Surprise!

That's how we felt when we discovered that the computer John had bought in January was having problems recently and would have to get a new hard drive. WHAT?! John called customer support and was walked through some test in order to find that out. Oddly enough, I had run a diagnostic test myself just the week before, but the code that came up wasn't on the list I had access to, and I misunderstood the text that mentioned something about not being able to access a disk, something something. Turns out, that *did not* refer to the CD disk drive. *sigh* None of that would have been that big of a deal, but when John went to save the C drive to the backup disk, Windows didn't bother to include any of his data in that, only the programs and their data. Then the technician came and took away the old drive and mailed it off for reconditioning before we noticed the problem. John has pointed out that he was lucky to only have had the computer for a few months and not to have put that many new documents on it, to have some data in email and online, but it was still a very sucky frustration.

In less frustrating news, I got a rush translation job this week and made a wad of cash. Ka-ching! Unfortunately, I underestimated the amount of time I would need and had to put in some extra hours I would normally reserve as non-work time late in the evening and early in the morning. But the doctor who hired me didn't seem to mind that it was a little late.

Hannah is harassing us to make an elaborate birthday party supply order from amazon us, just so she can have a ton of Star Wars swag on her birthday. Most of her friends are going to be out of town; we could make the Star Wars stuff ourselves with our color printer and some glue. Today I was teasing her about her nerd cred--she misremembered the subtitle on a Fantastic Four (*heh* I just typed "Fabulous Four") movie--and she said it was hard growing up in a nerd-free country. I asked if she felt like she didn't fit in, but that wasn't the case--there just aren't enough nerd role-models here to emulate.

I lost some of my balcony plants, including the mystery tree, the smaller walnut tree, and the lavender. I didn't really like the lavender very much, and I didn't even know what the mystery tree was, so I guess it was not too much of a loss, and now I can reuse their pots. All my flower boxes have sprouted so far, and I finally have seedlings coming up in my herb pot as well. Yay, cilantro! I need to cut back my poinsettia and just generally do some gardening this weekend.

John and I take turns planning meals and grocery shopping, but Hannah was not pleased with John's choices this last week, many of which were meat-less. "I neeeed meeeeat!" she moaned at every meal. Scurvy, I am telling you. Anyhow, today I got sick of her whining about the lack of meat and the lack of instant food for lunches and told her that if she didn't like it, she could do it herself. And she did! She sat down with our kitchen notepad and started planning meals. When she ran out of ideas, she fetched a stack of cookbooks and started looking for more ideas. One of us still has to drive her to the store (and probably cook some of the meals), but my baby sacked up and offered to take on some responsibility! *sniff*

And now I will try to post this with the poor internet connect from up in our sunroom.

-Nee in Germany looks forward to meat