We're back from vacation. Well, really we've been back for a week; but apparently life was eagerly awaiting our return and pounced on us like a giant puppy as we entered the front door.
We got back and had the kind of return where thirty things need your attention, and it's not the type of stuff that you can reprioritize 'til later. Things like clogged sinks that flood the kitchen, and a visit from your VP on your first day back, and a double work week to make up for your time off, and just when you think, 'Okay, I'm gonna make some time for the blog, and the wedding, and get some calls and emails done!', the computer BREAKS. Yes, that's right: when I realized that we'd gotten from Monday to Friday without even being able to look through the wedding magazine that Mo had brought me, I set aside the better part of eight hours on the weekend to just do wedding and P:P stuff. So naturally, when I woke up on Saturday morning, sent Brian off to work, had a quick shower, and returned to my computer, she was broken. All that she would do was give me a black screen with a Microsoft logo and a black progress bar, with a little green inchworm, indicating magical technological processes, crawling forever across the screen.
Mo came by in the afternoon for a derby meeting and I lamented by computer issues to one and all, and she took Bleeblo (my computer's name is Bleeblo, props to whoever knows where that comes from) to her house where her Jay started working on transferring the files onto a hard drive before attempting a hard drive wipe. It made me think of a doctor trying to salvage all the viable organs from a recently deceased person. I kept thinking of files and folders that I couldn't live without; for 24 hours, I had a weird form of Turret's where I would suddenly call out things like, "My portfolio!", "The cruise photos!", "My invoices!" regardless of what conversation I was in the middle of, or where I was in the world. I would get updates from Mo via text, saying that they needed reboot discs, or that they were picking up an external hard drive which would act as the cooler in which to store the harvested organs. I kept thinking we should go over to Mo and Jay's and...help...somehow, but then I realized it would just become four of us staring at the green inchworm screen, three of us with no knowledge of how to fix it.
Oh, and because Brian's desktop computer died a gruesome death a few months back, my Bleeblo is the only truly viable computer in the house; we have the loan of my brother's old laptop, but its cord had been chewed on by his dog, and Mike's patch job has finally let go, revealing sparking, smoking wires.
In essence, I spent the first five days home without a single moment to even update P:P's facebook status, and then spent the weekend without any possible way to do anything for the wedding that involves a computer, email, or blogs--which is everything.
The end result was kind of nice, though, I must admit. Because of the public profile of our wedding, I think we both feel a certain level of responsibility to be updating you all, answering emails with great speed, and staying 'on the ball' where other couples may routinely take a week off of planning. Instead, due to these life happenings, we had to let all the wedding stuff just sit for an extra week...and it was actually kind of nice! I did find time on the weekend to look through my wedding magazine, and Bri and I went on a date night, sharing a bucket of muscles at the Casino Lac Leamy. I spent almost all of Sunday with Mo and Jay, talking at mach speed with Mo and watching as Jay worked some sort of magic on my computer.
The weirdest part? As Bri and I were over there on Sunday, having brought the reboot disks over, Mo and I went in the other room to talk about something way too girly for the boys. We heard Jay calling us back into the living room, and he told us that apparently, Bleeblo had simply started working again. He'd taken out the hard drive, removed some dust, and put it back together, but that was all--no reboot, no virus fix, nothing. Bri went to work, but I stayed well into the evening while Jay did some updates on Bleeblo just to make sure those wouldn't cause an issue; this gave me more time to just hang out with Mo, and with Jay, who I see far less frequently. Mo drove me home, and as usual we found ourselves sitting and talking the car endlessly instead of rushing upstairs as I'd planned to, to begin working on all the blog and wedding tasks I could now do. But in the end, I had a really wonderful weekend, and while I am indeed stressing about wedding tasks, I wonder if this come-and-gone computer issue (and maybe even the sink flood, the VP visit, etc etc etc) was the 'greater power's' way of slowing us down a little.
We're getting back into the swing of things now, so expect some good blog updates soon, including a tidy list of what we're still trying to put together for the big day, and the long-awaited offer that one of our donors is offering to all of you. In the meantime, consider the possibility of turning off your computer tonight, and making time for tasks or people that you haven't been able to prioritize lately. The wedding plans can wait--it's just one day's celebration. The relationship is now, and I'm so glad we had the week to focus on it.
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