I’ve been having problems with my pc giving me a blue screen for a while now. I’ve spoken with a few friends about it and the opinions have varied from, “don’t stress too much I’ll help you when I’ve got time” to “oh my goodness, you’re going to lose EVERYTHING on your pc, it’s about to die”. Thank goodness I’ve been blessed with a solid dose of common sense and a very logical brain so I didn’t panic. I got gatvol on Thursday and called my local PC shop. I’ve supported them fairly well over the years and they understand that due the nature of my work I cannot be without my pc for more than a day, so they were most gracious and pushed me in ahead of the other work they had waiting. I explained all the error messages along with the opinions I had gathered along the way. It appears that the problem was a faulty sector on one of the RAM cards. The solution was simply to remove the offending card and pay them R200 for their days labour. They cleaned up the HDD’s (yes there are 2) removed all unnecessary files etc and basically made it run a little faster.

Totally excited I came home ready to spring into action and get going without fear of interruption, I find out that my antivirus has expired. Delightful!! Now I was left with the choice, do I risk going onto the internet without protection for 1 night or do I wait? Remember the boys had just spent almost the whole day cleaning up my pc and making it work nicely. I resisted the urge and stayed off the internet.

Friday the pc went back to the pc shop so they could do a proper removal of the old antivirus and load something new. Just by the way, Bit Defender sucks big time, stay away from them. Their customer service sucks even more than their product. Oh and I had to take J’s remote controlled helicopter that he got from Father Christmas on Friday morning at school back to the toy shop because it was broken and he was desperate to play with it.

On Saturday I had a family photo shoot in the morning. I did that, then came home and left the pc while it downloaded all the photos. Now that I have a new camera this tends to take a while – in the region of 4 to 5 hours!

While that was busy I continued making J’s advent calendar. I got the idea from Sally, and it looked so amazing that I totally had to have one for J as well. The perfectionist in me made my life so incredibly difficult during this project. I couldn’t use fabric glue because even after it dried it still showed through the felt fabric. Then the boots looked boring just plain green or red, so I had to put the fluffy white bits at the top. And so it went on. Oh and I also had to sew elastic on the top inner side of the pockets so that he could easily get his hand in and out with the gift without getting his hand stuck and ruining all my hard work
After that it was back to the pc to reload CS3 because for some reason it would not work and my Spyder calibration utility was all out of whack so that had to be reloaded as well.
Today was spent cleaning up the bits of material, thread and finding all the pins I’d dropped on the floor. I haven’t even started editing my family shoot yet and I’m already exhausted.
I think I’ll make peanut butter & honey sandwiches for dinner.

Here are some photos of my son’s Advent Calendar. I’m actually very proud of myself and he (thank heavens) is totally delighted.

The Advent Calendar I Made