Thanksgiving Weekend Catch Up

I’m back in business with Internet at home. However, we had to buy a new computer. Turns out our Compaq wasn’t upgradeable, even though on a big red sticker on the front of it read that it was upgradeable and expandable. Liars.

The reason for this mess was Microsoft, of course. MSN stopped providing DSL service in our area and suggested Yahoo. I thought, sure why not. Yahoo sent me their stuff but when I put in the installation cd, it said we didn’t have enough RAM. Okay fine, we’ll upgrade our RAM. Then we found out the everything in the computer is proprietary with Compaq. Don’t buy a Compaq. I have learned about the innards of a computer, though, and am no longer afraid to take it apart and have a look inside.

We went to Fry’s this morning to see if we could just replace the motherboard in the Compaq. Of course not! So we bought a refurbished emachine with lots of RAM, a faster processor, Windows XP, etc. The only thing it doesn’t have is a zip drive, which I didn’t realize until we were on our way home. Not a big deal since it does have a writeable cd drive.

I do have to hook the old computer back up to take my 10K word novel off the zip and put it on a floppy so I can work on it this weekend. But what else was I going to do with this long lovely weekend?!

Yes, I’m working on my novel again. Yay!! I have two drafts that have been sitting for quite a while because I thought they had lots of overlap and could be combined to make one cohesive story. I don’t have a title for it yet but I’m referring to it as “The Masterpiece”. So I tell Dave I’m going to go work on The Masterpiece. hahahahahaha!

I made my first Thanksgiving dinner ever. The previous night I brined the turkey in almost 2 gallons of water that had soy sauce, sugar, salt, cumin, allspice, fennel, 8 cloves of garlic, and several slice of fresh ginger. The free-range turkey brined for about 14 hours. I have to say, the result was delicious! The juices made such a rich, brown gravy. Oh yummy! There were only 4 of us for Thanksgiving so Dave and I will be “enjoying” leftovers for quite some time. Tomorrow I pluck most of the meat off and start the process for turkey frame soup.