Oh, I love a rainy night

Wow, what a day it's been.  It started raining last night around 10 and it rained hard.  I love sleeping in hard rain, so needless to say, I promptly fell asleep on the couch while watching ABC Family's second night of their 4-day Harry Potter weekend.  Yes, that means you can still catch it for the rest of the day today AND tomorrow if you've missed it so far.  Try to contain yourself. 

Obviously that means I woke up completely rested this morning around 8:45.  L was still sleeping soundly, so I decided to take my book and finish it from one of my favorite spots: the armchair in our study.  Down the hall I trekked, climbed into the chair, covered myself up with the blanket, and tried to turn on the TV for a little background noise (I'm that girl who needs background noise to read).  The remote wouldn't turn on the TV, so I looked at the cable box and of course it had some kind of weird error message.  "No worries," I thought, figuring the cable got knocked out with the storm and I simply turned on the DVD player.  New Moon happened to be in there, so you know, a little eye candy in case the book got boring in the last 30 pages.  I opened my book and moments later, I heard a weird noise.  Almost like a drop of water hitting hard plastic.  I looked up and sure enough, a drop of water was rolling down Edward Cullen's face.  And not in the movie.  This was on the TV.  My focus shifted up and saw that apparently we have a leak in our roof that happened to be causing water to drip directly down on to the TV and the cable box it sits on.  SUPER.  I jumped up to get paper towels to wipe up the water (luckily it looked like the leak hadn't been going for too long) and move the TV and cable box to a dry area.  Then I took off to find some kind of make-shift buckets.  Several towels, an ice bucket, a big vase, and two jug coolers did the trick.  The clean-up actually took a lot longer than you'd think because I thought it was just one spot dripping and then I kept finding more and more (water is basically coming in where the crown molding meets the top of some built-in bookshelves and as the water came in, it either rolled straight down or off to either side and then down the sides of the bookcase- whatever, use your imagination) and therefore having to get more towels and continually find more containers to collect the accumulating water. 

After that, I took a picture with my camera of everything so we could show our landlord what was going on and went to upload it to my computer.  I opened it up and saw the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.  This is sort of a recurring thing with my computer; it loves to go through phases where it won't start up and it needs to run diagnostics for like an hour to reset itself and then it works just fine for a couple of weeks before needing to rinse and repeat.  After like 4 rounds of this, it usually simmers down for a few months before the cycle starts again.  So far it's run diagnostics three times today, all with no avail.  I'm sure it didn't help that while it was running them the first time, I didn't realize the power cord had come unplugged and that it was just running on the battery, which wasn't fully charged, so of course it shut down mid-run. 

During all of this, I also decided to try and reset the cable box to no avail.  Just kept getting weird error messages. Since I obviously couldn't upload the pictures from my camera to my computer, I decided to take pictures with my phone.  That worked as far as sending them to our landlord, but I'm on L's desktop computer right now and even though I downloaded the pics from my email, his stupid computer won't let me upload them for Show and Tell for you.  Grrr. 

All of this was before I'd been awake for an hour.  Fun way to start a Saturday, no?  Also fun to explain all of that to your husband literally as soon as he opens his eyes.  At least the leak was under control.  He'll work on my computer at some point over the weekend.  I'm just hoping I didn't potentially lose like 6 years' worth of pictures... fingers crossed that I can get it to work long enough to recover them and save them to a back-up disc or jump drive!  I've already been lucky once this week and gotten a camera to come back from the dead, so here's hoping I can repeat it with my computer, too.

The good news of the day:  the rain has stopped and so has the leak has.  L just got up in the attic to see if he could spot where the leak in the roof was and everything is totally dry.  No idea what's going on there.  L and I had a late breakfast and ran a couple of errands and left the cable box unplugged so it could dry out for a while.  Good news: the cable box is working again, so everyone can relax knowing that I can watch Harry Potter's adventures all weekend from my favorite chair. 

On a side note, L was introduced to Sur La Table during our errand-running and is now a big fan, but that's another story.