I am a celebrity!

So I am already famous here in Abilene. Since I got a travel grant from the Eisenhower library, they took my picture when I was receiving the check. Anyway, I didn't know it, but they printed the picture in the local paper. Then Sunday, when I was visiting the Greyhound Hall of Fame, the lady working there recognized me from the paper! Crazy!!!! I am a star!!! And today a volunteer at the Archives recognized me (granted this one makes more sense in that I was in the archives at the time)! And then my hotel called me and said they found a room for me for Thursday night (I had been bumped due to the dog race) so I don't have to go to Salina. They must have realized that keeping a star like me around would be good for business.

So I had a nice weekend. On Saturday, I went to Salina (a bustling metropolis of 45,000) and saw "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" at the mall. It was cute - good Saturday afternoon movie. I also got some new shoes at Payless shoe source because I am a big spender!! (actually, they are very cute fake patent leather red ballet flats). I think that Saturday was prom night in Salina because there were all these girls at the mall in formal dresses, many getting their hair done. I always did things in the opposite order, hair then dress, but far be it from me to question Kansas prom procedure. I totally wished I had my camera to get some pictures of all these high schoolers in formal dresses and tuxes sitting, with horrible posture, around the mall fountain in front of JC Penney's.

And then on Monday the shit hit the fan. AGAIN. I am in the archives = computer works. I get to hotel = computer will not boot up. It keeps running through this startup repair that, conveniently, does not actually repair anything (though does ask me if I want to send info about the problem to microsoft to help other customers). So I call Dell (fortunately, this computer is all warrantied up the wazoo). First guy has me run checkdisk, which has been my go to in the past. No go. Still won't start. I call back. We try restore to an earlier point in time. No go. So finally I had to do a factory image restore which deletes all your personal data. Awesome. Thank God I had backed up Saturday morning, so I only lost a day of notes from the archives. But still, it sucked. I don't know what is up with the computer, especially since I had JUST gotten a new hard drive for it. I downloaded the service pack for Vista that just came out, hopefully that will help. In this snafu, however, I lost all the pics I took of abilene, including the greyhound hall of fame and I am not going back. So no greyhound skeletons and mechanical hare runner thingies for you!