Machines -6, Adrienne - 0

Well, my battle with machines has continued.  The score was Machines - 4, Adrienne - 0. When we last talked about machines, I think my brand new camera had just died a slow death, my car had an electrical problem and then the mirror was broken and my computer network went down.  The trend has continued.  Last week my adored 1940's Wedgewood oven began acting crazy.  I tried to make more of those awesome lemon cookies (I hate that my Myer lemon tree has sooo many lemons that they are almost rotting before I can use them up. But how many lemony things can you cook...) and they burned.  I barely had them in the oven for 5 minutes and they were burning on the edges.  Then I cooked this awesome leek/potato pie thing and I only had it in the oven for 15 minutes and the pie crust was burning.  The oven was turned to 350 but the temperature on the cheapo thermostat that I bought was around 500 degrees.  The kitchen was about 125 degrees and I was literally sweating.  After baking the pie thing I had to stick it in the microwave because the potato slices were still raw!

To make a long story long, I called the guy and he came and said the oven's thermostat died.  It lived a long life of 70 years! They don't make them like that anymore.  Three days later we had a new thermostat and a $400 bill.  But a working oven!!  Yeah.

I heard back that my camera would be fixed under warranty after some haggling.  It was only 37 days old when it died.  You would think this would be a no brainer, you would think...

M new laptop

Then the latest machine debocle occured.  My trusty laptop died two nights ago.  I turned it on and it did this check disk thing and then froze.  I turned it off.  I turned it back on and it did it again.  Then froze.  (Understand these check disk things take at least one hour and I am just sitting there watching it tick tick....)  Then I turned it on and realized I could stop the check disk thing and did.  Windows started up and it turned on.  I ran into my office and backed up my hard drive.  I did a little work and then turned it off.  The fatal blow!  I turned it back on and it would not bring windows back up.  It brought up the words you never want to see "System Recovery".  I turned it off and went to bed.  I texted my brother and told him to call me in the morning.  When he did, as I suspected, the news was not good.  He was a sport to help me out as we problem solved and then I decided to go buy another computer.  He talked to me in the store (what did I do before cellphones?) and then came home with my new baby!  For 24 hours I have been making recovery disks, installing software, and recovering data.  Loads of fun!  Hey if you ever want a mindless thing to do, have your computer stop working, buy a new one and make recovery disks, install software and recover data.  I now know why I could not be an IT person.  I could not sit there and watch the computer install or write to disk.  I know IT people do other things but this task is so tedious for me.  I want it to go faster.  I have a need for speed.

One thing I did find out was that my back up was not as good as I thought it was.  Some of the data I thought was getting backed up was not.  So I will have to go back to the drawing board on the back up situation!

Well, the machines are winning but the war is not over!  The score is now Machines - 6, Adrienne -0