I'm not dead...but I'm tired

I am not dead, in case anyone was wondering. I've been having a lot of trouble with my left hand lately and I can barely finish typing my work some days, so I don't have anything left for a blog entry after that, unfortunately. The good news is it's slowly been feeling better over the past several days and, as you can see, it feels good enough for me to do some extra-curricular typing.

Nothing much going on around here. B and I are sloooowly getting pictures hung up inside the house and B has done a lot of work in the garage, getting it straightened up and more things unpacked. He got the Total Gym set up in there yesterday and I used it for the first time in months this afternoon. I only did a minimal workout so I'm not limping around in pain and soreness tomorrow (I hope). I've also been walking every day, either outside or on the treadmill. Mostly outside, since it's warm every day, but sometimes it's just too windy to go out there for a walk. Like today, for example. Right now the wind is 24 miles an hour gusting to 34. That's pretty windy.

B bought a little weather station yesterday that has inside and outside sensors and will show the temp inside and out, the wind speed, humidty, etc., so geeks like us will always know what the weather is like. He got it online so it's not actually here yet. I got him something like that for Christmas a few years ago, but it crapped out after a month or so. We're hoping this one will be nicer.

I was really excited to see a new episode of Lost last week, but I miss Eli Stone now. B and I were really into that show, but the season finale was the week before last. I've been bummed about AI ever since Michael Johns got sent home. I really liked him.

B and I have been riding our bikes out the neighborhood some and that's the first time we've been in our bikes since last summer, I think. Things are pretty flat around here, so there are no huge hills to climb, but I still get out of breath. That's just me, though. I have undersized lungs or something, I swear.

Well, time for dinner. I'll try to come back and update again soon.

Computer oddities

B and I made it up to the Grand Canyon last weekend on the correct road. It was definitely closer this way, but it still took a while to get there because the road got rougher and rougher the closer we got.

This is a picture I took along the way as we approached Diamond Peak (the big cone in the background). There were tons of those yellow flowers in bloom starting about halfway down this road. As you can see, the road was dirt/gravel at this point, but towards the end it became dirt/gravel/water because it literally crossed Diamond Creek several times. Fortunately it wasn't very deep so we were able to drive through it, but I would've felt better in an SUV or ATV.


This is what we saw when we got to the end of the road. If you click on the picture, you can better see the Colorado River in the background, which looks muddier, and Diamond Creek joining it in the foreground.

There were some people there on a little beach over to the right of the area in the previous picture. I think they were getting ready to get on some rafts, or maybe returning from a rafting trip. This is Indian-owned land and they run a rafting expedition that leaves from this spot. In fact, they charge you money even if you just drive there to hang out, like we did. There was a woman waiting there to take $16 from each of us as soon as we got there.

This picture is looking back up Diamond Creek, showing where we came from. The creek is on the right side of the picture.

This is a picture B took looking east up the Colorado River. You can see the rafts the Indians own over on the right.

We would've taken a lot more pictures, but the camera batteries died about halfway there. It was a really scenic drive and we hardly saw anyone else until we got to the end. As we were driving back out, we saw several people in SUVs and a couple of tour jeeps driving in. One of the jeep drivers stopped to say hi and he seemed pretty surprised that we were able to make it to the river in our sedan.

From what I read about this place, apparently it's the only spot where you can drive down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. We definitely want to go back there, but maybe not until after we get another vehicle. We're planning to get some kind of SUV for trips like this.

Another thing we did this past weekend was take my computer to be looked at. The good news is, nothing was seriously wrong with it. No viruses, spyware or anything like that. Somehow the registry (I think) got messed up and things were missing, which was making my computer run really slow and get bogged down and eventually just kind of give up trying to run. Plus the guy at the store said it would run a lot better if I freed up some space on my C drive. He was able to fix the registry stuff and I deleted a bunch of things from my C drive and now I'm out $135.

After getting my computer home, it still didn't seem to be working quite right, though. I was still having problems with my internet connection via my wireless adapter because I couldn't connect to the secure network B set up when we first got our DSL established. I couldn't even see that network for some reason, and when I looked at our network specs, it showed that there were three computers connected; mine, B's and one named Scott.

This was really suspicious to us because our next-door neighbor's name is Scott, so B got on the phone with tech support to see if they could tell us what was going on. In a nutshell, we found out that our next-door neighbor was in fact connected to B's computer through the wireless connection and I was connected to the internet through Scott's computer and his network. How crazy is that??

So B and the tech support guy were able to get rid of that highjacked network connection, set up a new one that's password protected, and now I'm online and have been online all day with no problems. Keep your fingers crossed that this will be the end of my computer problems.

When I was finished with work today, I opened up Winamp to listen to some music and noticed that my playlist was blank except for one file called "J at the pool," which is an mpg I made from our home movies several years ago. I was really confused for a second, but then realized that the guy at the computer store must've opened that home movie file. By default, Winamp opened to play it and as a result, created a new playlist with just that one file. Caught ya! Fortunately it was just some video of one of the beach houses we stayed in and me reading by the pool. Nothing incriminating. ^_^

I made a new animated gif yesterday and tried putting it on here as part of the entry, as you can see below. That didn't work, so I put it over on the sidebar. It's a clip from Ayumi's '07 concert DVD, which we finally got to watch this past weekend. It was really good. She sounded great and it was interspersed with behind-the-scenes clips, which was interesting to see. I'm hoping someone will eventually subtitle the DVD out of the goodness of their heart so I can watch it again and understand what they're saying in the behind-the-scenes parts.

I've been sick with something since last Friday night and I still don't know what it is. I woke up during the night with intestinal problems and then felt OK during the day on Saturday, but Saturday night I got a bad sore throat that continued through Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Actually, it's not completely gone now, but it mostly just feels scratchy at this point. Sunday I felt bad mostly because my throat hurt so bad, but Monday and Tuesday I was really, really fatigued and feverish and didn't do very much. B drove into town without me on Monday, which is our normal grocery shopping/errand running day, and got things done without me. I felt guilty about that, but I truly felt sick as a dog.

Saturday night, when my sore throat was first starting, B said he wanted to do some exploring the next day, so we got out a map and planned a drive to the Grand Canyon from here. We've driven to the Grand Canyon from here before, when we were here looking at houses last year, but we drove over to the south rim, which is east of here by a couple hours. So this time we decided to go for the western part, which looked to be much closer. Unfortunately we missed the road that would've taken us there and ended up taking another road that took us to the Supai Indian Reservation. It was a fun drive, though admittedly it would've been more fun if I'd been feeling better that day. The road we were on just sort of came to an end at Supai, where there was a parking lot right at the edge of a canyon. I'm not clear if this was actually part of the Grand Canyon or not, but it looked like it, except there was no river at the bottom. From this parking lot, you could take a mule ride into the canyon or hike or take a helicopter ride. Maybe we'll go back there at some point.

I just continued to feel worse and worse that day, so after we came home I just rested. B was tired from all the driving, too. I started using Zicam on Saturday night when I felt the sore throat coming on, but I'm thinking it wasn't a cold because the Zicam didn't seem to help this time and usually it knocks out my colds within a day. And of course, I got sick right after I decided to start exercising again. I haven't been back on the treadmill since Saturday, but I did take a short walk around the neighborhood with B yesterday and I felt OK afterwards.

I think I'm going to have to take my computer in to have it looked at this coming weekend. I did all kinds of diagnostic stuff on it last weekend, hoping to get it running better, but none of that seemed to help. It still gets really bogged down and starts running really, really slow after having been on for a while and I think it has something to do with the wireless adapter I'm using because the computer was fine until I started using that. I guess it's possible that something happened to it during transit from NC to here, but I doubt it. Maybe I need more ram with this wireless adapter. I hope they can get it fixed for me quickly because I need this thing for work.

Testing this gif.