo informs me that the smoke controller thing on the grill is used to activate the force field.  Right.

Boys.  Gotta love ’em!