Weekend!
So we live in this time zone and we’re flying aaaaall the way over to *THAT* time zone.
Most of the errands have been run. We’ve done the laundry and the last load (towels) is tumbling in the dryer right now as I type this. We’ll leave a handful of dirty clothes in the hamper, but not many. Since we’re travelling with my mom as well (sigh), we’re going to be getting up at 3 in the morning in order to get to the airport approximately 3 1/2 days before the flight takes off. “We have to go through security, you know!”
The airport is smaller than most malls.
Then we get to spend a day alternating between “hurry up” and “stand in line” and “sit down for a loooooong time.”
But then we get to visit with relations. The good news is that mom gets along with Maribou’s mom and so I’m hoping to just pick up my mom and throw her at Maribou’s mom and then run off and sit on a porch somewhere.
For a week. Whew.
The big thing I want to do while I’m out there is “not be on the diet” so I’m looking forward to that. Though I admit that the local cuisine is of the sort that thinks that the qualifier “Italian” to any given dish means that the dish belongs on the “spicy” part of the menu, it will be nice to visit a place that knows how to make poutine.
Though I’ll be able to decline the “spruce beer” when it is offered.
The other big thing that I’m looking forward to is a whole week of weekend. I can’t remember the last time I had a whole week off with Maribou and we did something together. Probably the last time we went out there.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Image is “Play” by Clare Briggs. Used with permission of the Briggs estate.)
Your posts always have a line at the end that says something like, “Image is thus-and-such, used by permission.” I’ve never seen an image.
I have child centered Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon preparing for Saturday evening, a birthday party/sleepover that involves roller skates, 8 12-year-old girls, and no sleeping, work Sunday morning, and utter collapse after that.
I can’t wait for them to go back to school Monday!Report
Oh, I’m sorry. You can see it from the front page.
The image is this one:
https://ordinary-times.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/weekend2-300×235.jpgReport
Bridge this weekend. Next weekend is Bach’s St, Matthew’s Passion, which I’m really looking forward to.Report
Packing, and attempting to finish a shop project that is taking much longer than anticipated. Roll top desks are much more intricate than they appear and they appear very intricate. And on Sunday, I drive for 8 hours to look at a house I just bought via the internet.
What the? Crazy, I know. Hence the packing.Report
The only thing more fun than being Jaybird or his mother while they are going on an epic plane journey together is being WITH them as they go on an epic plane journey together. I plan to do a lot of listening to already-downloaded podcasts with headphones in.
But once we’ve gotten there, and slept, and had breakfast with the fam and driven out to the cottage and figure out who gets what room, and slept again…. I think I will have a fabulous time.
Just got to finish getting the house quasi-in-shape for the house sitter, and finish packing. *nods firmly* *goes to sleep first*Report
We are in the airport. Jay wants you all to know that he is in a very bad mood. In related news, the ticket/baggage counter is, of course, not open yet.
I’m feeling peppy and not even needing sleep, I didn’t wake up yesterday until 11 am.
Jay’s mom is parking the car.
Whee.Report
Handful of cascading failures:
The flight out of Colorado Springs had maintenance issues and we had to actually DEPLANE. (I’ve never, ever, had to deplane before. Normally they just keep us on the tarmac until they fix it.)
This caused us to miss our next flight.
Anyway, we caught a different plane (the X+1 O’Clock instead of the X O’Clock) and our 3 hour leisurely layover became a 35 minute layover and we got back on our original schedule just in time to have our luggage get lost somewhere in Boston.
But we got here.
And our luggage got here the next day.
And now we’re in a lovely little cottage with intermittent wi-fi and no cell service and we can see the ocean from the deck and the in-laws are at least a hour away.
And everybody woke up for breakfast, ate, and then retired for a nap.
Cascading successes.Report
Par tay at my house. Yall not invited. 🙂Report
Time to Celebrate.
A friend of mine bagged a bounty by beating Intel by 1%. (yes, this is impressive). So, now the people he was working with get paid (this was up in the air before).
[Coming soon to a computer near you!]Report
This weekend will see some brewing; after this Saturday I’m giving up most of my Saturdays through December with volunteer work at a local high school so I need to get some beer ready, so I’m not likely to have much other time available to pursue that hobby. I keep on telling myself “this is week I get serious about diet and exercise again,” and it keeps on not happening, but… this is the week I get serious about diet and exercise again.Report
“This weekend will see some brewing; after this Saturday I’m giving up most of my Saturdays through December with volunteer work at a local high school so I need to get some beer ready”
Now that’s a way to be the cool volunteer!!Report
What is the point of gaining wisdom in life if you can’t corrupt the young.Report
I am getting a new-to-me bedroom set and stereo and TV! My parents shut down their Manhattan apartment and my dad is in CA full time now. So I got a bunch of stuff from that apartment which is still in the more expensive than I can afford myself family.
Two b-day parties through my girlfriend.
Rosh Hashanah begins Sunday at sundown.Report
And it’s worth shipping across the whole country? That must be a real nice set, congratulations!Report
Our friends’ kid’s birthday party is potentially in the plan this evening – assuming we all check out healthwise (one of the parents is going through chemo, so we don’t want to bring plague to a house of suppressed immunity. And we have a child in first grade.)
Tomorrow our tenants move in – I don’t think that requires a whole lot of action from us, as they already got the key yesterday to start moving some boxes into the house. But it will be a big relief, and should mark a change in mental state.
Also, we might go to a corn maze with the kid’s school
The bedroom floor is almost finished! And we will be cut off from fussing with the old house as a family will be living there, so we’ll actually be stuck in the new house – we might get to set up our bed in the bedroom this weekend! (!!!)Report
Oh, and! There’s a course I will hopefully get to take through work, and the most economical option appears to be in Pasadena, in January. I swear I didn’t fiddle the numbers!
The pessimist in me suspects they’ll send me to Ottawa in February instead (the most expensive, and dreary, option) because the appearance of frugality is more important than actual frugality.Report
My wife’s new laptop is in, and trying to get the data from her old laptop has been the sweeps week episode of “FAIL”.
Let’s see — some weird firewall interaction slowed down the movement of files between old and new laptop (using PCMover just to snag profiles, documents, etc — not applications) so 70 gigs took…forever. Like 20 hours and it wasn’t done. It hadn’t completed when someone named “My kid” accidentally hit the rocker switch on the surge protector I had both laptops plugged into, and since they hit battery power they quickly went to sleep.
I fixed that, resumed the process, and went to bed. Only to have the old laptop decide to update Windows and restart, despite me turning that off, overnight.
I go to start it AGAIN, hoping to god it remembers where it was, only for the old laptop to demonstrate why it’s been so problematic and eat it’s hard drive. 2k for a recovery specialist. Nope.
So I did out the backup (from 2012, my wife has not been great about that, but she stopped using that laptop maybe six months after that backup, so we have like..95% of everything and everything we lost is…acceptable.
I get that working, start to transfer files, only to have Windows keep aborting the (ridiculously slow, since my external drive is still USB 2.0 — we only used it for her laptop, I back up online) process. I curse, move it to my PC and dig in. Windows keeps aborting the copy because real time protection flags some files. So I run a deep scan and clean out some really old java exploits lurking in the depths of the backup, while deep scanning her new laptop to make sure it hadn’t gotten old java cooties.
I finally, FINALLY, get it all moved today to my PC. Tonight I get to create a share, move it to her laptop, then move the files where they belong in the new profiles. (While full scanning my PC to make sure I didn’t get cooties to boot. I doubt it, real-time protection is great and anything nasty on her PC is 4 years old. Not exactly cutting edge to get around the scanners).
THEN, I get to go onto Mozy, download the 100+ GBs of her old desktop’s backup set to her laptop, sort out all THOSE files, delete the online backup entirely, then create her backup set on her laptop and do the initial backup.
In the end, she’ll still have lost a few years worth of data (but years she barely used the laptop), get all her old PC stuff consolidated (that thing ate itself awhile back, but she had a laptop so she didn’t care…), and everything backed up online.
And then, a week after getting her laptop, maybe she can use it.
THIS WAS POORLY PLANNED ON MY PART.Report
Oy, when machines want to be obstructionist…
Rather less epically awful, but I got a new “proper” (i.e. fanless, sold as a router, multi-antenna, offers both 2.4 and 5 GHz wifi) router for home, to replace the old PC with a humming fan that’s been serving that purpose. The new router works fine when it’s connected to a LAN port on the old router, but for some reason can’t get an IP address directly from the modem. So it works great, as long as it’s not achieving the thing I wanted to do with it.Report
Putting together a home NAT is next on my list. Luckily for my wallet, I don’t really want to do HD streaming from it, so I can get by with something a lot cheaper.
Unfortunately, my online backup choice (Mozy) still thinks it’s 2002, and claims network storage is ‘commercial’ and thus won’t back it up unless I upgrade to business-level needs. Which is, frankly, way too expensive.
So looks like it’s gonna be a 3TB RAID setup with a 3TB USB 3 backup drive. That still exposes me to “massive power surge” and “fire”, but I can mitigate the first (maybe just plug in the USB backup weekly for a single update) and look to see if there’s an online backup source that isn’t an idiot about network storage, or see if I can convince Mozy it’s really just a detached drive on my PC. 🙂Report
I have hopes of being able to help band Monarch butterflies (yes, such a thing is possible) at a wildlife refuge near me. They are having some kind of “citizen science” day and while technically in this I don’t qualify as a strict “citizen” (I am, by profession, sort-of a scientist*), I think they’ll let me in.
I just need a day doing something other than grading and dealing with upset students.
(*Though I publish almost nothing, do little research, and most of my time is spent teaching and grading, which probably means to “real” scientists I’m not even one, but whatever)Report
Monarch Butterflies is a great name for a band.Report
Sounds like lots of people will be celebrating this weekend. I will join the festivities by attending my nieces birthday party where my son insists she wants all of her birthday presents to be presents that he would enjoy. Mostly Legos. I am suspicious.
I’ll have to find more than the party this weekend to distract me because I start medications for IVF on Monday and it’s all I can think about. I see several trips to the gym and rigorous housecleaning in my weekend. Maybe a bubble bath. Nothing that requires actual brain power because I won’t be able to concentrate, obviously.Report
Re: the excerpt
I read an article about how optimists tend to be late because they assume they can accomplish more in a given time. That describes me pretty well. “What– me worry?”Report
I don’t know about that @kazzy I am an optimist, but I am a total clock watcher and earlybird. I am the 3hours early to the airport guy.Report
That also explains why, when I have a meeting scheduled at 10:30 am, I am sitting in the room where the meeting is at 10:20.
I always thought it was too many Prussian ancestors, but maybe it’s my fundamental pessimism. (“You should leave early in case you have to wait for a train at the railroad crossing.”)Report
Segueing into a later thread this weekend – seeing Dan Scotto’s tweets, I’m gobsmacked that after weeks and weeks of giving us the equivalent of NFLN’s Thursday Night Football, the AFL Grand Final is not available on normal tiers of US cable, and after they only gave us 2 of the 4 games leading up to it. It’s like skipping the wild cards, starting playoff coverage with the divisional round, broadcasting one conference championship and never mentioning the fact there was another, and skipping the Super Bowl entirely.
So they won’t see a red cent from my potential purchase of a Buddy Franklin replica jersey – primarily because that’s not a thing, but if it was I damn sure wouldn’t buy one now…Report
Home.
Today was a long day. I’m wrecked.
Also: no religion.Report