Today I found myself wishing that I could open a window instead of being stuck inside with air-conditioning. But, after speaking with people who had to work in this oppressive heat, I decided to be very grateful for my good fortune because many people don’t have air-conditioning. You see, we have had to endure a week or more of relentless heat and today’s extreme humidity made it feel like it was 115ºF. Yikes!

And there has been no rain. Our grass was a beautiful green until this week. Now it’s burned because there is no way we can waste water on nearly a 1/2 acre of grass. Only the gardens get watered and they’re also not doing so well. My yellow rose bush is not happy. It doesn’t do very well in high heat and watering every night is not an option. I water the gardens generously every second day, and that has to be enough. Water is a precious commodity these days, even here where water is plentiful.

Drinking water has got to be the best way to keep hydrated in a heatwave, or any time, really, and I always have a glass of spring water by my side. I find myself feeling grateful again because I have clean water to drink and I get to work inside where it’s cool. I’m blessed and all the other problems I’ve had lately with computers and other stuff, seem trivial right now.

Tomorrow won’t be as humid, thank goodness. It will still be hot but that’s ok because it looks like we will finally get some rain on Saturday. Good, our grass will make a comeback and we’ll see green again.

Keep cool, don’t stay out in the heat if you don’t have to, and if you do, keep drinking that water. Enjoy your summer because before you know it, we’ll all be complaining about the snow and cold!

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When life gets to be too much and the drama is intense, I find great comfort in reading inspirational quotes. The following video contains some of my favorites which I hope you’ll find inspiring.

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If I could turn back the clock a few years, I would have built my own computer myself piece by piece instead of buying this HP Pavilion I have. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad computer. It does the job and with added memory and a better video card, it’s a nice machine.

But with a brand name computer there’s a very good chance you do not get a Windows OS disk with it, and you instead have to create system recovery disks. That’s what I have with this HP: 3 HP PC Recovery disks. And on June 20th, my worst nightmare happened. I had a horrible computer crash. I had to format my hard drive and start over from scratch using the HP Recovery disks. What an ordeal!

First of all, it means all the bloatware that HP loads on a factory default computer was re-installed and I had to remove all of it. Then my computer still had lots of problems and the HP recovery disks failed several times, until I did a ton of research from my friend’s computer and discovered that I was not alone in my frustration. I finally ditched the HP recovery disks and got another OS disk. But, after all my HP recovery troubles, my hard drive got a lot of errors on it and so I had to run chkdsk a few times to fix it from within the Recovery console in Windows.

However, I did learn an important lesson: do regular backups. Not just Windows stuff, but full backups. I lost quite a bit of data and a ton of software that I now have to reinstall and it will take me quite some time to do. All because I didn’t do full backups on a regular basis. I’m now using an external hard drive to house my backups. I was using CD’s and DVDs before and that is why I started getting lazy. I paid for my laziness and carelessness. Mea culpa. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

And if you’re thinking of buying a new computer anytime soon, insist on getting an operating system disk with it. If they don’t give it to you, I would seriously re-consider that purchase. Have a custom clone PC built for you or build it yourself and buy the OS if you have to. If your computer fails, it is so much better to have the OS disk so that you do a clean re-install if you have to. Now, I have to get back to installing software so that I can do my work. I’m going to be at this for a while, I think.

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