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. ^_^