My Terrible Week (or two)

I lost my cell phone a little over a week ago. After looking in all the normal places (and abnormal ones, like the refrigerator) and asking the lost & found at a mall and a Barnes & Noble, I had to give up and buy another one.

image by Marc Noon 

In the week leading up to that, it became obvious my DVR was becoming useless. It had been going downhill for some time, but it finally stopped accepting direction from the remote control. (Yes, I bought another remote control and put new batteries in it. Bupkis.) I could record using it, but only watch the recording once—no rewind, no editing, no dubbing to a disk. So I ordered another one.

photo by Keremdmrc 

Also in this same time period, my car engine lugged for a short time. The last time it did this, I ended up having it towed in for an expensive repair. It was near due for its 60,000 mile check, so I had the shop do that. The battery was low, so that needed to be replaced, making it more expensive than the usual check.

public domain 

Then my digital camera stopped working. It simply would not turn on. I charged up the battery with a skeptical attitude, because even when the battery is low it will give a low battery signal. Sure enough, after I put the charged battery in, it still would not turn on. That’s why the pictures in this blog are so generic.

public domain 

How’s this for generic?

I decided to wash my bath mats. Assuming they were colorfast, I threw the white ones from one bathroom in with the dark blue ones from another. Wow, they’re not colorfast. The white ones came out light blue.

White + Dark Blue = Light Blue?

I thought this could be a good change of pace. But under strong light, there were brown splotches amidst the light blue. The chemicals for the dyes just combine in odd ways. It really looks distasteful to have bath mats with brown splotches on them.

White + Dark Blue = Puce!

Perhaps what caused me the worst anxiety was that Word started acting up. I opened up chapter 2 of my present work and found that all the corrections and additional pages from my last session were gone. I knew I had saved it—several times while doing the work. Very well, I opened the version I saved to the cloud. That also had the recent additions missing.

Working from my printed copy, I put the corrections and additional pages back in. This was hard for the corrections—I had to read the chapter almost line by line to remember all the changes I had made. I saved it along the way, then saved the final version to the cloud.

I noticed something funny in Windows Explorer. If one hovers over a file, it shows when it was last modified. It showed I had last modified chapter 2 two days ago. That was before the recent additions. Sure enough, when I opened the file again, all the corrections and additional pages were gone. Same for the version in the cloud.

I completely shut down Word and opened it again. Then I made the corrections a little at a time, saving, then closing and opening the file. This time the changes were saved. Word is working fine now. But that was a stressful writing session.

So tell me, how did your week go?