It’s My Imagination

Emergency Preparedness

My husband has made a list of things he wants taken care of, or at least looked at, on our van before I drive it to Tennessee in a few weeks. I also want to make sure it’s ready for the trip, since he’s not going with us, the last thing I want is to break down along the highway somewhere.

His list includes all of the typical things associated with the engine as well as possibly having the brakes looked at. We just recently had all four tires checked, rotated, balanced, and aligned, so they’re all set. The last thing on my list would be to get the little dings taken out, but, they’re all just door dings, so, unless I’m going to auto body Nashville, I’m not going to worry about it. It’s not like most other cars don’t have their share of door dings! Now, if it were major collision repair, I’d be going to the experts!

Looks like we’ll be trying to put it in the shop either this week or next to make sure it’s all ready to go. I can’t believe I’ll be leaving in just a couple of weeks!

Technically Bruised

This has been a very trying weekend spent battling my computers and a number of technical difficulties.  I feel bruised, but not beaten.

It all began Friday afternoon.  My laptop had been somewhat sluggish for weeks, but I blamed it on all the online work I was doing, opening and closing of websites, fast paced website visits that I do with Entrecard on my other blog and just the siple fact that my laptop is getting older.  Everything was working normally when I set down my laptop and went into my sewing room to work on another project.  I came out an hour or so later, only to find that my laptop had “lost” its wireless connection.

I tried everything, but could not get the wireless to work.  The network setting simply said “not connected”.  I did a system restore, I did wireless network searches and would come up with “none available”.  This was odd because just about every house in our neighborhood has wireless and I usually see 5 or 6 of them when I do a network search, but this time I got nothing.  I became so frustrated that I finally handed the computer to my husband and asked him to take a look.  He then spent an hour or so doing what I had just done and he, like me, had no success.  I finally just went to bed.

Saturday morning I picked up the laptop to try again and found that I now had wireless service!  Somehow the computer had righted itself and was back online.  Everything worked smoothly, albeit slowly, all day with the exception of the Entrecard website and the entrecard widgets on any blogs I opened, including my own.  (I don’t currently use EC on this site).  I spent a good part of yesterday fighting with this, checking all my setting, ad blockers, security, everything I could think of and nothing helped.  I was even having problems with it on my desktop computer so wondered if perhaps it was a website issue.  I put out a call to other bloggers and found that no, it was something on my end.  I had no idea what it was and, out of frustration, again went to bed.

I  woke up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep.  I can’t relax when I know things aren’t working properly.  I decided to get up and take another look at it.  When I came out of the bedroom I noticed that my desktop computer was still running.  Usually, it goes into hibernation during the night.  I decided to shut it down completely, something I rarely do.  I then went in and picked up my laptop, turned it on and discovered that, not only was everything working, including Entrecard, but everything had picked up speed.  I worked on it for about an hour and then went back to bed, content.
The one thing my husband had done with the wireless network was to create a bridge.  I’ve never had that done before and am wondering if I now need to disconnect the bridge.  The desktop computer is still turned off, but I’m concerned that when I turn it back on, the “bridge” will cause problems again.  I guess the way to find out is to turn it on.

Anyway, for now, I’m back up and running, but very tired from lack of sleep!