That's right - I'm back, and with an all-new font that means I have to either a) colour in my text as a means of highlighting it, or b) just accept my text looking terrible (ESPECIALLY when it comes to italics!)
I also realised that the fonts weren't working properly on mobile phones, so I fixed that too.
Never mind the fact that all my previous posts now look terrible in that exact way.
That's… LESS easily fixed, unfortunately.
Mum & Maia actually left for Vienna on the morning of Friday the 28th of February, and they spent the weekend there. Actually, I have no idea what they saw beyond "there was a church at one point".
But I had a burger and cheesy chips with bacon for dinner that night, AND I got a comedically large pack of chocolate back from the Viennese airport's duty-free shop, so I won't complain.
Then, on Monday the 3rd, Dad picked up my new backup hard drive from the locker it'd been delivered to (I knew Amazon does that, but I didn't know eBay do it as well) - but then, when it came time to start everything, we didn't have a reader for it, so I had to wait another day for a new one to be delivered.
Once that was done, it was time for me to begin my very first backup… which failed after one minute, but it said it was a "transient error" that might not come up next time, so I tried again… and it failed AGAIN. It failed repeatedly, in fact, so I knew SOMETHING was up - the only question was WHAT?
Well, it took about an hour of research, but I found out that when Dad swapped my computer over from a HDD (hard disc drive) to an SSD (solid-state drive) a few years ago, the cloning process (by which everything on the first drive was quickly copied, that is to say "cloned", over to the second) garbled the names of the drive's partitions, and THAT was what caused the backups to keep failing.
And by "garbled", I mean "one of them ended with þæ░" - THAT kind of garbled.
Fortunately, I was able to download a tool to change the names of the partitions to only use "normal" characters (I imagine it'd probably throw up an error if it tried to read anything outside Unicode's Basic Latin block) and everything proceeded smoothly - about two hours later, my very-first computer backup was complete!
I know how bad I am for never backing anything up properly before this - at least I was lucky enough to never have lost my data beforehand!
Next up would be Friday the 14th, when I filled out a form to get my medical exemption certificate renewed! That's it, though - nothing else of note happened that day.
Although I WAS surprised at just how easy it was to get everything sorted - all I needed to do was fill out the form, even though I expected I'd need to make an appointment (and I actually tried to make one too.)
The weekend, though, was Freesia Community Day in Pikmin Bloom, so Mum & I walked into town, playing the game, and had some nice treats while we were there, like lunch out and ice cream!
The ice cream was different from last time - now it's soft-serve instead of regular, scooped ice cream - but it was still nice!
In fact, I prefer this new ice cream to the old ice cream, because it tastes slightly better. Not that the old ice cream wasn't ALSO nice, though.
Monday the 17th was, of course, St Patrick's Day, so I was FINALLY able to get some use out of this Irish flag pin I've had for who knows how long.
I also volunteered the next morning, even though I wouldn't normally volunteer on a Tuesday. I had my reasons.
On Saturday the 22nd, we went up to see my grandparents again - the first time in a fair few months too, I think! While there, Mum, Maia, & I took the opportunity to go on a 45-minute walk down to a stream and back again. We ALSO all played Pikmin Bloom while doing so, because of course we did.
On Wednesday the 26th, I was met with the sudden announcement of a Nintendo Direct presentation for the very next day, so (naturally) I gave it a watch!
It didn't have anything about the Switch 2 (which they actually specified before release… not that it stopped SOME people) but there were still two game announcements that caught my attention - Rhythm Paradise Groove and Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream! They're both out next year - I'm not as guaranteed to buy Tomodachi Life as I am to buy Rhythm Paradise, but I'll just have to wait and see what happens.
And, of course, Sunday was Mother's Day, so Maia made a special breakfast - smoked salmon and scrambled egg croissants - to celebrate!
Anyway, that's all from me.
Ignore the fact that I posted this late in the day - I had an afternoon full of volunteering and it slipped my mind!
I'll be back at the same time next month - but until then, goodbye!