Hello. I'm ba-ack!

It's been a month since I last posted because my darling, precious, beautiful laptop frizzed out on me. No warning.

It was a hard time of discovery for me. Discovery that all the files I thought I'd backed up so nicely on an external hard drive, were in fact, not there. I don't know what I was remembering backing up, but it wasn't the stuff I needed.

In the interim, we bought a second-hand laptop to replace my old one - a PC so the kids can play minecraft on it as well as do any online schoolwork they might need to do. But when it came time for me to use it, I just didn't like it. It was a little bulkier, a little heavier than my previous laptop and the keys didn't light up for when I was using it in dim light.

Also, I had lost months' worth of work, which made me keep eyeing my old laptop longingly.

I decided to take my old laptop to a computer repair person and pay the $80 fee for a diagnostic test to see whether it was saveable. Based on the symptoms my laptop was displaying, the repairman thought that either my hard drive had died (in which case all those un-backed-up files were lost for good) or the connection between my screen and hard drive had broken. I left the laptop with him so he could work out which it was. And I prayed.

4.30pm that day he called me.

His news was good. It was the connection, not the hard drive that was busted. He could fix it. Should he go ahead?

"Heck yes," I said, along with a few too many, "Thank you!"'s

So another couple of hundred dollars later, I was able to pick up my precious, oh-so-loved (never leave me again) laptop and immediately back up all my files onto both the cloud and an external hard drive.

And it is on that beautiful laptop I say, "Hello," to you today.

Hello.