News on the Fernandina Beach Homefront

The last week has been filled with life’s “adventures”. It has been said many times, that experience is what happens when you were expecting something else! And that pretty well sums up the last seven days.

A friend collapsed last Saturday in our home and was taken to the hospital. Sunday, we were told it was critical and he might not make it. Fortunately he improved later in the day. And while he remains in ICU, the outlook is brighter.

Then a good friend’s mother was reported to be near death, requiring the son to fly back from Colorado. Although she had been ill for some time, it is always disquieting to have life’s mortality thrown in your face when you don’t expect it.

On a less serious(?) note, both of my computers died last weekend. I’m preparing this on Margaret’s computer while she’s out shopping. My laptop has been in the process of dying and being repaired for over two months now. I return it to the repair shop; they “fix” it and return it; then within 3 days, it dies again. This time was the fourth death – I’m becoming frustrated with the probability it will never be useable again. And this is too bad because it’s less than two years old and was a “state-of-the-art” machine when I bought it. I won’t bad-mouth Toshiba although this is the latest round of problems I have experienced with their computers. Maybe I’ll go back to Dell?

Then while using my new desktop to do research on the Internet, I must have clicked on a “bad” site, because the next thing I knew, I was getting “virus” messages on the screen. Even though I had an anti-virus program installed, this one apparently slipped through. The machine is now in a local computer repair shop. I expect to lose everything on the hard-drive – which of course means reinstalling everything. More worrisome is whether or not the external hard drive with all my photos was affected. I won’t know the answer until the technician diagnoses the problem. Although I have the last two year’s photos on CD / DVD, the Photoshop processing I have labored over would be lost. Sigh…

All news is not bad, however, our local contractor has joined forces with another local company and now has a crew of eight (instead of two). We are somewhat optimistic that this will break the log-jam on our house repair(s) and we might actually see progress. Our hope and goal is that all will be finished before Thanksgiving (this year)!

Tomorrow is Margaret’s birthday. I wouldn’t want to say her age, but she will now be on the Medicare rolls and our taxpaying friends can begin help paying her medical bills and prescriptions. I thank you in advance!

We head out to Seattle next Wednesday (9th) for a visit with Shel & Lynn, then on to Harold & Connie’s, ending up at SeaTac for a couple of days with our daughter as she attends the Writer’s Conference. We head back on the 22nd for a few weeks to get ready for our fall trek.

We will spend a few days at Fort Clinch State Park beginning on August 10th and get the motor-home ready for the trip north. We should be able to head out on the 14th. The only “dead-line” is my photo class starts on 9 September in Vermont. I’ll report more on that as we progress.

I keep promising a treatise on Fort Clinch, but without my primary photo source and my “big” computer, it will have to wait. In the meantime, today’s photo is from our trip to D.C. Feb. 2008. There are many photos of the front of the White House across the lawn, but not many from the rear – which is where the primary entrance(s) are. Not a great shot, but I like to have something on the blog besides just words. Boring!

Wayne