Can you read me now?

Alternately Titled: Being an April Fool is no joke.

How does this blog post look?
Spiffy?
Way cooler than before?
Like a few hundred bucks?
It should.
I'm writing to you from my new super-duper HP Pavilion dv7 "Entertainment PC" laptop with AMD Turion x2 ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics wifi certified windows vista lightscribe direct disc labeling sms premium sound mediasmart camera built in and a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.

And, yes. I just read all of that right off the label stuck to my new laptop. (Well, except the compass thing, but you already knew that.)

And, nope. I have no idea what 90% of it means.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

My old laptop was going down. Fast. It was around 3 years old. I used it daily. It stayed on most of the time. It was way bogged down with pictures and web graphics and games and all the other stuff you're not supposed to save on your laptop. I knew it was coming. I was just hoping to postpone shelling out the Benjies for a new one. Say, for about 3 more years. Unfortunately it had other ideas.

On Tuesday, in preparation for the big scary April Fool's virus (that seems to happen every year with lots of pomp and circumstance but no delivery), I decided to spend the evening cleaning up my laptop, updating all my virus protection, etc. etc. This included downloading CCleaner to clean off a REALLY slow running low memory hard drive. I'll save you all the blah-blah-blah, but ultimately CCleaner removed some Windows registry items and upon reboot gave me THE BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH (BSoD). So I spent all of April 1st - like a fool - trying to fix it myself. I'll save you all of the wailing, crying and gnashing of teeth. And that was just from my husband for living with me during this time.

Day 2 of BSoD: We took my laptop into some great computer guys who tried to revive old lappy for not one, not two, but three days.

THREE DAYS.
That would be over four days of no laptop.
No work.
Under a work deadline.

Now?
Lappy's dead (apparently - and shock of no shocks - there were a multitude of other problems, too). OK, well, not really DEAD (Lappy still boots up), but severely wounded beyond repair.

So here we are.
A new computer.
Something that would be fun and exciting for most people.
Something that's more like water torture for me.

It's been lots of fun at my house. (Scratch that...I've been loads of fun.)

So, tell me.
Can you read me now?