now looking for places to visit on the web

Remember a while back when I was incommunicado because my PC was in the shop? Back then the diagnosis was that I needed to reformat my hard drive, but I wanted to wait until my book was finished and mailed off. I procrastinated.

But now that I'm brainstorming new stories I couldn't put off the deed any longer and I bit the bullet. I stayed up until 3 AM Monday morning after storing all my files on jump drives and deleting programs and reformatting. I got some of the stuff reloaded, but it was a nightmare.

I spent all day Monday working on reloading the software and getting the peripherals running: scanner, printers, floppy drive, speakers. My head was ready to explode. But it's amazing and kind of weird how some of that stuff loads itself. By late afternoon I had all restored except sound, one printer and AOL. Kristin took pity on me and figured out the printer first. The software CD had three models on it and kept loading the wrong one then giving me error messages. She figured that out. Then, and this was a big DUH moment: I had the speakers plugged into the wrong jack. LOL Kind of ironic that I reformatted the hard drive and figured out everything else, but I couldn't plug one jack in right. Oh well. I was tired and my head was exploding--that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
Then after about 45 minutes on the phone with two Internet providers (I use the Internet through a high speed connection, but I use AOL for email) and having no success in recognizing my modem, Kristin put her head with mine and we figured out that one, too. Sometimes it's beneficial just to have another person sit in the chair so you can look over their shoulder with a different perspective.

In the end: I got rid of the fatal error that wouldn't let me plug in the scanner, and I'm sure I freed space, and with only one loss: my favorite places/bookmarks. I lost all the places I visit on the web, research, blogs, writer and reader sites. Bummer. :-(

I'd love it if you sent me your top ten favorite sites on the web. Maybe they're some of mine, too, or maybe I'll find new ones.

Happy Valentine's Day!