tarotgal

After having a computer virus delete my entire desktop (it took me hours of freaking out to get the virus erased and everything back) I decided that the fact that my backup drive is just a paperweight is a bad thing. It hasn't worked since about 3 weeks into the new operating system (Vista) which was, what, 5 years ago? Sooooooo I bought a new backup drive. And this one backs up beautifully in real time. No need to do it manually and it backs up many versions of a file at a time and all my email and it's lovely. Truly lovely. However, it slows down my computer. When it's supposed to be running in the background (i.e. when my computer is active) it still takes up about 55% of my CPU memory. That doesn't leave much for Word and Firefox and Outlook and DVD player and all. It even has a "run when computer is idle" option and that's checked. I can't imagine what it would be like on my comp if it weren't! So as much as I want this realtime backup thing... I might just have to unplug it during the day and just let it back up at night or while I'm at work. Seriously. It's to the point where I open an email and the program says "No Response" for 2-3 minutes before it opens. And that's PER EMAIL. Same thing for webpages. I open a new window and three minutes later the webpage window is again active. It's driving me batty and making it impossible to do anything the way I normally do. *sigh* Guess I'll just have to get into a routine of unplugging and plugging back in again. But at least it's backing up. Yay.

On another happy note, I had a special Writer's Block Party for my wirters' roundtable group tonight. I prepared games and prompts and people brought food. We shared what we wrote, what our problems were, what helps us when we're blocked, etc. And I brought a whole bunch of writing books and one book to raffle off along with an outdated mug from work (from two logos ago; we're trying to get rid of them LOL). I went with a red & white theme like a picnic and bought a bunch of toy blocks to decorate the tables with. We had a great turnout (13; that's big for us as we usually have about 5-7 people at any given meeting). And I think people had fun talking about their writing and sharing tips. We didn't even get to all the group prompts I'd prepared, but people seemed to like the idea of doing one prompt per meeting so maybe we'll try to do that from now on and see how it goes. Sometimes it's nice to just sit down with other people and make yourself write and see what comes out, you know? And I've got a bunch of prompts prepared now! Anyway, I think it was a great success, especially as I spent about 2 months thinking about it and only one evening after work actually throwing it together. (Literally, I got off work and went to my volunteer job at the library and then came home from that at 9 and started work on it... after I ate dinner. LOL). Anyway, I'm proud and pleased and just wanted to share my happy. And now I'm free to go back to writing h/c numminess. Oh Dean... I've got some PJs for you...