Dual Citizenship

For the past few years, our household has claimed both the PC and the Mac as places we wanted to be a part of. We have had our Mac for about 2 years now and we love it dearly for all the cool features, most of which we have absolutely no clue about. We just couldn't bear to part with our PC for the sheer comfort of Windows, Outlook, and well.......just the familiarity of what we grew up with. So, for the last few years, we have been living in two worlds with our videos and pictures in one and our files and emails in the other. We aren't the brightest when it comes to electronics around here so we probably missed all the warning signs of the imminent crash that was looming over our PC. This morning, as Travis was checking emails or going over baseball stats, the screen went blank. Then it said: SYSTEM CRASH?FILE DUMP START. Or something like that. He immediately turned off the power and called tech support, i.e. our brother-in-law, Michael. Poor guy. There are major pitfalls in being part of a large technologically unsavvy family and having serious computer programming skills. I am surprised that he answers the phone when we call. His only words of comfort were, "That's not good", in a british accent of course.

So, our dilemma was this: do we buy another PC and continue to try to co-habitate? Or do we just suck it up and finally learn how to exist solely in the Mac world? Lucky for us, we have yet another brother-in-law, Ryan, who unwisely answered our call for advice and well, HELP. He let us in on the secret of this parallels software that allows us to have our Mac and still run our Windows programs so that our immigration process will be a little less painful. Thanks to the both of you guys! After a day of mourning all that we lost, I am happy to say that most things are up and running again and I am trying not to even think about all the dumb reasons I haven't backed up our files in a long time. So all you friends of ours, let this be a lesson to you. Go out and buy an external hard drive or whatever it takes so that this doesn't happen to you next.

I worry sometimes that we have no skills of value to share with our siblings and their families. At some point they are either going to drop off all their kids for a month of baseball camp at our house or just change all their numbers so we can't bother them anymore. Or send us a gargantuan bill for all the services they have rendered in this area for the past 10+ years. But that's what families are for, right?

BTW, I did lose all of my contact info for everyone so if you don't mind sending me a quick email so at least I have that, it would be a big help. You can reach me at either sharesebeck@fuse.net or sharesebeck@gmail.com