What the Junk?!

I hope to sleep tonight. My house worries are over / just starting. What do I mean by that? I got a certified letter today that my house is going up for auction in January.  I have no idea how I'll be able to get anything else as I'm on disability. I will be looking into section 8 and my options. I am glad it's finally over (the worry about losing the house) but I'm SO DAMN UPSET about losing it. NEVER trust family. EVER. It's going to be hard to move the ridiculous amount of stuff I have in my house. I am just so upset. I didn't sleep a wink last night because I knew something bad was coming in the mail today about the house I just didn't know it was going to be that bad. I will survive, though. I hope. I have a friend who will help me move and said he'd rent a truck to help me, so that is a relief.  He is the one I go thrifting with and that I go to the beach with. I still can't believe this is happening. Now that I know the worse, maybe I can sleep tonight. We'll see. :(

I went to bed early last night, but it was hot in my room. I got up and turned on the fan since I'd long since taken my air conditioner out of the window. It didn't help much. It was frustrating when I really needed sleep as I'm stressed and I wanted to sleep and try to not be stressed!  When I woke up (a million times) and finally got up this morning, it was cool in my room. Ugh. I was hot under the covers, but it was cool in my room. So frustrating! At least it's not supposed to get really warm today, hopefully, my room will be cool enough to sleep tonight. I really need some sleep.  I have my writing done, but I still have my other Sunday chores to do. Boo!

I am still using the 13" MBP. I plugged in the messed-up drive. The Mac doesn't recognize it in Disk utility nor does it show on the desktop. It DOES show up if I do a search in the Terminal. I don't know how to get it to show up. I tried a few different ideas I found online, but nothing has worked yet. I will continue to try later. I need a good night's sleep. I went to bed early last night and still didn't sleep well. Also, I hurt my shoulder area somehow. I don't know if I slept wrong or what the deal is, but I can't move certain ways as it HURTS! Ugh, one more thing to deal with. ~_~;

Well, nothing has been fixed. Luckily, I have my 13" MacBook Pro to use. I'm on it now. I  just NOW gave up working on the other one. I will work on it more tomorrow, but for now, I need a break. I was able to get onto the 15" once and grab the important folders in case I have to reset from the factory. Looks like I might have to do that. I so wish I could afford a newer MacBook. I have been looking at the 2019 models. I REALLY want one of those.  I just can't afford one. It would make my life so much easier to have a newer Mac. Oh well, for now, I'll use the little one. At least I can write. That is important!  I haven't written today. Of course not, I've been trying to find solutions. I am going to write after this. Even if it's just a few lines, I will have written today. I'm so frustrated, a few lines I probably best.  I do not do my best writing when I'm stressed!  This little MacBook Pro is great and works well, but I am used to BigSur now and this is running Catalina.  Oh well, I will make due.  I am so glad I have my backup!

I am posting this from my iPad Mini because my MacBook is not acting right. It started to get weird so I restarted it. That took a lot longer than it should and then nothing wanted to work right. It’s annoying af! I have been working on since about 5 or so today. I’m tired of messing with it. I’m rebooting it one more time now and I’ll check on it again tomorrow. At least I can post to my blog with my Mini and my bluetooth keyboard! Ah!  I hate having computer issues. I’ll try again tomorrow to see if I can’t figure out the issue. I’m going to pull out the 13 in MBP and have it ready so I can search and troubleshoot. Wish me luck!

I haven't heard anything else about the house situation, but I totally screwed up my hair tonight. It's been getting ridiculously long because I haven't been to a salon since before Covid. I got irritated with it tonight and chopped it off. It's uneven and looks horrible. I was going to go to Great Clips and get it fixed (if possible) but they closed in less than 30 minutes when I got done. I'm stuck with it until tomorrow and I am not sure I can even afford to go in then. Not to mention the total embarrassment of how it looks. I can't win. :(

I actually had no plans to go to Starbucks today or to even leave the house but I got a reminder on Facebook and it said that I visited Starbucks for the first time twelve years ago, today. :) I went for my anniversary! I have been in a state of stress most of this week and weekend.  The only thing that gave me a lift was finding that Instant Pot on Friday. I may lose the only home I've ever known because I trusted my sister. It's a long story and I don't want to say ore as I'm still upset but I'm trying to keep calm. I saw a lady with realtor tags taking pictures of my house on Wednesday and I went out to ask what she was doing and all I got was 'she was taking pictures for the company' I was going to ask 'what company' but another neighbor came out and said she wanted to know that too and they lady drove off. ~_~ I have no idea what to do, I've lived here my entire life. I am disabled and I can not afford to live anywhere else. I was supposed to be allowed to live here until I die.  I am not sure what is going to happen, but I really do not want to leave here.  What I have learned from this? Don't trust family. Ever.

Okay, sorry for the depressing post. I didn't mean to spill all that out.  I haven't seen or heard anything since then and since I have no clue who that lady was with, I can't find out more info. So, if you've ever enjoyed my blog or given me a small thought, please send all the good thoughts my way. I want to stay here in my house as I was promised.

In other Sunday news, I did all my usual chores. The only thing left is to get the bed linen from the dryer and get it back on my bed.   I haven't slept well in days, obviously, but I'm hoping to be able to tonight. Fresh bed linen is so comforting and nice.

I got on a writing roll today and wrote 3550 words!  I was type, type, typing! :p I did my usual Sunday stuff, washed my hair, my bed linen, took out the trash, and put away the laundry I washed yesterday.  So, a bit of aftermath from the beach. On the way home on Wednesday, we stopped in Reidsville on our way back to go to the Goodwill.  I had not found a single Fossil handbag on the entire beach trip. Guess what I found at the Goodwill in Reidsville? Yes, a Fossil bag! lol, I love it. It's fabric and I am using it at the moment.  It's more of a summer bag. the yellow Sak bag will be back again later this year, for now, I'm using this.  I will take some pictures soon. I want to do a post-beach picture post.

Friday of this week, we went on our little thrift trip. I didn't get a lot, but I did find Fossil-branded canvas jewelry/pen roll-up.  You know I love Fossil stuff. I am not sure what I'll use it for yet. We also went on a thrift trip last week after the beach trip and I found a very cool item. It's a Brother P-touch label maker that works!  I bought some batteries to test it out and it works. I can get replacement tapes pretty cheaply so I'm very happy. I paid a whole $4.00! YAY! I love bargains like that. OH! At the same Goodwill this weekend that I found the Fossil roll up thing, I found a brand new Anker USB C to USB C cable for $1.00! It works well and it's the braided fabric kind. It's 6ft long and I love it.  I love finding bargains.

Now, for the other thing.  Yesterday I heard from my sister, nothing bad, just every time she calls I get so nervous it's bad news about the house i live in. My stomach is in knots when I hear from her. I certainly miss the days of being glad to hear from her! Anyway, I have been dying to get a newer iPad Mini as my iPad Mini 3 only has iOS 12.  It's getting slower too.  I have tried everything I could think of to get credit to get one.  Well, after talking with her, i thought of something and tried it thinking it wouldn't work. It did! I  was able to get one on the spot. BUT I knew I would have to wait for it to come. It had, 'set up your account online now' thing. So I did and got the card number and info.  I go look at the local Target and of course they have none in stock.  The Best Buy in Lynchburg VA has the one I want.  I go on there and put it in my cart thinking the car won't go through, I'll need to wait until I get the physical card. Nope, it worked and I had purchased it! @_@  I was ecstatic but also a bit concerned as I'll have to pay it each month.  

I had to drive to Lynchburg to get it. I got dressed and jumped in Goontz and left.  I got up there and it was ready so I went to the curbside pickup, got it and then pulled to the side to look to make sure it was the right one. It was and I was very happy but a bit angry at myself for buying it when I couldn't afford it.  I had seen a McDonald's and a Bojangles right outside of the city on the way up so I headed back there and got Bojangles and ate it before heading home.  I got home and backed up the old one and put all the things from it on the new one. I love it and i know I'm going to enjoy using it for years. I'm still sick on my stomach for spending so much, but I made a promise to myself to pay more than the minimum each month and not put anything else on it.

I did put one more thing on there though. After I got back to town, I went to Target's site to see if they had any First-gen Apple Pencils. I have wanted one forever.  They had one so I took the plunge and got it. I LOVE it. It's better than any of the ones I've bought in the past. Works fast and very responsive. I'm in total love.  Now, I plan to try and pay all this back as quickly as possible. I also plan to look into shipping costs and try to sell some of the Fossil bags that I've bought that I won't carry. I bought several because they were Fossil, not because I particularly liked them. I hope to sell some and make some money to put towards this bill!

Speaking of Fossil bags, I found a small yellow leather one in the Salvation Army store Friday. It's so soft and one I actually would use!  I have so many that I am hoping I can sell some and make enough each month to just pay the bill on this and have it paid off soon.  I know I can do it if I put my mind to it! 

Best Buy offered six months of Apple News for free and six months of Apple Music for free for buying it. Apple has a promotion for a year of Apple TV+! Cool beans. That made me feel a bit better about spending so much.  I already signed up for Apple TV+ and watched an episode of the Peanuts show on there! :) I hope to enjoy my free Apple TV for the year.  I will probably use the other two trials too.  I love freebies with purchases. Too bad I couldn't get two years of Apple TV. One for the iPad and one for the pencil! :p Oh well, I'm not greedy. I'm happy with what they gave me.

Wow, I think I made up for not posting in a while!  I hope to do some picture posts soon.  I'd like to share the Fossil bag and some more beach photos. OH! Some time back I picked up a case for my old iPad Mini and it didn't fit, it is for the one I just got. So, I even have a case for it without having to order one. Yay!

Yes, I was about to leave the computer and not post today.  Well, what happened? So, as I said I wrote up a big post two days ago and then didn't post it or save it to draft. D'oh!  It was about a comedy of errors when I was getting my old iPhoto files from the old Macbook to the MacBook Pro.  It took FOUR tries.  I networked the Macs to move the file over. The first attempt, my dumb ass restarted the Macbook.  On the second attempt the internet went out.  The third attempt, it was almost done (as it was the first time) and I noticed the MacBook wasn't charging.  What did I do? I pulled the cord out to re-seat it.  Guess what? No percentage on the battery.  I had to start over for the fourth time.  Sigh. I finally got the file moved over and got it all set up.  I had everything back to the way I wanted it. I was happy. I was still working with the 'dead' drive to try and get it to connect  Well, I foolishly restarted and tried to reset the PRAM.  Guess what?  I got the same exact error from the weekend.  I put the drive that I had the Catalina backup. I got hooked up.  I was able to access the files on the corrupt drive but couldn't get it to boot. I moved the files to the external drive (the one my friend lent me) and then I erased the internal disk and did a clone of the drive.  I then unhooked the external and booted it.  It worked. Phew. Now I just needed to get Big Sur back. That took WAY longer than it should have but I finally got it back.  So I spent a lot of time yesterday getting things back up to speed.  I finally finished up today and got everything as it should be.  If I could get that first external drive to work, that would be great. I STILL haven't heard from support! :(  I went to clone the drive with Big Sur on it to the drive I bought for the 13" MacBook Pro (I haven't used it yet because I still need a hard drive cable.) I figured I'd clone the drive on that and see if it was okay. I put it on the 13" MBP and nothing  I get that circle with a slash.  I am not going to worry about that for now. I have this one working and now I know exactly what caused both 'crashes'  I will NEVER try to reset the PRAM. AHHH!

So, as of now, I have a working computer with all my stuff.  I just need to download a few programs that I just remembered I don't have on here.  I had to do that iPhoto transfer again today. This time it only took ONE try! Whee! lol So, here is your update.  I hope you enjoyed it. I'm going to take a nice break from my computer.  My pretty snap-on case came for it today.  I'll try to remember to take a picture tomorrow.  I ordered it from China on the 3rd and it got here today. Not bad at all!  I

So Saturday, I was using my computer just fine.  I had to restart it and then that was when the problems started.  It did the exact same thing it did in November. It was showing no bootable volumes.  I thought, at least I have my Time Machine backup.  Guess what didn't work?  YUP.  The backup did not work at all and it erased the drive to do the backup so I was left with a clean drive and no backup. AHHHHHHHH!  I tried everything I could think of and worked on it all day Saturday.  I borrowed a drive from a friend and tried a few more things and nothing. I had to just stop and give it up for the night. I was tired and frustrated and nothing was being accomplished.  I didn't sleep well as you might imagine.

I woke up around 7 and decided to re-install my OS.  I knew I would have to install the long-ago version and then start updating until I could get back to Catalina.  I got that on and then tried to clone the drive and put it on the empty internal drive.  That worked fine! So, I have no idea why it died in the first place but I had Cataline. I installed a few things I needed and did the patch to get Big Sur back because by now, I was used to it by now.  That took all day on Sunday.  So, today, I got the old drive and the backup drive to get files off. The backup drive is now just null.  It lights up when I plug it into the computer but it isn't recognized.  I contacted support as it is under warranty. I'm hoping they know of some trick to make it work. I need the information that was on there. I'm still very upset that I did my backups weekly for no reason. :(

Today, I was able to get some things from my old drive, but a lot of stuff is on the 2TB drive I got in November that I can't access.  It's driving me nuts that it's just 'dead'. If my stuff can't be recovered (please let me recover it!!!) I hope they will replace the drive.  I spend the day running recovery on that old drive. It took over 5 hours and I didn't get everything I needed, but I got a lot.  The newer stuff was in the Time machine backups. It's driving me crazy to have this happen again so soon after the last incident. So, now I wait for tech support on my drive and hope I can get things going again.  This time, I think I'm going to clone the drive weekly on an external drive.  That way I know it will be backed up.  At least I truly hope so! This whole situation has been so frustraing!

I did get to write a little tonight and that was great. I haven't written in several days because of this mess.  It was nice to get those words down! 2178 words is not bad after not writing in a few days! :) I am again grateful to Evernote for being my daily writing backup site. I didn't lose any writing because of it. Thank you, Evernote!

It has been a hectic 24 hours for me.  Last night I did a write-in for NaNoWriMo and that was fun!  My computer was slowing down terribly so I went to restart it.  I was smart enough to back up the day's writing in Evernote.  Good thing I did because my hard drive failed quite spectacularly!  I went to Target and bought an external hard drive and I was able to re-install Lion (SO OLD) and then I was able to upgrade to... I think it was El Capitan and from that, I was able to install Catalina.   I currently have Scrivener, Chrome, and Evernote on here.  I am going to try to save my files from the bad hard drive, but for now I'm satisfied.  I have my first two days of NaNo writing and I can keep on.  I haven't written today because I was trying to get my MacBook Pro back to a working laptop.  It is and I hope tomorrow to get the files from the dead drive. It's there, but I'm going to have to do so work to get my files back. I'm just happy to have a working laptop for now.  The other stuff will come later.  I'm going to get my daily word count for NaNo and I'll feel so much better.  Wish me luck in getting all my files back!  

A friend asked tonight what I was writing for NaNo an now I am doubting myself.  AHHHH!  It's too late to go in another direction.  I could do another book in the zombie odyssey, but I am not ready for that right now.  I had another idea for a story a few years ago.  Now I don't know if I want to go with book two with my skaters or do something completely different. It is way too late to research something else NOW. AH!

My lawnmower is currently dead.  I need a new part for it.  I would have used my backup mower, but I didn't have long enough cords.  My backup mower is electric.  I had the right amount of cords, but one of them got messed up so now I need a new cord or a new part for my mower.  It's so frustrating as I needed to mow earlier this week. Ugh.

So, my friend got off work early today. He hadn't heard back from the dealer but decided to go anyway. We drive all the way up there and the lot is EMPTY.  The dealer is gone.  No cars, just an empty lot.  WTF?  So we call the number and it's out of service. D'oh!  There is a lot next door, so we go and look at their cars.  The guy comes out and my friend tells him that we had been looking for the lot next door and the guy says they moved.

He gives us the new address and we head there.  Nope, that isn't the place. We go back and they say that it was the correct address but the car we were looking for was not there and we still don't think that was the correct place.  He said they moved and re-branded.  I think he was full of it! We did get to visit a few Goodwill stores, so the trip wasn't totally wasted.

I found a Fossil bag and a cool Gumby mug in the Goodwill store in Roanoke.  All in all it was a frustrating day.  We drove all that way for nothing.  Oh well, the search continues.  I didn't sleep well at all last night. It was extremely late / early morning when I finally got to sleep and I woke up before my alarm at 10:30, so I'm super tired.  I hope to sleep well tonight.  

I had to keep convincing myself that it was, in fact, Friday. It doesn't seem like a Friday at all!  Oh well, it is and here I am posting.  I got my Munzee stuff today.  I got five of the big game piece Munzees, a sheet of 50 generic Munzees, and a grab bag assortment of Munzees.  It was a good haul.  I can't wait to go out and play.  I was going to do that today, but plans got changed.

My friend texted and said we'd eat and then he had a few places he wanted to go if I wanted to tag along.  I did, so I did!  We ate and then we went looking at a few houses.  He is wanting to move from his house somewhere else and is just looking at different places. I wish him luck in his search. I really liked one of the places he looked at.  It was pretty neat.  As for my own house situation, it's still uncertain, but I can't do anything about it, so I'm going to try not to worry about it.

I went out yesterday evening and got another container for my washi.  I had been able to get everything in my old containers, but everything was crammed in there pretty tight. Now I have plenty of space and I can always add more washi. As if I need more! I also got a few more things I needed for the house.  I spent a lot more than I had planned!  I still don't know how I did that.  Too much stress, I guess.

Anyway. I hope to get out and Munzee again this weekend.  Perhaps I'll do it on Sunday again.  I have many new Munzees now so I want to go deploy them.  Hopefully it won't be too horribly hot.  At least I hope it won't be!  We'll see.  As for now, I'm going to sit back and relax until bed time.  I slept poorly last night and I'm hoping to make up for that tonight.