Monthly Archives: August 2012

First Week of School? Blue Screen of Death…

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Every day this week my computer at work greeted me with the ominous message above. The photo doesn’t do it justice, since you might not be able to see such flavorful sentences as “Collecting data for crash dump”, “Initializing disk for crash dump”, and “Beginning dump of physical memory”. Any time you see the word DUMP on your computer screen it’s not a good thing. Seeing the word DUMP half a dozen times, you’ve gone from bad to worse. Lucky for me, rebooting temporarily solves the problem, until this beast of a machine decides to start dumping while I’m working.

Of course this being the first week of a brand new college semester, did not help the situation.

*sigh*

At home, I am blessed to have a Macbook Pro who greets me every day with a heartfelt chime and an eagerness to get the job done. You see even when the PC in my office at school is working, it takes so long to boot up I can go to the copy room and back before I have access to a cursor. Coffee? Sure. Plenty of time.

The Mac? He’s ready, willing and able the moment I pop his lid and press ON . . . and I love him for it.

Now if someone could invent a remote start for the PC (like some folks have for their cars) so it’s all warmed up by the time I climb two flights of stairs… Or maybe the rest of the world, including my college, could just switch over to Apple computers and we could stop this nonsense.

Photo by Karin Blaski 8/20/12

What’s to Like About Rockford…

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My family is considering moving to North Carolina in the not too distant future and I have mixed emotions about it. When I think of NC I think of mountains and beaches, southern hospitality and northern seasons, more manageable winters and fewer summer insects, and I’m ready to high-tail it out of Illinois. Then I see the Phlox blooming in my garden, have a neighbor over for a backyard bonfire, hear my children rave about their school and my roots sink further into the Rockford ground.

My husband says, don’t forget Rockford’s stats: the highest unemployment in the state, highest crime rate, highest high school dropout rate…

I say, but I love my super aggravating/rewarding job…

He reminds me of when my minivan gets stuck at the top of the entrance road to my son’s school in the wintertime and other parents have to get out of their cars to push me…

I remind him of some of our favorite restaurants, the Sinissippi Light Show every Christmas, how much we love our church family…

We go back and forth. I waffle. But for the time being, we stay.

On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to like about Rockford, IL. In fact, lots of Rockfordians are “as grumpy as a cat caught in an empty fish barrel,” says the man who works at Kelly’s Mobil. So I thought, I’ll use this blog to remind me why I want to stay. I’ll create a running series entitled, “What’s to Like About Rockford” and once a month I’ll post something positive about the city and surrounding neighborhoods where I live, work and play. That’s only 12 posts a year. Surely, I can do this.

Suggestions welcome!

Photo by Karin Blaski, 8/3/2012