Fridays and Hard Drives

Grace has officially made it through her first week (although only a partial week) of first grade. I think she likes it just as much as she liked kindergarten last year except she did say tonight when I was putting her to bed that she hopes she isn't so tired at the end of the school day next week. I told her she'd get used to it pretty quickly. It is a big difference as kindergarten was only about 3 hours and now she's in school for about 7.

Now tomorrow she has gymnastics at 8am so she'll be getting up at the same time as all week for school. But that's for 3 hours, not 7.

Hold on, watching the shuttle launch...

Discovery (STS-128) made it up tonight. Looks cool at night.

Anyway, back to blogging. So you might be wondering what Grace may have brought home with her in her backpack. You would be right if you thought that she still has pretty much everything in her backpack. She took out her 3-ring binder today, but she still has 22 glue sticks, markers, pencils, all kinds of stuff in there. She says she just forgets to take it out and that she doesn't want to take it home with her every day even though she has been doing that. Hopefully Monday we will see better results with this.

She had what they call "Buddies" today. I'm still not really certain what it is but it has to do with 3rd graders and them getting together and it just so happens that the 3rd graders they are teamed up with include our next-door neighbor. So she says she'll get to be teamed up with him. That's pretty cool. She also had art today and I can tell she enjoyed that because she has some marker on her forehead and all over her hands. She's not the neatest kid, but she enjoys what she does. I do really think she enjoys art because when she came home she started on some art project of her own with a bookmark we picked up at the library the other day that you're supposed to color yourself.

Riley keeps waking up each morning as Grace isn't the quietest kid either. I don't want us to have to tip-toe around the baby when she's sleeping so honestly I don't mind her making noise but for some reason she keeps waking up pretty early. And that would be alright too as she doesn't need to sleep until some set time each morning but if she gets up too early then her nap schedule won't really work. Honestly she hasn't really been on a wonderful nap schedule yet as she is usually just taking one long nap. Today since she got up fairly early I put her down for her nap early and she almost slept until Grace got home. So this would be alright too but she can't stay up from 1:30 until bedtime. That's just entirely too long. She was acting sleepy around 4:30 so I put her down again and she got a little nap it before Julie got home, but it wasn't a normal nap. Maybe I'll have to start getting her up from the first nap if she sleeps too long so we can split them up better.

But then we run into problems if we aren't home. It's always give and take like this. If we aren't home she pretty much just doesn't take a nap although she will sleep in the car typically. So if we aren't home then she would generally only get one nap anyway and it would be good for her if that were as long as possible. Oh who knows, we'll get that all figured out as time goes on.

So if you looked at the subject of this post you'll notice more computer related stuff. Can I just say before I start this part that Western Digital drives from my personal experience fail and pretty much always before you would expect.

When I bought my HP desktop last year I had a 400 GB Western Digital hard drive that I just transferred over to use as my main drive and used the larger drive that came with the computer for storage. It started to act funny so I took it out and put in a 500 GB Western Digital hard drive I had to preempt any problems that may have happened. Several months later the 500 GB drive dies so I buy a brand new 640 GB Western Digital hard drive to use for my main drive. In less than a month I think it failed. So now I have 3 drives (all in warranty) that have failed. Thank goodness they are under warranty, but honestly how does a person go through 3 hard drives in one and a half years? I'm starting to think this darned HP is cursed. I'd just like to burn this thing.

So anyway I go on the Western Digital website and find out that the 500 GB hard drive's warranty is expired unless I can prove when I purchased it. They go by manufacture date unless you have your receipt to show when it was actually purchased. Well I do have the receipt so when I put that information in, I only had a few weeks of warrantly left. So I sent that one out on August 17 and they received it on the 21st of August. They mailed the replacement drive on the 25th and I received it today. The only problem is I have to do this two more times but at least I'll get 3 new drives. All I can say is to ensure you backup your system regularly. Luckily I have been except when I lost the 500 GB hard drive I did lose 2 months worth of emails. But it could be much worse.

Does this mean you shouldn't buy Western Digital hard drives? I don't think so. Just keep your data backed up and pray it doesn't die after the warranty period is over.