Bah, Humbug

Okay, I'm not in a very Christmas-y mood right now. My vacation is going by very fast and I'm not getting anything accomplished. Or, I should say, I'm not doing any relaxing and working on projects I want to work on.

Sunday we visited friends in the outer reaches of northeast PA. They bought a new townhouse back in April and this was our first chance to see it. We had a great time and it's wonderful to spend time with college friends I don't get to see very often, but man, was it a long drive - close to three hours. Especially with a one-year-old and a cranky husband. We took the turnpike home and chopped almost a half hour off the drive time.

Monday was crazy busy. H. had her 15-month appointment at 8:30am - she's 23 lbs, 13 oz and 31 and 1/2 inches long - plus she had to get four shots, including a flu shot, which was still available. Then we stopped into my work to visit a few people who didn't get to see her at the Christmas party. Then, it was off to my parents' house. My mom and I took H. and K&K to Sears for a late Christmas portrait. I thought the girl that helped us was very rude as it pertains to the coupon we were using, but that's a rant for another day. After lunch, we all played outside for a little while, since it was in the 50s for the first day of winter. We got home around 4pm and that's when my real adventure began.

My IP at home is MSN and there was a disc in the mail on Monday to upgrade to MSN 9. When I tried to install it, I kept getting an error message that the .NET Passport system that verifies e-mail addresses and passwords was unavailable, making me assume it was a problem on the part of MSN. So I tried to get online several times last night and at various times throughout the day today. I still kept getting the same message and was starting to get annoyed. So I finally called MSN support. Turns out I didn't have enough memory to install the new version, which is why I was getting the error message. Wouldn't an error message telling me what the real problem was been more helpful? So I reinstalled MSN 9 and it appeared that the installation was a success. But when I went to log on, the sign-in screen was scrambled and I couldn't log in. I tried re-installing and re-starting, but nothing worked. So at 10pm, I called back with my new problem. I was on the phone for over an hour and still couldn't get the problem corrected. Microsoft didn't want to admit that I could have received a bad disc, which I suggested since this was the second problem that I had with it. Finally, after much back and forth and a whole wasted evening, I found my old MSN 8 upgrade disc and loaded that back onto my computer and voila, I'm finally back online!

So after braving the grocery store the day before Christmas Eve and baking two batches of chocolate chip cookies, I'm finally catching up on my journal/blog reading and writing what I thought was a quick entry. (I'm rambling now, but it's after midnight.) And I just realized after dinner that I actually have to go inside Walmart tomorrow! I never withdrew the money I needed for four cash gifts, so I have to do that tomorrow and my bank is inside Walmart. If you don't hear from me by the end of the week, I'm still trying to get out of the parking lot.