I hope you still love me... or My story of terrible luck

Dearest followers,

Many apologies for the complete lack of posts for the last...well, at least the last three weeks. Possibly longer, I lost track. See, my computer decided to up and off itself recently! I had catastrophic hard drive failure, which would have been okay and easily repaired if Dell hadn't shipped my new hard drive to WA, where I do not live. Fortunately the girl in India who answered my complaint call knew that WA and NY were not geographically near, so about a week and a half later I had a new hard drive! Hooray!

Except not. They sent me the wrong version of Windows pre-installed, so there was a bit of a hassle with that. Then I had to make a mad dash to Toronto (more on that in a later post) which set it back another weekend. Then, once I finally had time to sit down and make the darn thing work, it decided to inform me that a)my network card didn't work anymore; b)my battery had "expired"; and c)my motherboard was shot. Seriously?!?! Now keep in mind that my computer is about 18 months old and still under warranty. Tech support had the nerve to tell me that this was pretty typical for a computer of this age. So I waited another week for the other new parts to go to WA, get lost, come to NY, and arrive at a tech's house so that he could come out after work one day and install them.

That was yesterday. He was here for about 2 hours, which caused us to miss the Coheed and Cambria concert at the NY state fair (in the interest in full disclosure, it was pouring rain as well), and when he finally declared it all done he handed it over and we thought everything was better forever! Then as he was driving away we realized that I no longer have any mouse functions and only 1 working USB port. I frantically called him before he could get too far down the road, at which point he informed me that the motherboard must have been dead on arrival. By now, I'm pretty well done with Dell. So now I'm waiting for yet another motherboard to make its circuitous journey around the US to arrive and my house and get installed. Also, because of the corrupt motherboard, Windows isn't exactly functioning correctly, which makes it a great fun to try and pass the security check on most websites.

So AT ANY RATE, I hope all of you still love me and are interested in reading what I've done. I've got several stories in the can, so to speak, and some of them will be going up retroactively so that you'll get the chance to read them in order. We're looking at the following topics (at least):

Vanilla Ice Cream (review of Vanilla Bean Paste)
Successful Macaroni and Cheese
Review of the Awesomest Tea Mug ever made
Trip to Toronto and Niagara Falls
and much, much more!

Oi, I better get to typing. Many thanks for your continued loyalty!

My best,
Katie