Hey there, Kryp, I live in South Carolina. I have been doing ok. How about you?
Regarding your pics, One simple way to get them to your pc is to just email them to yourself and then dl it instead of just viewing it in email. If you pull up the shot you are interested in, you can prob get a Share option by doing a long press on it.
That usb-ms toggle function in recovery is one way to hook the phone to pc that seems pretty reliable. You could do that and navigate to where the pics are with your windows explorer, then copy or move them to a folder on your pc.
Same idea just plugging usb cable in to phone and pc and drag down the notification bar and select disk drive, done.
Then, the old faithful way of turning off phone and digging out that little micro sd card and putting it into an adapter/ card reader, attached to pc, and same story, windows explorer, navigate to it and do your thang!
Good to hear from you guy, take care! Anytime I can help, let me know!