Trip to the west
Several weeks ago, I wrote about an opportunity the four oldest had to go on a multi-week trip out west with our Grandpa Arndt. At first we thought that this trip would be taking place in the near future — say, in February. Well, this morning the four oldest went out to breakfast with Grandpa, and we collectively decided that though it sounds like a tremendous trip and we are all very much looking forward to doing it, now just simply doesn’t look like a good time. It sounds as if it would be better for Grandpa if it’s postponed, and it would definitely be better for us, as all of a sudden we find ourselves in a very busy time.
This is kind of a relief, really, to have come to this decision. There are so many things to keep us busy and excited here and now, and it would be hard to break away for two or three weeks. The airing of the Montel Show is one reason that we want to make sure we stay close to home. There’s a very good chance that once the show airs, there will be other interviews/articles/stories done on the family. Also, from what we learned the last time we were on Montel, we’re likely to keep very, very busy with website-related stuff.
So I’m not sure when this trip would end up transpiring. While we were talking this morning we bounced around the idea of us all flying out to some location — say Las Vegas or Los Angeles — and then from there renting a car and driving around the west. We figured that even that would require a good 2,000 miles over the road, so you would still do plenty of driving even if you flew out west. But who knows what will end up happening. It’ll be interesting to find out, that’s for sure!
This afternoon, Paul (24, oldest brother) was having a problem with his computer. After he turned the thing off, suddenly it would no longer boot into Windows XP. It would suddenly reboot while at the Windows loading screen, and when he would try any of the fail-safe modes — the safe modes, command prompt, last-known good configuration — none of those would work. Well, that’s kind of rare that nothing will boot, because normally when you have a problem you need to boot into safe mode or go to the command prompt or something. So it was kind of scary.
I did a little bit of Googling but couldn’t really find anything related to his problem. I read on a forum somewhere someone suggesting (for a different problem) using the Windows XP CD and running the recovery console. I went and got the CD, popped it in his drive, and booted from the CD. The great thing about these CDs are even if the hard drive is completely messed up, you can still boot from the CD because the computer will attempt to boot from the CD before trying a hard drive.
Anyway, the forum idea didn’t work. But I decided to try to run CHKDSK (which is XP’s version of ScanDisk, I guess). Long story short, it worked! I let it run through the check, and all of a sudden his fine computer was up and running again. So evidently it was a pretty simple solution. I’m just thankful that I was able to find the idea to use the XP CD, because I wasn’t even thinking along those lines. With that, we conclude tonight’s lesson on why it’s important to go to Start -> Shut Down instead of pressing the power button. Every now and then, the computer will punish you!