Hard Rain, Hard Drives and Hard Waits.


Like Karen and Tim we are anxiously awaiting the birth of their little girl – but the waiting is hard. For the last couple of days I’ve been watching Penny slowly spin herself up waiting for that phone call. We don’t get many unexpected phone calls – or even expected ones. So every time the phone rings it might be them.


I’ve been trying to keep Penny’s mind occupied. Shopping almost always distracts her so yesterday we went to the outlet mall in Sandestin to look for a small camera for her. She wanted something to keep in her purse so she could take photos wherever she was. She doesn’t want her cell phone to do this because it has a lower resolution. The specs were – small, good resolution and relatively inexpensive. The Sony outlet was a good place to look. She ended up buying a 7.2 Megapixel camera and it is now in her purse full time.


Of course, we stopped at Fresh Market on the way back and got some fruit and snack mixes. Since it was about 1 PM at this point we stopped at Slick Mick’s for their Philly cheese steak sandwich special. It looked like rain so I parked in a slot right at the sidewalk in case it was raining when we came out. Shortly after we were seated the storm arrived and I watched the sideways rain and gusty wind while I munched my sandwich and homemade potato chips. We haven’t had much rain for the past 2 weeks so we needed this but we didn’t need so much all at the same time. The rain did not let up through the time when we paid the bill and were ready to go. We tried to wait it out but the rain wouldn’t stop. We bit the bullet and made the short dash to the car – and arrived soaked.


The drive back was almost a float. This is one time I was glad we had the extra ground (water) clearance of the CRV. I don’t think my old Civic would have made it through some of the puddles we crossed. Our town has decent drainage but there were substantial puddles everywhere. We arrived home safely and enjoyed once again the convenience of the automatic garage door opener saving us from another dash through the rain.


Today I spent most of the morning working with my laptop. For the past 3 days I’ve been getting a “hard drive failure imminent – back up your data now” type of message whenever I turn on the laptop. So I haven’t turned it off in 2 days while I back up my data to my external 80 GB drive. Last night I made a recovery copy of my disk using Norton Ghost. It took 7 hours for the computer to do this. This morning I went on line and ordered a new hard drive and increased memory for the laptop. We will see if we are still here when the drive arrives. I’m replacing the defective 40 GB hard drive with a compatible (and faster) 120 GB drive. I will blog on the remove and replace action when I complete the job. The blog will likely be titled “Pulling out my hair”.

For our Penny Distraction Activity (PDA) today (after I spent the morning on the computer) we went to a movie, grocery shopped and did a walk-through of the A C Moore store.


The movie we saw was “License to Wed”, a fun summer comedy good for distraction. Robin Williams plays a priest who requires couples to complete his special marriage preparation course before they can wed in his church. The movie was cute and not really overdone (good clean humor – nothing raunchy). I liked the ending the best because although most of the comedy was predictable fluff the movie ended up saying the correct things about marriage and relationships. It was humorous with a lesson and even gave me some things to think about.


The walk through A C Moore brought us face-to-face with Dara, who used to own and run TLC where both Karen and Christy went for day care. She was thrilled to see us and asked about the girls. She kept saying how special they were. She told us to say hi for her. She now lives in Defuniak. She said she still has the red fence from her ranch and the old TLC smiley face is in her green house. She can’t part with it, but she doesn’t know what to do with it. It was a special treat to see her after all this time – Penny should have whipped out her camera and taken a picture! We didn’t think about it. We both have camera cell phones. We’re just not used to having the electronics with us all the time yet.


Now as I sit here writing I haven’t yet conceived tomorrow’s PDA. Perhaps we will go somewhere and play with her camera. Maybe she will do some Egmont Key embroidery. There is always another movie. And of course, the surefire PDA of last resort – shopping. Is that the phone I hear?