Am I dreaming?

Can it be true? This post on Shakespheare's Sister brought a tear to my eye.

Since I haven't been speading much time on the net lately, I assumed that all was status quo. Although I must admit that my inner voices are telling me not to get my hopes up.

The end of an era

...and the beginning of another.

Mr Independent graduates high school tomorrow night. I'm not exactly sure how things will go from here. He's enrolled at the local college and will continue to work his current part-time job as well as work with a friend who has his own remodeling/small construction business. I'm trying really hard to transition to the role of parental advisor as opposed to parental enforcer. Don't get me wrong, there's still rules of the house that will be enforced on the inhabitants of this house, no matter what the age. I'm referring to the decisions he makes about his own stuff. It certainly will be interesting, if not entertaining.

I have returned!

Yes, I was gone for quite awhile. I do have reasons.... surgery for one, a fried Ethernet connection for two.

The surgery went well. I'm 10 days post op and I can't believe how good I feel. My neck and back pain are completely gone. I stopped taking the pain killers 4 days post op and now only seldom take Tylenol. The incisions are healing well and we think I'll have only one or two areas that will have big scars. The rest should be barely noticeable. I love the way "the girls" look and I have absolutely no regrets. I saw my surgeon today and he removed the 5 or 6 sutures. How is the rest of it being held together??? For crying out loud, I've got incisions from side to side! Modern medicine is amazing. For those interested, a total of about 7 pounds was removed.

The computer issue was a pain. It seemed to be a result of a lightening strike from one of the nasty thunderstorms that rolled through the area Monday night. Now I never claimed to be a big time techie, but I worked as an application trainer and analyst for several years and I'd like to think I gleaned a lot of knowledge from the brilliant techies that surrounded me. At first I thought the cable modem or rotor was zapped, but we were able to connect to the net from any of the other PCs in my house on the same LAN. Only my PC was having the issue and receiving the message that there was no or limited network connectivity. So I crawled under my desk (not an easy task...remember...5 days post op). I saw the lights on the Ethernet connection, one green and one orange. I knew the green was good, I couldn't remember if the orange was a bad sign. I knew not seeing any light was bad, but an orange light I just wasn't sure. I tried to go down a logical list...swapped the cable with another connection that worked, ran through all the typical Windows repair processes, nothing seemed to fix it. I finally decided to just buy a new Ethernet card. The only problem is that when I opened the CPU case, there was no Ethernet card. The port for the cable (as well as the two adjacent USB ports) was housed by a little silver box that was connected directly to the mother board. SHIT! I had no idea how to deal with that. There was one open slot that I may have been able to put the Ethernet card into, but there were other unknown items plugged in around it so it appeared not to be an option. Luckily we didn't open the package yet, so I went back to the store and exchanged it for a compact USB network adapter. It took all of about 3 minutes to get it setup and be back on the net. YIPPEE!!

Two good things came out of this episode. I tested the connection speed and it appears to be just as good, if not better, than before and I vaccuumed the inside of the CPU and hopefully the sucker will run cooler.

Bottom line... I'm back in action. Let the cheering begin.

Since I'm always on a quest to gain knowledge, if you're so inclined, leave a comment to tell me what other troubleshooting I could do.