You might not believe this, and a word about "following"

Long time blog readers may be incredulous at this (I had a hard time believing it myself), but today my laptop crashed again! Yes, the same one that did just that in February (although it has a new hard drive as a result of the February experience).

This time the crash was not of the hard drive, but the video card is apparently dying a slow death. When I booted up this morning, the screen...well, how can I describe this...wigged out. It turned all sorts of crazy colors, including a black, white and psychelic green checkerboard pattern briefly, and then filled up with blue and red lines from top to bottom. I could still see enough to work with it, though, so I bet you can figure out what I did. I backed up every bit of data on that thing: all my pictures, my email files, my writing and other documents. Shortly after that, the laptop locked up completely, so I was once again VERY thankful for my external hard drive. If you save ANYTHING to your computer and you don't have an external drive to use for backups, I can't suggest strongly enough that you run out and get one. Do it now, especially if you have the kind of laptop I have (which will remain nameless, dude). :)

Anyway, I'm up and running on the backup laptop (the one my husband usually uses), so I'll keep the blogs coming!

I had another one of those "inside most of the day" sort of days, so I don't have any interesting Ocracoke stories or new photos to share, but here's a quick FYI. A few people have commented that they would like to "follow" the blog, and then some (but not all) of the ones who commented have actually become followers. So I wanted to just clarify, in case folks were waiting for me to respond to their requests to follow, that you don't need to ask me and I don't need to do anything special (or anything at all, actually) if you want to follow the blog. Anyone can become a follower, so if you would like to do so, please go right ahead! If you're not sure what following is and would like to learn more, the official Q&A/explanation from blogspot is here.

Have a good evening...and back up your data, wherever you are...