Nathan & Fiona, Kaisa & Everett – Family Blog

I suffered from a computer problem. No, I’m not talking about Computer Users anonymous (although if there was such a thing Fiona would freely admit me), I’m talking about the BSOD, Blue Screen of Death! I had a wake up call that could have been a lot more serious than it was. Don’t get me wrong, there were still casualties that couldn’t be recovered — Cousin Niki, I had 4 Gigs of video from your wedding that are still in a zip file on my backup drive that I haven’t been able to recover…I’m really, really sorry…and ‘Melodious NeverSeeYouAnymore-ious’, gone are your your TV recordings of So You Think You Can Dance and The Notebook…I didn’t try very hard to save them…sorry, but to a lesser extent.

My “backup” external hard drive wasn’t exempt from the BSOD fury either. I say ‘backup’ because I commited a cardinal sin of having a backup drive and fell prey to the vast tracts of space that it offered and used those tracts for my recorded TV shows. I ended up saving what I could, wiping the rest, reinstalling Windows, and then taking it in to the nice people at Computer Lane (crummy website, good service) to discover it was actually my RAM that had failed, but that it had obvious effects on the hard drives. Great excuse to get a new 1GB stick of RAM (and Best Buy was the cheapest, what will this world come to next?)

Here are some things that anyone with a computer should be do.

1. Run CheckDisk and Defrag often
2. Have multiple backups
3. Have an off-site backup

1 — Run checkdisk and defrag often. Okay, I’m really not sure that this will help a whole lot, but it definitely can’t hurt the overall health of your hard drive. Vista has an option to schedule defrag built in. With XP I’m told you can put defrag in a scheduler and have it done that way. I usually run it 2-4 times a month.

2 — Have multiple backups, especially of non-replaceable data like home videos, photos, and school/work projects. Those were the first things that made me sick to my stomach– wedding/birth/family videos, pictures of family (like grandparents not alive), and old photographs that have been scanned and digitized and I may have the only digital copies. Multiple means at least two, preferably 3 or even 4 isn’t neccesarily overdoing it. With as reletively cheap as hard drives are, external and otherwise, there’s no reason not to have at least one. Keeping it connected to the computer is okay too for automated backups. But what if the worst happens and the computer is detroyed in a fire or flood?

3 — Have an off-site backup. This never really crossed my mind because, being fairly young, I’m still invincible and that invincibility is obviously passed on to my electronics, rights? Maybe not. There’s several options here and more if you have nerdy friends that want to back up your stuff in exchange for backup up theirs. Although I do have very nerdy friends (thanks for the loan of one of your many extra hard drives Mark) I’ve been looking at Mozy and Carbonite. Both have pros and cons but I think I’ll end up going with Mozy for many reasons: I’ve heard great things about them, they’re local (in Utah, awesome billboard), they offer 2GB free storage (and I like companies that do stuff like that), I can pay monthly, and they have a ’set it and forget it’ mentality to data backup. Carbonite looks like an excellent choice as well and is quite comparable and slightly cheaper, but I don’t want my data to suffer possible hibernation sickness. Mozy and Carbonite are $60 and $50 a year respectively with slight price breaks with Mozy for paying upfront for a year.

And for the record…even with my limited backups, it’s taken well over a week to get things up and going again. What do you do to backup? Share your experiences!

I had a very strange thing happen to me last night.

I was sleeping deeply last night, and even dreaming, when I was awakened in the middle of the night to hearing my name called.  I literally heard someone shout “Fiona!” in a really urgent tone.  I lay wide awake and couldn’t shake the thought that I needed to go and check to make sure the doors and windows were shut.  I was a little scared at this point, and almost woke Nathan up to do it, but I bucked it up and went.  The back sliding door was shut and locked, but the kitchen window was slightly open.  I shut it, kicked on the AC (I was hot) and went back to bed.

I have no idea why that happened or if it was a prompting from the Holy Ghost (though I really felt at the time that it was).  I kept listening to see if there was someone lurking outside, but I didn’t hear much.  Just a few bumps here and there.  I figured it was the people above us.  But it’s nice to know that if we were in danger, the Holy Ghost was looking out for our family.

I have finally rounded the bend in my pregnancy where I feel great again.  I have (most of) my energy back and don’t feel sick anymore!  And I’m not big enough yet to feel uncomfortable.  This is the part of pregnancy where you just sit back and enjoy it.

One of the things I love the most about being pregnant is feeling the first stirrings of life within me.  It’s amazing.  I don’t really know why, but they call it “quickening.”  The other night, I told Nathan “I’m sure it’s great being a man and you really love it, but I feel sorry for you that you never get to experience feeling life inside you.  Do you ever wish you could feel that?”  He relplied, “I’m good.”  Pretty funny…I’m glad he doesn’t feel he’s missing out on anything.

Anyway, today was the first day I could really tell my baby was in there.  I’ve felt him/her a few times before, even as early as two or three weeks ago.  But today, I have felt the baby giving me little nudges and flutters almost constantly.  I wonder if it was something I ate, or if he/she is just wanting to let me know he’s/she’s there.  Either way, I love it and get a smile on my face every time it happens.

I am so excited I can hardly stand it!!!  On October 8th through 16th I will finally get to go to Hawaii!!!

We have been talking about going to Hawaii since before we were married.  I wanted to go for our honeymoon, but Nathan’s family was planning a trip there for Christmas the next year, so we decided to wait until then.  Well, that trip got canceled.  We were quite bummed.

After that we decided that we would just save up and go on our own.  Nathan had a bunch of flight miles from United when he was going back and forth to teach in China.  They kept sending us credit card offers and we finally realized that if we signed up for this mileage credit card and did a few other things, we would be able to accumulate enough miles for free flights to Hawaii pretty quickly.  Sure enough, by last fall we had enough!  However, since we had a new baby, we decided we would wait until she was old enough that we could leave her with Nathan’s parents.

Well, that time has finally come and we have this small window where we will be able to go before having another baby.  We were really discouraged because we are also buying a bigger home, and that is leaving us quite broke.  Luckily, my mom and dad have a timeshare and decided to go in October, so we are able to stay with them for free!!  We are going to spend 4 days in Oahu and 3 days in Kauai.  It’s going to be so wonderful!  Everything has worked out perfectly with getting the flights arranged, and I feel like this is the right time.  We are finally getting the second honeymoon we have wanted for 3 years now!

I was so excited yesterday that I even went online and bought this cute maternity swimsuit from Old Navy.  Isn’t it cute? The best part is, it was only $15!

Ok…now it’s time for your recommendations! What are the best things to do on Oahu and Kauai?  If you know of a must-see, leave a comment and let us know so we can make the most of our week in Hawaii!!

Here are some recent pics of our little toddler.  Since most of them involve Cheerios, I’ve titled this post accordingly.  Enjoy!

One morning daddy dressed Kaisa up in his Utah Blaze jersey for breakfast.  She had fun playing dress up and eating her Cheerios!

Before we could stop her, Kaisa had dumped her entire box of Fruity Cheerios all over the floor one morning.  Don’t worry…we made her help us pick them up. :)

I took this picture this morning.  This is what Kaisa’s hair looks like the morning after pigtails.  Hillarious!  Isn’t she so cute?