Today started out nicely. Brian made breakfast.
Then I found ants in the office. And more in the laundry room. Luckily they weren't all over stuff in the pantry, although there's not much sweet in there for them to go after. Brian sprayed the house (he sprays the base around the entire house) and for the most part, the ants disappeared. There were some still in the office, but from experience, we know they'll be gone by tomorrow.
I'm sure you all know how I feel about ants, if you've been reading my blog for very long.
Last week I was able to get a goodsized discount on some of my plugins for my videos and I took advantage of it. These were upgrades for software I had bought years ago. For some reason, they wouldn't let me update the activation code when I first tried installing them, so I figured I'd to that this morning. Okay, I had to deactivate the old number to get the new license code to take. I can do that. Then I tested them. The button for configuration doesn't work on those three sets of plugins. Just a little explanation. These plugins are used in transitioning from one scene to the next. Cool fun things. The button works on the others, but not on these. Hmmm. I ended up asking a question on the software company's Facebook page.
Then the mail gets here. Not good. Because Brian's not making much money, we're able to get a good discount on our utility bill. Earlier this year we had to send copies of our income tax to prove that we're not bucks up. Today's letter said they want that again, plus another government issued thing. And that we'd used 609% of the baseline usage. That took me a while to figure out. Sure, we ran the A/C a bunch last month (remember the record heat and humidity?). I checked our last bill. Baseline is 370 Kwh. Six hundred percent of that is 2220. We were well under that amount. The warning is you go over 600%, you lose that discount. So, I don't know who's calculator they used, but it's wrong. No matter, right now we're not even close to 1800 Kwh. It's just a bother.
Then there's a notice from our health insurance company. Oh, hai, guess what? We're not going to have the PPO plan you're using now, not under Covered California, but you can buy it from us off of the exchange. It will only cost a thousand bucks a month. And you can't get a tax credit for it since it's not through Covered California. Have a nice day! So, there will be that to deal with.
Then, I get the BSOD on my computer. You know, the old blue screen of death. Okay, it happened once, no biggie. Then it happened again. Crap. What's going on? I think I narrowed it down to an external hard drive. Western Digital. It's going bad. Okay, now I swear a little bit (reflecting on the Samuel L. Jackson video I posted yesterday). See, on this hard drive are hours of video that I downloaded from my old video tapes. I don't want to lose that. The drive shows up as "raw" on my computer. Bad sectors or something. A couple of hours ago I started my Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery software. Hopefully I'll be able to save a good portion of the video. I still have the tapes, thank goodness, but it's a lot of work down the crapper. And this is most likely going to take days. It's a 2TB hard drive. According to the little working window, 387946496 sectors need to be read. Right now, it's on 202752. Like I said, it's going to take a while. To keep the external drive cool, I'm putting frozen water bottles on it. That should help.
Dinner was pretty good, I'd put a roast in the crockpot earlier today. Mashed potatoes, peas and gravy. Now I have to go put the leftovers in containers for his mom and wash the dishes. He told me last week the only time she eats meat is when we send it over; because it's so expensive - so I've been cooking more so she'll get a couple of meals each time we bring food over. I kind of feel bad because I haven't been cooking much due to the heat.
And I found the ants were back in the laundry room.
I really hate those motherfu....well, you know.
And now I leave you for the evening to go do my final chores, then settle down and watch our latest Netflix movie. "The Signal". I hope it's better than the one we tried watching Thursday (Reasonable Doubt), we got a half hour into it, turned it off and started watching recorded stuff. It was just bad.
Hoping that tomorrow is a better day....
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