Troubleshooter extraordinaire

These are some of the projects L made in College for Kids. I finally got them photographed, but not in time. You will see some liquid destruction on some of her projects. I may tell the story at some point. At this point, I'm still far too pissed to discuss it and am only now starting to not want to choke my husband. After I took the photos, I spent a long time cutting out around the drawings on the more damaged items, so she could try to put them on a new background or attempt a repair.

So many things to blog about! I'll get started tonight, but will have to catch up a little each night, because time is tight this week, as L & I don't get back in town from her dance camp until after 6. With dinner and animal chores, that doesn't leave much evening!

My basement cleaning, followed by computer issues have kept me from blogging for a few days. The basement is essentially done. It’s clean, and everything is organized and where it belongs. I am so happy and relieved to be done with this chore that has been looming over me for more than a year! I made a decision that I may regret for the rest of the summer, though. The garden needs to be weeded as badly as the basement needed to be clean. We had perfect weeding weather on Saturday—low 70’s and cloudy. I was on a roll with the basement and just couldn’t pull myself away! Now it’s back up to the usual 90’s, which is way too hot for me to work during daylight hours!

On to the computer issues, which I’m still kicking myself over! My laptop’s cable quit working ages ago. I can’t even remember what happened to it. I ordered a replacement, not from Toshiba, but another brand that was cheaper. That allowed me to get 2 power cables instead of just one, which given the short lifespan of cables in our house and the fact that M’s laptop is a Toshiba also, it left us one for backup. Cables arrived, everything was great for a few months. I found that the new cable, started having problems connecting reliably. A careful inspection revealed what looked suspiciously like a tooth mark on the portion that plugged into the machine. I wiggled and kept that cord going until it just stopped connecting at all.

Then I switched to the backup. That worked well for a few weeks, up until last week. I started having to wriggle the cord and really push hard to get a connection. After a few days, I found that I could get it to make connection briefly after a great deal of effort now and then, but not reliably at all. This effectively limited my daily computer time to the very brief life of my battery along with the minimal recharge time it got while I pushed and wriggled the cord until my hands cramped up. No blogging, for sure. I basically limited myself to quick e-mail checks.

Here’s where the idiocy comes in. I decided that the likelihood of this second cable going bad was fairly improbable, statistically, and therefore threw out my normal methodological troubleshooting, which I am normally quite good at. I pride myself on having excellent troubleshooting skills. People pay me money to troubleshoot. So, at this point I just took the leap that the female adapter connector on my machine was bad—probably because I had loosened it while insisting on pushing and wiggling the cable in an effort to be cheap. I kicked myself for hosing my computer instead of just giving up on the cable right away. I informed M that I would need to take the computer in to have it repaired, as I didn’t have the time or the inclination to futz with it. Fortunately, I didn’t have the time or inclination to take it in until the following day.

Just as we were getting ready to leave yesterday to take L to dance, the rogue troubleshooter that lives in my brain started screaming at me. I told M I wanted to check one thing quickly before I take the machine in. I got the Toshiba cable that came with his machine and plugged it into mine. It connected perfectly, and stayed connected with no shoving, wriggling. Why didn’t I do that when my cable first gave out earlier in the week and save myself the stress and frustration? Just to complete the whole, whopping, three-minute troubleshooting process I had previously ignored, we plugged the bad cable into M’s Toshiba. It didn’t work. What a surprise. He pointed out that the connection made by the Toshiba cable was much firmer than that made by the replacement cables. In short, my laziness in skipping the short troubleshooting process that I knew should be followed, caused me inconvenience, stress, and nearly the cost of an unnecessary computer repair. I’d like to say I was distracted by my focus on cleaning the basement, but I think it had more to do with laziness and me being in a very fatalistic state of mind these days (of course it can’t be the cable—that’s too easy, it must be the most horrible and expensive problem—faulty laptop). That three minutes I saved at the beginning of the whole fiasco didn’t do much to offset the time, energy, and stress I exerted on the situation.

I’ve ordered a replacement cable—Toshiba this time. In the meantime, M & I are sharing his. Now I’m free to blog and surf the net at will.