Hat for Papa-Part Deux

Last night, I came within 4 rows of being done with the hat for Papa. Yarn Harlot made this in an evening? She must be a FAST knitter, and I must be TURTLE-SLOW. But it's a process, right? Therapy, right?

I'm too competitive for my own good!

So now, I have to find Size 11 dpns to finish this little wonder, and then I can take it to him and have him try it on. I think I'm going to make another one--just for kicks--for his wife. She can wear hers to support him!

Anyway, had I bought my Size 11's last night, I could have finished the hat, and you'd be looking at a finished project, but could I stop off at the knitting place--considering I drove right past it without thought?

NOOOO!

So, I give you part two of Papa's cap, and will finish tonight with a picture!

My animals were posing last night--especially my TomCat, Chat Au Lait--ready to pounce on sleeping husband...


I can almost hear "Don't move! I've got you covered, and I'm just pretending to be uninterested in your hairless head!"

So alright, Chat, pose for the camera!








And he did this:






You, are a perfect cat.


See the box under the cat?

Ah, that's another story.

I received a panicy email from my friend Ray. "The computer isn't working right." He says. So I email him back with assurances and that I'll come up on Saturday to help him work things out. But he is adamant, and decided he'd broken it, I suppose, and he returned all his computer related stuff and tried to get his money back.

Only Best Buy has a 30 day policy for returns, and he was just a scant few days beyond that.

Mental note: DO NOT BUY FROM BEST BUY ANYMORE.

He was so frustrated and unhinged on the whole affair that he told Best Buy Geek Squad to junk it.

I'm shocked, you see? Well, of course you can't see, but I wrote back and said

"YOU WHAT?"

Well, to his credit, he called them back and told them that I would come over and pick it up, which I did. I'll fix the machine, no problem there. Geek Squad told me that they'd turned it on to see what was what, and they told me that Vista's operating system was corrupted. Ah, okay, that means Reinstall Vista. No problem.

Except for one thing. He returned all his peripherals. The router. The fancy wireless printer! Ouch.

So I have a weekend project--getting his puter running again. I think that this time, I'll put it together so that it immediately goes to the world wide web and his particular website, and a shutdown sequence that is a lot easier than Vista's--not sure what that will be--perhaps a more understandable icon on the desktop than the circle at the bottom of the screen--now that, I'll have to consult with my own Geek Squad--but otherwise...it's not impossible, and how to explain to my friend Ray, that the computer isn't BROKEN, just the software is acting up, which you can EXPECT to happen when you're a new user...which actually, I thought I'd explained to him. But maybe he didn't hear it?

My dog looks on with doubt in her eyes...











No, seriously. This isn't rocket science, unless you don't understand how computers work. I'm sure that he doesn't want it back. He has a friend who said that he'd buy it from him, otherwise, he's out $700+, and while I'd like to have the machine, I don't have $700 to buy it. Hell, I don't have $100 to buy it! I'm not sure that Ray's friend will give him the money he paid for it. My hubby said that his friend could probably sell it for more than what Ray's friend would give for it--after all, the operating system has to be rebuilt, right? That's a real difficult process, right?

Wrong.

Stick a disk in the cdrom and let her run. Then allow the machine connection to the internet to update. It's a no-brainer. But Ray? Like I said, he went into meltdown before I had a chance to work on it.

Well, it sort of ticked me off. Yes, it's true that I can't just drop everything and run up to his house and spend the entire day working on a computer. I do remember the days when I got really anxious if my puter wasn't working right. Now, however, it's "just one of those things" you deal with on a day to day basis if you have Windows as your operating system, and that goes triple, IF YOU HAVE VISTA.

Not that I'm bitter.

So, having said all that, my other cat, Smokey/Cherise (we really haven't made up our minds what we want to call her--she's been in our home for 6 years)...tries to hide from me, knowing what the weekend holds. I'm sure she thinks that I'm not up to the task--and depending on what transpires over the weekend--remember I need to finish the hat--I should be done with the reinstall before bedtime, Friday. Leaving lots of time on Saturday to return the Cool Machine to Ray, and the massive effort to try to convince him that probably the only thing he did WRONG was to try and shut down the computer when it was updating--or downloading an important update, then disconnecting it from the internet while downloading--who really knows what happened. This old gal can fix it.