Update

I hope everyone had a nice Mother's Day weekend. On Saturday we were at the boy's baseball games all morning and afternoon before heading to my Mom's for a pre-Mother's Day dinner. We visited with Jason and Laine before they head out of town tomorrow. They showed us the new blog they set up so we can track their travels. Derek is already harassing them with instant messaging.

Unfortunately both boys won their games on Saturday so they will continue on in the end of the season tournament. They were fun games to watch and we want them to do well, but this season has dragged on long enough.

Yesterday we did Mother's Day for Helen's side of the family. We had a good time visiting with everyone.

Swim team practice starts this week. This is the first season the boys are doing swim team. They weren't too happy about it, but we told them to give it a try. We figured they might like it and it should definitely help them be better swimmers.

The school year is winding down as well. Helen is very stressed right now. It seems like some semesters she's reasonably on top of things, but this semester is not one of them. She was grading labs all weekend and was not happy about it. Whenever she complains that she doesn't have enough time to get her school work done, I offer to take care of everything so she can have unlimited time to work, but that makes her even more cranky because the point is that she doesn't want to be working on her personal time in the first place.

We're irritated that Helen's not going to get paid for the Tuesday following Memorial Day. The last day of school was supposed to be the Friday before Memorial Day, but the school system is forcing the teachers to make up a snow day on the following Tuesday. We will be long gone out of town by then so she's taking the day off without pay. At least she has the option to take it off without pay, but shouldn't grading labs all Mother's Day weekend count?

I've also been bogged down with some computer issues. I like to stay on top of things so it really deflates me to come home feeling like I've got everything under control only to have Helen inform me that something has broken. I have to fix it even though I wasn't the one to break it. In fact, I wasn't even home when it happened. It's bad when you walk in the door and are informed that something needs fixing, but it's worse to go and use something and find out that it's broken and either no one informed you or no one knows anything about how it might have been broken.

The other night it was the printer. I tried some things to fix the problem and then finally decided to uninstall the printer software and reinstall it. Unfortunately, the install would not run. I was obsessed with fixing the problem for a few days. I stayed up late several nights and went back and forth with HP technical support only to figure out (on my own using some tracing tools) that the install would not run because I had disabled auto run a couple months back when the conficker worm took control of our computer.

The night we were attacked by the conficker worm we had returned late from Derek's basketball game and we were trying to shut everything down, but Derek got on the computer (when he was supposed to getting ready for bed) and all the sudden things started going haywire. I'm not sure if Derek caused the problem, but it was certainly suspicious that things started going wrong while he was on the computer. It took me several days of obsessively trying all sorts of things before I finally had to restore the main hard drive from backup. Luckily, I run daily backups of the main hard drive to an external drive each night so we didn't lose anything. I really don't know how non-technical people have any hope of keeping their computers up and running. There's always something.