Keeping Up With The De Oliveiras: It's Snowing!...

Well, not here anyway. Most of the country has had snow at some point over the last few days but we have been spared. Instead it's been raining or pouring or dripping in some fashion... one of the wettest Januaries we've had in a while! I think we're due to have 2 weeks worth of precipitation over the weekend.

This post has been a long time coming, believe me. The first week after we got back from Canada was filled with unpacking and jet lag, and not long after I recovered my laptop started giving me even more trouble than usual. Fortunately, my Christmas present arrived mid-week this week, but the fan on my new laptop runs continuously on high. The computer is therefore never hot, but the fan noise is kind of annoying. We called Customer service today (and the representative agreed that the fan sounds way too loud to be running normally, so at least I'm not going crazy!) and we'll be sending it in this week to be fixed, but that could mean I'm without this new computer for 2 weeks or more... I'm hoping that because I had started to clean up my old laptop to get the files I needed ready to transfer over, it will hold out long enough for me to get my new laptop back. But in the meantime I'm going to try to prepare and schedule as many posts as possible.

On the bright side of things, I do love my new laptop aside from the loud fan! I'm almost completely adjusted to the new keyboard configuration (going back to my old one is going to be fun - I'll be typing q's instead of a's for the first 10 minutes) and I'm surprised at how much I like Windows 8. As soon as this fan issue is fixed, I think this will be a great machine. Much better than the old one, which takes a good 20 minutes to start up. Carlos and I did a test the other day: we both downloaded a PDF file from the Internet and timed it to see how fast it took to download and open on my laptop and on his computer. Time it took for Carlos: 20 seconds. Time for me on my old laptop: 5 minutes. It really was time for a new machine.

So here I am, typing away on that new laptop right now. I'm optimistic that with the speed of this computer, uploading photos and setting up entries will be a snap, so keep checking back here over the next week or so for new entries about our trip to Canada in December. My plan is to schedule a post for every other day or so (yes, I have that many photos to share!)

And just to keep those of you who have been patiently (yeah right!) waiting for a new entry, here are a few photos of Aimy's first encounter with snow.