The (Almost) No Good (Almost) Horrible (Almost) Very Bad Day (Almost)

Hi, my name is Tracey, and I'm an addict.

This morning, I decided to try something. I was trying to avoid having to completely reformat my hard drive and start all over (darn freaking viruses), so I got the brilliant (snort) idea to just upgrade WinXp (ya know- where you don't lose all of your programs and stuff). If it works- great. If it doesn't- nothing lost but the hour or so it takes to upgrade.

Wrong. Silly me- my cordless, optical, USB mouse does not work when upgrading WinXP. I don't know if it was me or what, but I'm so totally paranoid about losing everything that I didn't dare do anything with my computer until I had some sort of techno geek around to fix my mistakes. This happened at oh, 930am this morning. My husband was at work. My father was at work. There were no other techno geeks around. So- I waited. I cleaned a bit, played with my boys a bit, and basically sat there and fumed- How could THIS happen to me? I'm going to lose everything! Programs- no big deal. The layouts that I haven't backed up because I don't have enough of them to fill a CD- BIG DEAL. My fonts? HUGE DEAL. The photos? REALLY HUGE DEAL. Oh- and the thought of an ENTIRE DAY without my computer? TERRIFYING. That's where the whole addict thing comes in. Although it would have been rather comical to see me drifting towards my computer, sitting down in front of it, only to realize that it still wasn't working.

Tomorrow- I will be backing everything up. Partly because I need to reformat, and also partly because I decided that I'm not going to screw with stuff like this anymore.

Back to today: the day got better. I got caught up on my DVR. I got some cleaning done. I got a package from Memory Maker's for the layout that I had published. Oooo- paper supplies! Travel themed paper supplies! Vintage labels! Cardstock stickers! Epoxy stickers! Self adhesive metal! Neat! And, of course, I got an idea.

I'm going to make an album. Not just a typical (for me) album, but one made entirely of paper. I'm thinking something along the lines of Oh Baby The Places You'll Go, something for the boys. This is really cool paper- unfortunately, I doubt that I'll be traveling places any time soon. Ya know, the whole 'money' thing. This is the type of stuff that I just have to do something with, ya know?

Oh, and not to toot my own horn here or anything, but you can find my layout, Spirit of Chicago, on page 84 of Memory Maker's Travel Issue. Because they didn't use my supply list (grrr), I used a page kit by Michelle Underwood (found on her Diddly Scraps CD).