"The Frustration Mounts..."

But Mike, you're never frustrated...or worried...or remorseful.

Well, true.

But something has changed, and it's got me all kinds of bugged.

My computer...all nine years of it...which was letting me make some great DVDs with the super-bargains I got on a DVD burner internal drive and a 1TB hard drive, now, all of a sudden, has decided that an error message should pop up right in the middle of making a DVD and...Windows Media Player has also decided that I can hear the movies I have, but not see them. Keeps saying a codec is missing. Literally all of a sudden! Now I'm not about to throw myself off a cliff because of all this, mind you. Not by my choice, but because there literally are no cliffs in Arlington. It's all flat! But man, it really irks me that I have everything I need to make some great memories for all of us and I'm like stuck in the road and am powerless. I went to Best Buy today to price DVD recording software because that may be the problem, but of course, everything they had had much higher system requirements then what I have. There's a slim chance it would work, but if it doesn't, I can't return it if it's opened. I'm hoping download.com will have something I can use. At the very least, I can still edit movies together to make what I want and then save the actual file on a DVD. I tried that and that works no problem. But man...the frustration mounts, ya know?

Emmy starts school next Monday. I dare say, she is looking forward to it! I know we are. This is one of those times where I really wish one of us could stay home with her and Zach during the summer. There are all of these great things that the city does like movie camp and summer reading club just to name a few, and she can't do any of them. Not that she was miserable this summer, mind you. We had a great vacation, plus she got to hang out with her cuz and go to a couple of really great YMCA camps, plus, she gets to go to space camp in about a month plus she is having her birthday slumber party next weekend. Man, her birthday this year seemed to be pretty time-consuming! Who does she think she is, me? :)

Wish me luck as I attempt to figure out the happy medium for my computer. I know I can figure out how to do everything I want. Even if I have to re-install XP again. Don't really wanna do that, but...sometimes, the hard choices have to be made, right?