Just a reminder that entries for the Carnival of Homeschooling are due Monday evening.

Please send in your submissions via the form at BlogCarnival.

And a lesson for me:  Don’t whine.

Computer issues are annoying.  You do not really realize how much you use the computer throughout the day until that luxury is not available.  How many times do I look up a recipe?  Print off an activity?  Look up the answer to some question the kids ask me?  Quite a bit, it seems.  Now that I noticed every time that I was not able to take advantage of this instant resource for everything imaginable.

I am happy that it doesn’t look like we lost anything of any real importance.  Although I cannot currently access them, I think we even still have all our pictures.  They show on the drive, but until we reinstall the program they are associated with, we cannot view them.  But I lost my bookmarks.

My bookmarks have been an ongoing project and I had quite a number of them collected.  Links to some of my children’s favorite sites, activities and printables for school and all the research I have been doing for our whaling project among other things.  All gone.

I took two hours tracking down the most important of them and reorganizing my bookmarks so that everything I needed would be available when I needed it.  I even sacrificed the time I normally spend on blog related activities to get this together so our homeschooling days would run a little more smoothly.  It was amazing how much better I felt just having my bookmarks back.

And so, of course, my husband decided that we don’t really need FireFox anymore and deleted it.  Just like that, all of my bookmarks were gone again.  And all the petty frustrations which go along with computer issues suddenly, in that instant, didn’t seem so petty any more.  I was angry.

And although I mostly just talked to the teapot about my frustrations, I think I went on about it for a good twenty minutes.  I think the teapot now knows more about my twelve years of marriage than a teapot should, but at least all it can pass along is that whistle.

At any rate, I finally got over it.  And last night my husband even reinstalled Firefox which I am happy to say did not elicit the growl I felt like expressing over the senseless loss of all my bookmarks.

So this evening, too, was wasted tracking down bookmarks.  Argh.  But now when I get frustrated, I’m going to click my bookmark to the University of Washington Libraries.  Because I thought I had all I needed for my whaling unit in my bookmarks before I lost them all.  Again.  So I never would have found these 396 images which are all in the public domain.  Now at least my children will have a selection to choose from in illustrating their work, and I will not have to worry about copyright issues if I choose to share pictures of their work on my blog.

It is not a great comfort, but if it is the little things that seem to get me the most frustrated, I am determined to let it be the little things which bring me the most satisfaction.  Hmm…isn’t this a nice picture?

 Courtesy of the Fresh Water and Marine Image Bank.