ILONA ANDREWS

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author

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Birthday Fun

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Yesterday was my birthday. Gordon bought me all sorts of coloring loot and Kid 1 got me flowers. Kid 2, who is in New York, wished me happy birthday.

Also my computer’s mother board quit. The PC froze in the middle of something, which it had never done before; I restarted and ran straight into the dreaded no video output. Light are on, fans are on, nobody home.

Did a hard restart. Held down the power button to drain the residual power. Nope.

Turned everything off, drained residual power, checked RAM one by one. Nope.

Removed video card, tried onboard video. Nope.

Removed the battery to reset CMOS. Nope.

Tried a different power supply. Nope.

Realized I hadn’t heard any diagnostic codes. Removed all RAM, restarted… and no beep. Without RAM, the motherboard should beep continuously. It didn’t. It might mean there is no beeper is installed, but a quick search told me my model should have had one, so it is likely the motherboard.

So we took the PC to Best Buy. The iBuyPower unit is less than a year old. We bought it in March. We get to Best Buy’s customer service, explain the problem, and the customer service dude says, “No problem. We are not going to fix it. We will just replace the whole thing. Go get a different one.”

So we went to go and get the different one, but they didn’t have that particular model in the store. So I picked out BB953, which has slightly higher specs and liquid cooling and is identical to Gordon’s PC.

We bring it to the counter. Everything is proceeding as planned, until the customer service dude says, “We can’t see it to you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Let me call the corporate.”

Fifteen minutes later it is determined that iBuyPower has issued new barcodes for that particular model, and until every Best Buy store nationwide sticks all the stickers in the right spot, none of the units can be sold.

Bummer.

I ended up picking out an air-cooled system that was slightly lower on specs than the previous PC, but at that point, we had no choice. I need a working PC. I have a working computer again – yay! – and my backups made sure that after an hour of tinkering, all my programs are loaded, all my cloud services are synced, my bookmarks are back in Chrome, so I am good to go. 🙂

Then we came home, and my Dobbie decided to have a bout of sickness. She laid on her pillow, refused to get up, and looked mostly dead. She has drastically improved by the evening and is back to her old safe today, so it must’ve been a stomach or some other weird bug. She is a senior dog, so we are used to slight sickness that comes and goes. So we dodged a bullet there.

Despite these potentially disastrous things, I had a lovely birthday. It was laid back and fun and I got to do all of my favorite things, including knitting and playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

Today is back to work day. 🙂

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Comments

  5. HAPPY BIRTHDAY AS YOU LEAD US INTO A
    HAPPY NEW YEAR 2019 !!!

    As one of the Author Lords, the year is yours to rule!
    Party on ! Live on…. WISHING you many, many more !

  7. Happy birthday to you! Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is amazing! (I’m one trophy away from platinum, but that damned pirate questline is glitched so I can’t finish on my main save 🙁 )

  9. Happy Birthday Ilona!!

    So round about the beginning of December, I lost my Kindle. So my Christmas present was a new Kindle. I’ve been nursing a dying battery on my phone for several months now. Starting the week after Christmas, it commenced with dying all the way. So I also got a new phone for Christmas (at an excellent price for an iPhone 8 through our provider, but an excellent price still = 125€). I’m extra glad from a financial point of view that we didn’t spend the extra 100€ to get my new Kindle with 4G. I’m still unhappy that I lost my older model that HAD 3G. Now I’d better load up on WiFi before I head out for the day, and no changing my mind when upon finishing whatever I was reading when I left the house puts me in a mood to read something else.

    /first world problems. (Mine, not yours. Your job is the computer. Also, that bar code thing is up there with the stupidest excuses I’ve ever hear from a company trying to screw you out of your warranty).

      • agreed! A “wrong” barcode and needs to be located in a specific place….such a load of crap! An insult to anyone with a brain. And we’re supposedly doing “better” and are “smarter” with things now “easier” than ever before because of technology. Yeah, right, unless you still have obviously ignorant humans involved.

  10. Happy New Year, and Happy Birthday! Glad to hear you had a nice day and that yarn was involved. 🙂

  14. Happy birthday, Ilona!

    I finished Odyssey two days ago and I was genuinely sad it’s over. I’m having AC blues now.

  16. Happy Birthday! Glad you enjoyed your day, despite minor bumps. Mine was the 20th of December and Hubby’s is Jan. 5th. We like to have relaxed days as well. Mine is usually napping, intermittent reading and not eating food that I prepared. His is usually family video gaming time and steak for dinner.
    Happy New Year to everyone as well.

  19. Woot! 🙂
    Happy Birthday!

    I’m glad you at least got up and running with the new computer… though that was a lousy excuse from the tech 🙁

    Keep cool!
    TD

  21. Happy Birthday, happy to hear it was an enjoyable one! Hopefully all the computer issues have been resolved for at least six months, you need time to finish the next masterpiece!

  23. I was wondering if you guys could update your release schedule for 2019? I know things got pushed back when you were sick so the schedule had to be revised. Please understand I very much appreciate how prolific you guys are, I’m just curious and looking forward to some good story telling. Thanks for everything and again happy New Year and Happy Birthday.

  24. Glad you had a wonderful birthday, despite the computer death, and that you are back up and running. Hope you have a happy, fun, and profitable 2019 🙂

  26. Happy Birthday! It sounds like you had a nice day. May every day continue to inspire and delight you.

  28. A belated happy birthday, glad the minor hassles couldn’t spoil it for you and I hope 2019 is wonderful! My birthday (in December) was spent walking in the woods, for work if you can believe it, so very enjoyable. Enjoy the coloring stuff, I really love doing coloring art. I give a lot of my favorites away, and then end up missing them!

  31. Yes that’s right (buffs nails) all the best people are born in January 😉 !!
    Sorry to hear u got to touch but not buy the liquid cooled tech (“but, but, it’s right there!). Good 2 hear u are back up & running! Happy color-dyeing birthday!!!

    • I. Laughed. So. Hard.
      Thanks for this, the stereotypes were spot on and brilliant, and very much still relevant!

  35. A very merry unbirthday to you! I was thinking about you this morning as I rode the
    airport shuttle in Atlanta. It was pouring rain and I got to trying to remember if you’d
    ever included a bucketing rain in any to the KD books. I don’t think so but I’ve now got this picture in my head of Kate arriving home, drenched and riding Cuddles who is insisting on trotting. 🙂

  36. My birthday is 29th December. I had lunch with friends and family. In the evening friends and family came around for drinks nibbles and more talking. A lovely day

  37. So glad you had a great birthday you certainly deserved it! Also glad to hear from your activities that your hands are much better…yea…… You are able to color, knit and play computer games again. I was VERY impressed by all the diagnostic s you were able to do in your computer! Wow just wow!

  38. Happy belated birthday!
    Wishing you the very best for the coming year, especially health, happiness, and many, many ideas (lol)!
    Blessings!

  39. Happy belated birthday. Back to work on Monday after two perfect weeks of gluttony and sloth. Looking forward to an amazing 2019 and some amazing books for my library. I hope your and your family’s year is happy healthy and wealthy.

  43. Whew! So glad after all that it ended on a positive note. I was terrified, yes, terrified you lost all your work in the initial big fry down. I should have known you would have it all backed up. Equally glad and relieved Dobbie bounced back.

    I’m glad you were able to spend some chosen leisure time doing what you like to do. That alone is cause for happiness.

    A belated Birthday hug is coming your way.

  44. Belated happy birthday Ilona! So glad your birthday was not humdrum and boring. Especially glad that your Dobie started feeling better.

  45. Happy Belated Birthday, Ilona! ?????
    Glad everything turned out ok, and Dobbie is doing better. ?✨?

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