My new Atlas N Scale Genesee & Wyoming switcher, road number 45, arrived today. I got it on eBay and got a great deal on it. I collect G&W model railroad items. Hopefully someday (soon) I will be able to have a small model railroad in the basement on which I can run them.
First thing this morning I discovered that the power had gone out at dad’s house. They are having fifty-five mile an hour winds today and the temperature has really dropped from yesterday. The power was out all morning which did nothing to improve my nerves. Instead of being able to spend the morning dealing with getting the email server back up and running again I spent the morning worrying that the three servers that went down with the power outage (we exhausted the available battery backed capacity.)
Work was very, very slow today. I was very surprised how slow it was. I am quite relived that I did not go in to Warren today as I would have been more upset about the downed servers. I had done a manual backup just a few hours before the systems had gone down but with as badly as everything has been going this past week I was not well prepared for their to be any additional problems of this magnitude.
The power came back on in the early afternoon and I was able to begin checking things out. It turns out that one server, a virtualized machine, completely disappeared. Luckily it was a machine that I had just built and had not begun using yet so nothing was lost except for a few hours of initial setup. Not a big deal. All of the other machines and virtual machines were still okay.
I got an additional surprise this afternoon when the bank called and informed us that the escrow account was set up improperly and that it was not going to cover the school taxes which are already due. So now we are forced to come up with the school taxes without any warning at all (they are already slightly past due when we found out that they even existed) even after we have been paying into the escrow for several months now. I thought that the purpose of the escrow was to protect against tax surprises rather than cause them! Instead of buffering against tax issues the escrow actually created problems this time by causing us to “pay the taxes” each month and then have to pay the actual tax, in full, out of pocket even after paying into the escrow account. So we have now paid this tax twice. Nothing like making things easy.
So we paid the taxes and that was that. At least we were able to pay the taxes. It could have been quite bad. It did nothing to make me more calm after a very long and hard week, though.
Dominica put in an hour or more this morning working on getting our medical insurance dealt with. We have been having all kinds of problems and this morning our payment for Dominica and Liesl’s hospital stay was denied. The whole problem has arisen because our insurance was switched on us after having gone to the hospital. Then we got in trouble for not pre-authorizing the trip to the hospital even though we were not put on that particular insurance until after the visit was over. The whole process is insane. We also found out that since Dominica’s old job keeps switching the insurance plan that we are on (it is not us deciding these things, they keep getting forced upon us) that we have to pay the deductable amount three times! So we are not nearly as insured as it would appear that we are.
I came upstairs for dinner and took over watching Liesl for a while. Liesl has been in a crazy mood today. I wonder if it might be a result of all of the stress that we have been under this week. Maybe she senses it. She has avoided napping today almost totally. She slept less than two hours all day today. She almost dropped off many times but would always leap back to being completely awake. She also took several bottles today. She just kept eating and eating.
Liesl finally seemed to have fallen asleep at almost ten thirty tonight while Dominica and I were watched the first season ofGrace & Favour which is more well known in America as Are You Being Served? Again.
We ended up staying up pretty late tonight. It was after one in the morning when we finally headed off to bed to get some sleep. Chris and I have been trying to get an FTP transfer working between us which has been a bit of a pain. We finally got something working tonight and I kicked off a transfer of the email data so that he can work on the email restore portion while I am working on the email primary portion. The estimated transfer time for the FTP transfer of the highly compressed backup file is a measly twenty-four hours. Ha ha. Somehow I imagine the connection getting severed at some point during that transfer process. That is a pretty long time for two computers to remain connected over the Internet without any major problems. I think that we will likely have to attempt this transfer multiple times before it actually does any good.