Good Afternoon!

Happy Sunday to all!

I promise, I have not fallen off the face of the blogging world. I've been spending most the weekend in bed, since I have not had to be up through out the day for the kids. I am hoping that in being lazy all weekend (that's what it feels like), that I am allowing my body to heal faster.

I had Nick dig out our ancient laptop, so I can use it in the bedroom, so I have had access to the interwebs. Friday night, Nick and I were conversing online (yes, I am aware of how geeky that is, when we were only 2 rooms apart), when his cpu went nuts. He's been letting the kidlets use his computer from time to time, and one of them picked up a nasty worm. It's first function was to target and break all security programs- ad-aware, spybot, hijack-this, McAffee, etc. Each of the programs died as soon as we tried to use them.

Luckily, Mr. Nick is a techno Wizard, and knew how to handle it, so we were able to run programs needed to isolate and destroy the worm. So, fast forward to Saturday, and I'm laying in bed using the laptop, and poof- it goes nuts as well.

The laptop has not seen regular use in over a year. It was used briefly as a DVD player when I took the kids camping in June. It was used 2-3 times over the summer to stream music when I was laying out in the sun. It hasn't been turned on since August, but somehow, I had the worm. That was bad news, right there, because it meant it had hit our network.

The kids computer hadn't shown any signs of a worm, nor had my desktop, but Nick set to work getting them all scanned and fixed up. It took this laptop over 7 hours to run the program, that's how slow this machine is. It took less than an hour on my desktop (0 infected files), and about 2 hours on the kids machine (over 100 infected files, but we knew they would have some because there was a non-destructive worm we couldn't delete about a month ago, before we knew about the program we used yesterday). At the time, we were able to isolate it, just not destroy it, so it's probably certain that those 100+ files were from that worm. Could have been both, though.

The laptop had over 30 form the worm, plus close to another 40 instances of adware on it. It's running super now, though- the adware had been slowing it down tremendously. ;)

Today, we made a run to Lansing. It's a 20 minute drive, roughly, and I wasn't sure how I'd do, but I wanted to get to Michaels. I've been crafting in bed a lot- lots of felt work. I just have to sew my banner on the machine tonight or tomorrow, and that's done. Back a few days before the injury, I stopped in to Dollar Tree and got 4 red satin placemats for $.25 each on clearance. I wish I had grabbed 5, since there are 5 of us, but I was thinking in even dollar amounts, and only grabbed 4. Yesterday, I spent the day appliquing felt hearts to each of them.

Before we went to Lansing, I had Nick stop at DT for me, and I picked up a few things- including 5 placemats. They are the same, but kind of an off white satin. I'm debating whether to make 5 new Valentine placemats, or make them into Easter ones. If I can go back to DT, I'll grab 2 more white ones, and make 2 Valentine ones, and 5 Easter ones.

My way of thinking- we'll have 3 red and 2 white placemats for Valentine's Day, and I can turn 1 of the red placemats into a center mat, with more hearts on it.

At Michaels, I picked up lots of ribbon- thin satin ribbon was on sale 3/$1, so I picked up 4 of those (yeah, I know, but I thought I had 6). There was some thin organza ribbon on clearance for $.50, so I picked up 2 of those. Then, I found 3 rolls of grosgrain ribbon on clearance for $.19 each, so I got all 3 of those. They were from Christmas, but are not Christmas patterns or colors. I also picked up 1 roll of rick rack ribbon for $1 and 1 roll of lavendar flower die-cut ribbon for $1. I think both will look good for Easter.

Open stock scrapping paper was 5/$1, so I picked 5 new sheets up. Some for Valentines Day, some for the heck of it. I am going to try to Mod Podge from bed this week. ;)

I wanted dark pink felt, but they didn't have any. Instead, I picked up lavender, light blue, and light green, for Spring colors.

I also grabbed a flower stamp, and a lavender stamp pad. In the Christmas clearance, I sorted through the picks, and picked up anything red or pink and sparkly. I can use them in my Valentine's Day hurricane candle holder. Rather, my regular, clear glass hurricane candle holder I plan to use with red and pink sparkly things to make it a Valentine's Day holder.

I do not have any photos on this CPU, nor do I have a way to upload my camera to this one, so this post is photo-free.

I just wanted to give everyone an update. Didn't mean for it to get so lengthy! Tomorrow, I promise a craft post, complete with photos. Invalid's honor! I just haven't decided if it will be place mats or a LOVE banner. Guess you'll see tomorrow!