h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So, what was I doing yesterday that made me have to reverse my usual pattern of reading everything before I post my journal for the day (and, at that, it only took an hour to read everything in My Conversations)?

As some of you know, Tom, my husband, is a minister. No, we don't have our own church--think of him as freelance (I figure that's close enough without getting all technical...) Today, he and PaperKid went to a town 3 hours away--Tom was invited to preach and do music, and PaperKid's singing backup. So, since it's a small congregation, Tom wanted to talk with a pastor friend of ours. We ended up going to the friend's church's monthly breakfast yesterday. After breakfast, PaperKid went with some other friends of ours (B and A)--one of their granddaughters is PaperKid's friend, and had a basketball game. Since the church and the game were in a different town about 15 miles away, we told B and A to go ahead and just drop PaperKid off at our house (B and A live in the same town we do) since I thought we'd be home by the time the game was over. After they left, while the breakfast area was being cleaned, D, the pastor's wife, invited me to her daughter-in-law-to-be's bridal shower, that evening (Tom's going to be best man at the wedding). OK, there should still be time for PaperKid and Tom to have one last song practice between her getting home from the game, and we girls going to the shower--and it'd give Tom some quiet time to finish up his message for this morning. So anyway, the cleaning was finished, and everyone was gone except Pastor B, D, Tom, Notepad (who was booooooooooored), and myself. While Tom and Pastor B were talking, my phone rang. PaperKid wanted to know if she could hang out with J for a couple of hours. Um, sure--we'll call when we're ready to pick you up, since we're nowhere near heading home yet, and don't know when we will be. So once Tom's and Pastor B's conversation was over, we headed home, stopping on the way so I could get a gift for the bride-to-be, whom I really don't know very well (though well enough to be pretty sure that she and J (different J than the previously mentioned J, by about 16 or 17 years and different sex...) will make good neighbors--J is already our neighbor). When I was finished shopping, I gave the young J's family a call, to let them know we were on the way to pick PaperKid up, but ended up having to leave a voicemail. We stopped by the house anyway, but there was no one there. A couple of phonecalls later, we learned that there were *2* basketball games that day, and the second had just started about 10 minutes previously. It was determined that the game would be over soon enough to allow PaperKid to be home early enough to practice, so we left it at that--no going back up to Smith River for us.

So then, after wrapping the gift, I needed to clean out and refill the chickens' waterer, and refill the feeder. And I had a bit of writing to do, which some technical difficulties got in the way of...

Y'see, my laptop is roughly the same age as Notepad, and the battery hasn't worked for years. The power port, where the cord plugs into the laptop, is also more than a bit dodgy, due to falls--the cord can't go all the way into the socket, for some reason, and the socket itself is sort of just floating just inside the frame of the laptop. As a result, it is very, very easy to disconnect the power supply, which results in an instant shutdown. If you've saved recently, it's not that big a deal, though annoying. If you haven't, or you've saved in a text editor and have copy-and-pasted into, say, h2g2 and have just finished fixing any funny weirdnesses from copy/pasting and are moving the cursor to post the darn thing when your youngest daughter decides to walk around the wrong end of the coffee table, strange noises can be the result. Then it was time to get ready for the shower. 'Twas fun! Notepad didn't want to leave...

You lead a busy life, Amy .

Yesterday was *not* typical

Oh? Was it unusually quiet compared to the usual day?

Not exactly

Gosh, my head's spinning

Deb