Inane Chatter

Is it really writer’s block if you’re so drained you can’t come up with any thoughts?  Probably not.  I’m sure I could think of something if I’d taken a nap today or something.  Seriously, thinking is hard.

I’m several days late posting pictures from the 10-miler, and I’m almost too lazy to get the camera off the island and plug it in.  Wait – I am exactly that amount of lazy.  I remembered I’m running linux, not windows, and I haven’t tried to connect my camera since that change.  Now don’t get the wrong impression – I’m not afraid of troubleshooting any technical problems that might come along (where troubleshooting = appealing to Google for help and then asking for John’s help if I’m still stumped), but I don’t have the energy to face those as-yet-hypothetical problems.  Have I mentioned I’m worn out?  On the plus side, my new shoes are working out.  The balls of my feet feel a little sore at the end of the day, but it’s the kind of sore that will go away as I get used to the shoes.  No pain in my poor pinched toes like with the last pair.

I’m bad at endings.

(See what I did there?)

So now the bathrooms are clean, the guest room beds are made, and upstairs is vacuumed.  I still need to clean the windows and dust.  At work (need I say it was another long day?), I basically cleaned out my entire desk.  I threw out what I could, but everything worth keeping is important enough to actually have with me in the training classroom.  So it all came home with me today.

I’m meeting Jess and Chuck around noon tomorrow in Chantilly, but there’s stuff I need to do first.  Sounds like I need a list.

1. Lord & Taylor is having a shoe sale.  I could go on Sunday, though.
2. Buy a laptop bag (for work) at Staples.  I’ve found the one I want.  That can wait until Sunday, too.
3. Get my car washed, inside and out.  I think the place I go is closed on Sunday, so I have to do it tomorrow.  I’ll be carpooling next week, so my car should be in good shape.
4. Dust.
5. Clean the windows.
6. Go to the grocery store.  I don’t even know what I need to get yet, but I won’t be able to feed Jess and Chuck if I don’t go.

At least I’m not traveling yet.  If this were the last weekend before all the travel, I’d be way more anxious and making many more lists.

My computer, thanks to John, is now running perfectly with its new hard drive and shiny new Fedora operating system.  And I get to use my pretty pink laptop with the nice keyboard.  (It’s really a pleasure to type on this keyboard.)

I think the condition of the house has been holding me back.  A half-clean house, so close to being mostly clean, makes me feel like I’m more in control of how and when I exercise, what I eat, and how I feel about myself.  You know?  If the house is clean, then I’m successful, and I have more energy and more enthusiasm for exercise.  But we still have too much clutter.  How do we get rid of all this crap?

Am I an optimist or an idiot?  I know which one I felt like this evening.  I had two days’ worth of evidence that going to work early was not going to mean I could leave early, but I decided to give it another try.  I was at work by 8am today.  Again.  It was almost 6pm before I left, and I worked through lunch.  (Like I usually do.)  So I’ve officially given up.  Or, according to Einstein, I’m insane. Of course, my schedule changes completely starting on Monday, so it hardly matters.

Man, that was negative.

My hard drive arrived yesterday (yay!), so I installed it when I got home.  That part was ridiculously easy.  It shouldn’t even be called an installation.  I unscrewed the old one and screwed the new one in.  Done.  Of course, I was still missing an operating system, but John downloaded Ubuntu for me last night and burned it to CD, so I popped it into the CD drive .  And ran into errors.  Pages and pages and constant scrolling of errors.  John came home, burned me a new CD, ran into more trouble, and has spent much of the evening trying to figure out why I can’t install Ubuntu on my laptop.  Eventually, he gave up.  I just watched him install Fedora instead.  I’m installing Linux; I really don’t care which version.

Heh.  John just named my computer Flyza Minnelli.  (Do you watch Modern Family?  You should.)

Who likes to get to work early and then work late?  I do!  (Brown noser.)  And my throat hurts.  I’m pretty certain I can blame this on allergies and the change in the weather.  But it SUCKS.  So much.  And even when the ibuprofen is working and my throat only hurts a tiny bit, it hurts a lot when I sneeze.

Enough of that.  I spent about half of today reminding myself that it wasn’t Friday.  I thought yesterday was Thursday, too.  But tomorrow really IS Friday, and that’s nothing but good.  John is running the error checking/scanning thing I couldn’t find the other day on my poor broken laptop, but it looks like it froze in the middle of it.  So much for that.

(My throat hurts when I yawn.  What’s up with that?)

I have nothing internet-y to share with you today.  I’m sorry.  What with getting to work early and then staying late (and actually working the whole time) and then making dinner and spending some quality TV time with John, I haven’t had time to play on the good old interwebs today.  My plan for the next 12 hours is to take my medicine, go to bed with water and ibuprofen nearby, prop myself up on several pillows, and hopefully wake up tomorrow morning with a relatively clear head and non-scratchy throat so I can run.  It’s been several days.  Oh, the humidifier.  Can’t forget to set up the humidifier.

Good news!  Tomorrow’s pollen forecast is low.  Hope it stays that way.  I don’t want to have another of those springs.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration.  It’s not THAT bad.  I have several computer options besides my own laptop.  Could be worse.  Anyway, as I think I mentioned yesterday, my computer crashed on me twice last night.  It did it again this morning, and then one more time when I booted using Ubuntu to see if it was a Windows problem.  Clearly not.  And Ubuntu gave me a message that said my hard drive is failing and it has bad sectors.  That’s what I remember, anyway.  I can’t say for sure because it crashed.

I tried to run a scandisk thing John told me about, but I couldn’t find it, so I called Dell Technical Support.  It took me a while to get through to a person, but once I did, she was very nice.  She told me that I’d already done most of the troubleshooting she was going to suggest (I told John.  He said, “You’re welcome.”), so the next thing to do is run Dell’s built-in diagnostic tool.  She told me how to do that, told me that it might take a while, and suggested I call back once it’s done and I can see what errors are found.  If no errors appear, I need to look at the operating system again.

I hung up the phone and ran the test.  I got an error almost immediately about not being able to detect the microphone board, but I’m pretty sure that’s not my problem.  The next error came under the “Hard Drives” heading.  It said,

Msg: Error Code 2000-0146

Msg: Unit 1: DST Log contains previous error(s).

My first thought was “HOLY SHIT!  Daylight Saving Time is screwing with my hard drive!”  And just this afternoon I was gushing about how much I love Daylight Saving Time and all that lovely warm sunlight in the early evenings.  Traitor.

I called Dell Technical Support back and read the message to a new very nice woman.  She told me I need to replace my hard drive.  Yeah, I get that, but what does it mean? I repeated my Daylight Saving Time theory to her.  She laughed.  Then she apologized for laughing.  (I forgave her.  I laughed, too.)  And then she told me that it means one of the disks on the drive is damaged.  It either can’t read or can’t write.  (Poor illiterate disk.)

Since then, I’ve googled the error message and found out that while I can probably manage to use this hard drive for a little while (I can try to make it stop using the bad sectors), it’s on its way to total failure, so I might as well replace it.  It’s not that expensive.  And DST stands for Drive Shelf Test.  Whatever that is.

So I need a new hard drive.  In the meantime, I have options.  But I’ll miss my pretty pink laptop.

ETA: This mustard is awesome!

Today was very frustrating.  We were both working from home (and the working part provided half the frustration, but that’s all I’m going to say about that), and when I booted my laptop this morning (my personal laptop, not my work laptop), I discovered a virus.  And not just any virus.  This was a monster virus that hijacked every program I tried to run.  I couldn’t open a browser, I couldn’t run any .exe files, I couldn’t do anything.  With John’s help (and the help of the internet via my work laptop and John’s computer), we were able to use the system restore feature to go back to last night, before the virus, and then get rid of it.  But it took HOURS.  John took the opportunity to blame Windows for this security failure and has me seriously considering installing the easiest version of Linux.  As long as I can open most documents and get to the internet, I don’t really care what operating system I use, so I’ll probably at least try it.  If I actually make it to the office tomorrow and the next day, though, it’ll have to wait for the weekend.