Another crazy day. My day started with one call after another starting from the moment that I was out of bed this morning. I was on the phone continuously until well after noon and barely even got a chance to come upstairs to eat with Dominica and Liesl during the lunch hour. I spent most of the lunch period making quick, short calls as the morning and afternoon seem to be filled with long calls.
I got down to the office downstairs this morning and discovered that Dominica’s laptop had died during the night. At some point it decided to restart itself and never came back up. It had put itself into a continuous rebooting loop that never even managed to bring up Windows. Great, not what I need this week.
I tried to work on the laptop throughout the day when I had some spare time. At one point it ended up getting even worse and become so bad that it could not even power up. Argh. I ended up chatting online with HP tech support and they diagnosed the blink codes from the front panel LED for me (as I could not find the codes online anywhere) and got me back up and running. It was a very unproductive day, though.
Late this evening Liesl had a major accident. She was doing something in the dining room while I was still in the basement working and Dominica was cooking in the kitchen that resulted in her falling and hitting the dead center of her forehead extremely hard on the hard corner of the leg of one of our wooden dining room chairs. Dominica yelled down to me and I came running to find Liesl with a massive purple bump in the middle of her forehead. It was huge. I have never seen any person have a bump like that on their heads before. It was like something out of a movie. It was so big that it made her head look deformed. Surprisingly, Liesl seemed to be only minorly upset. She cried a little when it first happened but once she was sitting in a chair with me watching The Wiggles she was pretty much completely happy.
We called Liesl’s doctor and we iced her head in the meantime. Her doctored called back in about fifteen minutes and explained that the bump was exactly to be expected and that there was no cause for concern. He also told us not to ice her head as that was only to make the swelling go down faster and was not going to make it hurt any less but that she would be annoyed by the ice and that that would be the bigger problem so best to just not do it at all.
It didn’t take long before Liesl was back to her old self. At no point all night did she not look like something horrible had happened, though. She might have felt fine but it definitely looked like it had hurt a lot. Poor little girl. It is a rough age.
I stopped working after Liesl got hurt and spent the evening upstairs hanging out with her. We all watched Speedway with Elvis Presley and Nancy Sinatra which we had started the other night but only made it maybe fifteen minutes into before I got pulled away on a call. Then we watched Betsy’s Wedding with Alan Alda which is a classic of the early 90s although very few people know it. It had a good cast and was a well done film with some interesting writing but was never all that popular. It has been in my collection for a very long time.
While the movies were on Dominica worked on getting Windows Vista Business 32 reinstalled onto her laptop. That went fine but took a lot of the evening. It will be at least another day before her laptop is back into full working shape.
I got the rest of my new camera gear ordered this evening. I have a new 18-200mm Nikon VRII lens coming that will replace my two cheap zoom lenses, a 16GB SDHC card to store all of the big 12MP images and the Nikon GPS unit that attaches right on to the top of the camera so that you can just go anywhere and take all of the pictures that you want and the GPS unit makes sure that the time is right and that the geographic location is stored right in the picture for you. Perfect for travel photography! Soon everyone’s cameras will do that. It is a really great feature. Especially for those of us using services like Flickr. I also had to grab a new 72mm UV filter for the new lens. Better safe than sorry. I can’t wait to try out all of this new gear.
I had a lot to do after Dominica went to bed so I stayed up quite late tonight working on all of the odd work that I needed to catch up on. I’ve been behind much of the week and want to get caught up before tomorrow. Tomorrow evening is SpiceCorps NY in Manhattan. I have some guys from the upcoming SpiceCorps Albany group swinging through in the late afternoon to pick me up which is great. I can just ride down to the event and don’t even have to bother with the train. This will save me time, hassle and at least twelve dollars. Good deal.
Before turning in for the night I got the laptop at least back up to the point where it was able to compress movies again. So it is back to work churning out new compressions through the night. I managed to get tons more CDs done as well while I was up late. Good use of my time.
One of my big projects is preparing my presentation for the SpiceCorps event tomorrow. I am giving my open storage system talk about which is only a five minute talk or so but it is nice to be prepared with handouts and stuff. I wish that I had time to work up an entire PowerPoint presentation and have the equipment ready so that I could give a more formal talk but I just don’t have time for that nor do we have a space where that would work anyway. I expect that we are going to be pretty cramped tomorrow.