Weekend Review: The Good, The Bad, and The Retail Therapy:)

This weekend started rough.  While taking pictures of our fall front porch, my camera displayed an error message pertaining to the need to reformat my SD card.  You know, the same SD card that has nearly 8 GB of family and blog pictures on it that I've never backed up on a computer.  It's the SD card that I've been using since mid-late August.  Two months of photos = hundreds and hundreds of images.  The pictures I worried about most were the pumpkin picking images, Lucky's birthday photos, Fall fun pictures at Gram and Gramps.  The videos of the kids through this time.  Ahhh!!

I got all panicked when I read the error message and my hands got fumbly and then my camera hit the concrete and broke.  I didn't mind having a broken camera (Even though I have a nice Canon DSLR, I predominantly use a Nikon Coolpix camera that we picked up a couple years ago for about $50 or so on sale.), as long as I got those pictures back.  I stayed up until 1 a.m. researching and downloading several free SD Card Recovery Programs to no avail.  Images = Gonezo.

In terms of blogging, usually this loss wouldn't be too big of a deal because I blog in real time.  I complete a project and blog about it within a few days of completing the project.  As I've posted here and here, however, this particular time was different.  We have so many projects that we've just wrapped up that I could write blog posts for at least a month.  Maybe more.  Now, many of those posts will not have proper 'before' images.  Insert huge sad face here.  I'll be doing some digging for 'before' pictures on older photo files, BUT that's going to take time.

Let me wrap this whole thing up for you with some lessons I learned regarding this experience:

1.  Always back up photos at least weekly.  I hadn't been doing this because our desktop computer is spotty at reading photo cards, and I wrongly assumed that my net book didn't have enough memory to handle all those images.  My computer savvy husband has recently informed me otherwise.  ***IF you have important pictures on your camera card, stop reading this post and back up your pictures NOW!!  You can thank me later:).

2.  TGFB = Thank Goodness For Blogging.  I use the best images in my opinion for the blog, so I have lots of my favorite pictures saved on my blog.  My blog, also got backed up on Friday as well.  I'll be spending time this week copying over pictures from the blog to my computer picture folder as well.  I figure the more places I save them, the better.

Now here's a question for you.  What would you do at 1 a.m. after learning that 2 months of important pictures have been erased?  Want to know what I did?  I engaged in some good old fashioned retail therapy.  I don't really support shopping as a form of a distraction, but I think lots of people do it, myself included.  I didn't need to shop for a new camera since I was able to fix mine with duct tape (what can't that stuff do?), but I did give myself a budget of $15 so I wouldn't get carried away.

Here's what I bought:

I used a coupon code found on this post and scored a FREE (free shipping too!) Veggie Tales DVD.

via

I also did this deal and scored the sweater I was eyeing at Target plus a pair of jeans for $2 less than the sweater cost alone at the store.  My total = $13.  And that includes shipping to my home!

via

Total: $13 for a DVD, pair of jeans and sweater all shipped to my home!  Not bad.

As for the rest of the weekend, we were busy!  We finished up our very last painting projects, and we brought in lots of new furniture.  We rearranged rooms and spaces.  

We had a family movie night with pizza!  (No pictures of this because I was still trying to recover my images at this point.  The kids were being so cute though!)

We shopped for our Halloween Costumes and spent time putting them together....we're almost done:

We finally finished up caulking our front step using concrete caulk (icky stuff) and sand to mask the grey caulk color:

We gathered doll house gear and we'll start work on it soon:

We went on a date night to a wonderful new restaurant and enjoyed calamari and beer.  We made our typical post date trip to Target and found these Missoni boots on clearance for $6.26 (75% off):

Missoni clearance is starting!  I think these boots went early and fast because they were marked 'online only' on the clearance tag.  I'm betting 'online only' items that were returned at the store are clearing out now.  I expect more clearance soon, although after reading this post, I'll be waiting for 75% off prices before I consider buying much of anything else from the line.  

And we made some bones using this recipe from Disney Family Fun Magazine:

And these ingredients:

Mini marshmallows, pretzel sticks and white melting chips (found at Walmart in the Halloween section)

Here is what we gobbled up:

These may be our second round of bones.  The salty-sweet combo is great (especially when frozen) and we gobbled up our first batch.  The pictures I took of our first batch got gobbled up during my 8 GB photo card disaster, so we used the opportunity to try it again!  They were just as good the second time.  Gobble.  Gobble.  Can you tell I'm looking forward to turkey day festivities?

All in all, a pretty good weekend!  Hope you all had a great weekend too!  

P.S. Bill is pretty excited about this:

Our garage is for cars again!  Just in time for the cold!!