It never fails. Every three months, I get slammed with reports that need to be done, and some oddball thing goes awry.
This quarter's weirdness was the tornado last Thursday night which killed my work computer. There are documents in there that I need (for doing these reports), but which are giving IT Ron a rough time. He thinks my computer hates him. He may be right.
So there's another computer sitting in his office now, waiting to be loaded with all the stuff I need to do my job - but I can't really DO my job without my computer. I can do the daily stuff at home and print it out in Master, but for the other stuff, I need a certified computer (Nielsen), and the documents that were living in my old computer (quarterly reports). Thank goodness I got the Sprout stuff done last week!
So after I did what I could elsewhere in the building, I started thinking about my workspace - and decided to change it around. Mostly because working with the computer and hooking things up was such a pain in the position the desk was in, I decided to move it so that the back side was exposed.
But first, there was lots of stuff to weed through and toss out.
Before I started shoving furniture around. The only thing I'd done at this point was pull the old ink cartridges out of the corner and hang my bluejean jacket picture up.
Oh, and I guess I'd already moved the table out from the wall and put the big bookcase in the corner. You wouldn't believe the pile of stuff I set outside my door for the janitors to haul away.
They probably hate me now.
Tomorrow, I am promised my computer (which is good because the Nielsen report is DUE tomorrow). And I'll have my office finished. Pictures to come.
My buddy Patience is hosting Fun Monday this week and she wants to know:
How I'll Spend My Summer Vacation! Y'know, it's getting on to that time of year. Everyone's already thinking of what they'll be doing on their summer vacation. So, let's hear about it already!!
Plans! I've got PLANS! Of course, who knows whether or not they'll come to fruition. Life has a way of throwing curveballs...
What I'd like to do: Renovate the final bathroom. Take a week's vacation out to Hueco Tanks to go camping and show my son some of the west. Have my training program for the Vermont City Marathon 2011 in high gear. Start riding my bike to work a couple of times a week / telecommute a couple of times a week. Help my mom get her house de-cluttered and begin simple renovation of her kitchen.
What will probably really happen: Weekend camping trip to local state park. Renovation of kitchen instead of bathroom because the stove is dying (40 years old) and it's a built in so replacing it is a major deal. May as well do everything else too! Drive my car everyday. Get the wall paper off the kitchen at Mom's then go back months later and paint...
Still, dreaming about summer time is a pretty nice pasttime!!! Thanks for getting me started, Patience!
I took Thursday off from work. It's spring break here and Darling Man and I have been working some wacky schedules to accomodate taking care of the ZBoy. Thursday was a good day to take off because the server for my particular area of work was dying. The new one arrived but would take all day to transfer data and install, so the timing was good.
It was a stormy day. We were under a tornado watch for much of it. There was one point on Thursday evening when I was just sitting on the couch and watching the wind and the rain pounding my backyard. Mesmerizing...
Friday morning rolls around and Darling Man calls me from work - there is no power to our building. So it was a fairly lazy morning for me. I finally pulled it together, packed up the Z and we went to get lunch for ourselves and to take to DM.
There was lots of debris in the road and along the sides as we made our way across town. We got our Larry's subs and headed for the office. As I rounded the pond behind the engineering building, I noticed lots of activity on the golf course. Rather bizarre business going on there...
It looked a bit like a big plane had flown in too low and snapped the trees off between 6 and 10 feet off the ground.
Rounding the bend, I spotted more trees down.
As I pulled into the driveway at work, I saw LOTS of trees, tops twisted off or blown over. (You can click on the pictures to make them bigger.)
It was rather impressive actually.
After walking around and looking, I realized that a small, weak tornado had passed over. You could actually follow the path by following the broken trees. It must have only just missed our building as all the damage seemed to be to trees.
The neighborhood behind the station was a mess too, one house having a tree coming down on top of it.
While the storm didn't seem to touch our building, there was still a mess inside. My computer was a casualty of the storm. When I tried to boot it, I got the black- screen-of-bad-news. A power surge had killed my operating system.
I love the IT guys. They are on top of things, so Ron brought the OS CD to my office and reloaded.... it then began a loop of shutting down and restarting. Yes. The brains were fried.
After messing with it a bit more, Ron pulled the whole thing out. He's finding me another computer and he'll try to recover as much from the old one as possible.
In the meantime, I worked a few hours in Master Control on their computer, and I'll be trying to make up for a mostly missed day over the weekend.
Still - quite exciting!!! I'll have to tell you other tornado stories another day.
I was never much for pulling pranks. It always seems so juvenile and I'm beginning to think that I was never juvenile... I was a pretty serious kid. I didn't do jokes (never could remember them) or pranks. I knew how to have fun, but it was rarely at someone else's expense.
Except for this one time - and I wasn't the instigator; I just went along with it. And I still cringe all these years later.
The house I consider my childhood home was smack dab in the middle of a neighborhood of old people. We made lots of pocket money raking leaves, sweeping roofs and doing those outdoors chores that they weren't able to do anymore. I also cleaned house for a couple of them (yes, those cleaning tendencies started very young). My house was the anomally, with lots of young children in residence.
At the time, it was me, John, Jerry, Andy and Matt, who may or may not have been born - he may have been just a very young lump of boy at that point.
Anyway, this was back when "streaking" was all the rage. It started here at FSU and spread like wildfire across the country. My dad went along on a streak (fully clothed) as a reporter and interviewed naked people as they ran. Ray Stevens wrote a wildly popular song about the national obsession. And this was the backdrop for our "practical joke."
We were home alone one day (or maybe Mom was taking a nap but I don't think we'd have risked it if she were there), when John dared Jerry to streak around the house three times. Jerry accepted, shucked his clothes and began his laps around the house in the buff. While he was doing that, John and I locked all the doors and windows. Jerry finished his laps and tried to come inside, setting up quite a howl once he discovered that he couldn't. Neighbors started appearing on porches - Miss Madie and Miss Blannie across the street were a bit scandalized by the young man in the yard with no clothes. Once the sisters made their appearance, John and I realized that we could be in big trouble, so we let Jerry in, who fell panting and crying onto the floor in the livingroom.
I wonder if he ever got over that. Nearly 40 years later, I know I didn't.
And it wasn't even April Fool's Day.
So enter April 1, 2009. In all the time since Jerry's streak, I've had no part of and paid no attention to April Fool's day. It seemed childish and mean and never interested me. Amazing that I was never the victim of such foolishness in all that time.
On March 31st, I was reading FaceBook status updates, and one of my co-workers wondered what kind of prank he would fall victim to THIS year. I thought it was odd, but it did occur to me that FaceBook would be exactly the right kind of venue for this kind of thing.
So it was with some trepidation and skepticism that I ventured onto Facebook on April Fool's Day. Things seems relatively normal until I got to this:
MR just got hit by a train (MR is my niece. Beautiful. Young. Brilliant. Just got accepted to a college with a fullride scholarship.)
I thought it was a joke, so I made this response: Geez... what is it with this family? First Jay gets hit by a beer truck, then you get hit by a train. I'd better look both ways when crossing!
Then there was this: MR well ok thats status is scary: make that- just got hit by a train and is surprisingly A-ok but my car didn't make it.
Lots of comments followed that one, but I was still trying to figure out if it was a joke or not. Finally the comments and her responses to them made me think that maybe it wasn't a joke.
A short while later, my brother Jay posted this: JR almost got hit by ANOTHER truck (his fault this time, not mine). WTF is wrong with Atlanta? GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!!
Okay... this is going too far. Jay WAS in fact, hit by a truck last week while trying to get to his bus. I IM'd him and discovered that this near-miss was also true! Holy crap.
And my niece's encounter with the train was ALSO true! Double holy crap, Batman. Instead of heading north for a joyful graduation next month, we could have been heading north this weekend for a very sorrowful funeral.
Then another brother, the cop, joined in with this: AR is back from the ER. Cannot be reattached. Who uses a left pinkie that much, anyway?
WTF? Has he had another run-in with a more pitbulls? In his line of work, he deals with lots of crazy people and has, in fact, been mauled by pitbulls on his arms and hands before in the line of duty.
Thank goodness THAT one was a joke. A bad and ill-timed joke, but a joke nonetheless. (Good thing you're not here, AR - you'd get a whuppin' from your big sister for that one! I don't care if you're bigger than me now.)
My niece didn't escape unscathed (and her car is totalled). This morning I found this on Facebook: MR is that dumbass on the news.
I HATE APRIL FOOL'S DAY. You never know whether that bad news is really bad news or someone's idea of fun.
I need to lighten up a bit before going on with my day. So I share this with you:
It took a little hunting (okay, okay... I had to scroll down some on Wisconsin Candy's posts) but I found out that Patience is hosting for April 6th! Just thought I'd let you know in case you missed it!
