Frustrations Abound

This has been one of those weeks where I feel like I'd have been better off just hiding in a closet all week ...

Monday was okay  -  for a Monday  -  except that the laundry I'd hung up on the basement clothesline on Sunday  was still damp, which meant I had to scramble around to find something both clean and appropriate to wear to work, and consequently was almost late.  Monday evening our downstairs tenants announced that they were splitting up and he was moving out.  Fine, the return of peace and quiet will be welcome, but we'll also be getting $200 less per month in rent  -  which is only fair, since we raised it by that much when he moved in to compensate for the extra gas/hydro/noise/laundry/general wear & tear.

Tuesday, systems kept crashing on us at work.  Then I got home to find that Big Guy had completely forgotten our planned Costco run and was sitting out back drinking beer with a couple of friends.  Fine, we'll just go Wednesday evening instead (weekend trips to Costco are a nightmare of crowds, noise, overflowing parking lots in which one circles endlessly in hopes of catching another shopper just vacating a spot, and checkout lines that stretch halfway to the back of the store ...).

Or not.  Wednesday  -  same friends, more beer.  And the friend who was going to come over and help me do my roots got called in to work an extra shift.  I can't do it by myself; the glasses (of course) have to come off, and then I can't see what I'm doing.

So instead, I decided to combine a batch of same-general-area errands, and went to the bank, the library, and the grocery store.  Now, normally I would buy one (two if there's a sale) large tub of yogurt, and dish it out into my single-serving lunch containers at home.  But this time I bought a week's worth of little individual yogurts, because I wanted the little containers to fill with slug bait in the garden.  Saw a flavour I hadn't tried before  -  it looked good, it was on sale, I grabbed two of them  -  it's nasty.  It's so nasty even the neighbour's dog turned his unfussy nose up at it.  Live and learn ...

On Thursday we had a group meltdown at work over upper management folks who want one thing one day, the opposite the next day, and no matter what we do, we should have done the other thing ... after a fairly high-pitched venting session we all felt much better!  Nothing changed, naturally, but we did get a whole lot of pent-up anger out of our systems and were finally able to laugh at the whole situation.

Thursday evening, despite all my precautions my computer succumbed to a reboot-every-ten-seconds virus that wouldn't stop even in "safe" mode.  And so ...

Yesterday my friend D who is also my on-call technogeek did his best to fix the problem, but we ended up having to re-install Windows.  All of my e-mail files, address books, desktop work-from-home files, financial records, internet favourites, music, pictures, all the programs I'd painstakingly added, all the games I really enjoyed relaxing with, all the knitting patterns I hadn't printed yet ... gone. GONE.  D is coming back next Saturday to try and recover what he can for me, but I'm not optimistic.  I have backups for some of what I lost, but the most recent is over a month old.  Most of what's gone can be replaced, or rebuilt from other records, but it really hurts to think I may have lost forever all my photojournals of trips to Yellowstone, Arizona, Hawaii, Costa Rica, our family camping & fishing trips, family Christmases and birthdays and graduations ... Mom and sister S have some of the pictures, but not all.

 Next payday I'm investing in an external hard drive onto which everything will be backed up, every day.  I never want to go through this again.