On Sunday morning it was either the mice or the maggots or the heartbreak, but the trailer got a thorough cleaning. The beauty of living in 240 square feet is that it is easy to clean. It can still take a couple of hours to do a good job.
The mice had kept me up, they were banging around feasting on a bag of tangelos I had forgotten about in the cupboard under the sink. They crapped in my bread baking bowl. Don’t ask about the maggots. I hate them worse than just about anything. Not my fault, and the problem is solved. I'll be truly finished when I find out where the pack rat hid the pistachios.
Two hours of soap, towels, the vacuum and a bottle of 409 and I was just sitting down for a cup of coffee at 9:30 a.m., the trailer as clean as it’s been since I moved in, when the phone rang. The server was down at work. Files inaccessible.
It had been acting up. All the computers had been acting up. Gremlins. Phases of Mercury. I’ve been fighting even getting the back up drives to back up. I had just finished sending an e-mail to the office asking if the server was up, because I could not log on from here at home.
That wasn’t the only crash. Lauren came by late on Friday to say our relationship wasn’t working for her any longer. She arrived in tears, would not let me speak, did this most courageous thing most beautifully. It had become messy, ill-defined, the kids could not understand. Through her pain she organized, she compartmentalized, she's a lawyer after all, she filed me.
So even computer hell was a welcome distraction. It was soon obvious that I was over my head. Called the tech, who was at the beach with his family. My disk recovery program could not drive the ancient monitor attached to the server, he surmised with a long distance diagnosis. Most definitely a bad drive. There is a store open in Bend.
Two hours in Bend, back to the office with a new monitor, Chinese food from Safeway, four new hard drives since we had been hitting the limit on the ones we have. The trashed drive decided it would come back to life long enough for me to clone it. It’s my boot drive, I am going to have to find out why data drives are mirrored but the boot drive is not.
Even though it would not repair with my most sophisticated utility, it lasted just long enough and the data seems intact. I took the time to do some housecleaning there, too, repaired permissions, tuned it, straightened out some accumulated disorder.
The files themselves, all 100 GB had been backed up on Friday because I got lucky, or maybe not so lucky because that’s what I was doing instead of going over to Lauren’s, which was just the last straw, there had been bales of straw though, she wasn’t being unreasonable.
It was 10 p.m. when I finished the Chinese food I bought at Safeway at 2:30 thinking I would have dinner at six. The hard drive works, the server is serving, I just logged on from my hill top and it knows me.
Tomorrow I am supposed to give a speech on chaos. There's irony, there.
2 comments:
" It had become messy, ill-defined, the kids could not understand. "
Why is it that it's the kids that feel it most, are most impacted and are caught up in the most chaos? How can they understand when role models (I'm thinking there are 4 adults in this picture) make decisions that impact them for a very very long time -- if not their life. I'm hoping your speech touched on how self created chaos impacts the kids.
By using your "most sophisticated utility" you can reformat or replace hard drives when bad data is written or they crash. Is that the case for lives we touch?
The speech on chaos was about how context gives meaning to data. That without context, much of what we perceive is chaotic, that we bring order to the perception.
As for the kids, I don't know that they are the ones that feel it most, but there are many impacts on them, some bad, some good. That's just life, and life is too complicated to be able to always provide only sugar and spice, beans and rice.
As Dada, I try to give the kids a context, too, one with which to sort their world, one that includes as much love as I can cram into it, strength, resilience, laughter, music and joy.
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