May 11, 2009: A Monday at Dad’s

I can’t remember the last time that I was at dad’s house on a normal Monday.  A rather strange feeling.  We had hoped to have been able to have gone to the Omega Grill for breakfast this morning but there just was not enough time to do so as work was pretty busy today.

While I worked for the office from dad’s upstairs office I also worked on getting his “new” dx5150 desktop set up and ready for him to start using.  Simple work mostly involving applying tons and tons of patches and installing a bit of software that was not already installed on there.

This was a nice, relaxing day for dad and Dominica because they were able to just hang out and play with Liesl and Oreo while I worked.

We got our traditional Davis’ Farm Market pizza for a late lunch today instead of for dinner.  Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo came over to spend the afternoon with Liesl.  They visited for several hours.

While they were there I took at look at my cousin Sara’s failed external hard drive.  She has a relatively new Western Digital USB 640GB hard drive that she needs for everything and it has completely died on her.  Dad had already looked into it and as far as he could tell the drive was dead, but everyone thought that I should look at it anyway.

The drive was definitely dead but the errors that we were getting were interface related and the drive sounded just fine inside of the external case.  So with my aunt and uncle there we made the call to rip the drive open and to extract the physical drive from inside of the chassis and see what could be done with it.  Since they are just standard SATA drives mounted with USB adapters it is easy to pull a drive out of an external chassis if you can get the chassis open.

The drive came out and we plugged it in to dad’s new dx5150 and it worked perfectly.  No problems at all.  It was just the USB adapter portion of the drive that had died.  So all of Sara’s data was backed up and easily saved.  Her external drive is no more.  She will need a new one of those.

After the Richardsons left dad and Dominica made a run over to Geneseo to pick up needed supplies from Tim Horton’s.  I am completely exhausted from a lack of sleep and am starting to feel sick from it.  Dad has only half-caff coffee in the house and Dominica is desperate for Tim Horton’s coffee and donuts so they decided that it was worth making the trip.  Dominica drove so that dad could get a ride in the new BMW X3.

Thank goodness for Tim Horton’s coffee.  That really helped get me through the afternoon.

As word was wrapping up, Art and Danielle came over to visit for a few hours.  It is so weird that we see them as much as we do now since no one really sees themanymore and they are leaving for the Congo in just about ten days!  Today is actually their first day at home since the last time that we saw them.  They have been in Florida and Virginia all of this time.  They barely have any time left at home before they leave.  Only one weekend left and it is pretty much packed with appointments and speaking engagements and going away stuff.  Michael did not come over.  He is visiting family and friends.  He will see us in less than two weeks when they all come down and stay for three days before flying out.

Katie (@kweenkmatt) is in Washington, D.C. today.  She is doing a class down there.  

After the Ralstons left this evening it was back to work for me.  I am completely backed up on stuff that needs my attention so I am doing what I can to keep up with it.  This is a really tough week with all of the travel and activities.  I’ve been dreading this week for almost a month – ever since we figured out that there was going to be an entire week of being out of town without any remote chance of there being enough time for sleep.

I ended up working until around three forty in the morning.  Ugh.  No sleep for me.

I did acquire the rank of Habanero on SpiceWorks tonight which is pretty impressive.  That makes me the second highest ranked person out of something like 650,000 users.  There are three rankings higher than Habanero (which is just above Datil which is above Thai) the next being Ghost then Mace then Capsacian.  The highest person is only at Ghost and I am catching up with reckless abandon.  I figure that I am roughly a month to a month and a half away from being the top ranked user on the system and probably just two to three weeks away from achieving Ghost.  It will take a really long time for me to move to Mace, though, the steps get bigger and bigger as you go.

Tomorrow I am working from dad’s house again and then, in the evening, we will be driving out to Frankfort to spend the night there.

Leave a comment