It all started three weeks ago, just before my Chicago trip. I couldn't seem to get iTunes to work to transfer songs for my vacation onto my iPod. Then it was Mozilla, which wasn't loading like it used to. Photoshop started acting up, then when I rebooted, Tivo software stopped running. I turned off the machine and decided I'd get back to it when I had the time.

Fast-forward a few weeks to Thursday. My entire day Thursday was spent fixing viruses. I decided to finally tackle the problem on my desktop computer. The operating system was somehow corrupted, and I decided to spin up an anti-virus program on a new drive and test each of my drives against the checker. Hours later, the program was finding hundreds (and on one drive, thousands) of instances of a virus. As the day went on and I became more and more tired with the whole thing, I started retracing my steps.

It was a house call I had made. The customer was experiencing slowdowns and, upon my visit, had obviously received spyware. I made my diagnosis as needing to refresh her 98 box with a new copy of the OS. That didn't help. I then found more than 3 thousand temp files loose in her drive, and decided that a format would end all problems.

I brought her machine home, and dumped her personal files onto my C drive, wiped her drive clean, installed win98 back onto her drive, then moved her personal files back. All was fixed.

What I didn't do was virus scan, and all those files I moved off her drive were tainted. When they met my drive, they introduced themselves to my system files.

Her files: "Hi. I'm a tainted file. Here, let me give you some lovin'."
My files: "Sounds good. What do I know? Your files are pretty. Can I have more?"
Her files: "Man, you're dumb."

So that day turned out to be rough, but not as rough as my Thursday.

Dad came down on Friday after I got home from another job. The job was (surprise) working on viruses, and it pretty much capped off my week. Yay.

We were up at 4am Saturday, and left shortly thereafter. 13 hours later, we were pulling into Orange Lake. We called Mike from Jacksonville and as Dad was getting his keys, Mike walked up behind him. That was some great timing.

I've been to a lot of grocery stores in my life, but never one so crazy. Half of the world was at the Publix, because they had checked in for the week with their families. And like we did back in the day, their carts were loaded with 300 dollars worth of family food for the week and the lines were long. But not like yesterday. It was CRAZY. We waited about half an hour in line behind the shortest of 15 lines, just to get about 5 items. It sucked.

After church on Sunday, we hit the park and spent the entire day there. Waiting in line at the grocery store Saturday proved to be valuable karma, because Sunday at the Magic Kingdom, we breezed through almost every single line. Our longest wait was half an hour on the very first ride we did. From that point, not a single attraction, show, train or monorail would hold us up more than 3 or 4 minutes. It was amazing. It has never been like that. (and we've been to Disney World in just about every week of every season)

We came back to the villa when Mike and I were too tired to think. Dad had a terrific father's day at the park, and we all had a blast. We decided to take it easy on Monday and just hang around the villa.

More on that soon.