Home from Orlando

Apart from snoozing on the planes today, I've been up for 20 hours. It's wonderful, as usual, to be home. The girls were happily surprised that I got back early, and the usual routine has resumed around chez nous, with the exception that I'm a little dopey and punchy with sleepiness.

G'night!

Orlando Day 3

Remarkably, we were able to change our flight time for tomorrow so we're leaving Orlando at 5:30am instead of 2:20pm.
Even more remarkably, it's actually 1:15am and we just got back from a trip out *after* the teardown of the booth, which took up the two hours after the Expo closed.

So I expect to get about 2.25 hours of sleep in the hotel, and much more in the plane tomorrow.
Looking forward to sleeping, but even more than that, as much as I love traveling, one of the best parts of traveling is coming home, and I'm looking forward to that even more.

(Of course, I'm not in Amsterdam or Florence, like Suzanne!)

Orlando Day 2

Here I am up past midnight again. Although I did sleep until 8:30 this morning and although theoretically I have a chance to get more than 8 hours of sleep at some point in this trip, it's not looking likely if I also try to fit in jogs.

The trade show stayed constant but not super busy today. It seems like we're making good connections, leading a lot of people our way. I expect there will be a few recoveries out of it, anyway.

Orlando strikes me as a lot like Vegas must be like, although I haven't been to Vegas as an adult, and even when I was there in my pre-adult days, it was only to drive through. There are plenty of amusements here for adults and kids, but that's really all that it's about, apart from the convention center. Without that tourist industry, I highly doubt the city would exist. I could confirm this online somewhere, I'm sure, but for now, it's just based on my Californian observations.

Dinner at a great sushi restaurant tonight (voted 4th best sushi restaurant in the country by Zagat last year, apparently), followed by chocolate - two candy bar-type treats, in fact. So much for low-carb dieting. But at least it will encourage me to run in the morning. I run to eat and eat to run. The day I truly eat fewer calories and exercise more and drink lots of water and get enough sleep is the day I can expect to drop a dress size. Until then, I can only accept where I am in the process, even if it's at the sputtering pre-enlightenment stage.

R feeding the giraffe two days and several hundred years ago.

Orlando day 1

I was wrong about getting only 4 hours of sleep last night.
I actually got 2 hours of sleep.

I went to bed at 1am and got up at 3:15am.
We left Petaluma a little after 4am, and were in Orlando around 4:30pm local time.

But it's been a good day. I do really enjoy flying, and the flights went very smoothly. The skies were clear and the view beautiful for the most pat. I dozed on both legs of the journey (otherwise, I think I would have vomited by now). The hotel room is wonderful, and the show already has impressed me with the crowd, and tonight was just an opening reception. Tomorrow will be a long day of work, I expect.

What I've seen of Orlando so far:
the airport
the convention center
the hotel
the Crab House restaurant, where we had dinner at around 9:45pm, and where we stayed to shut the place down, finally buying ridiculously silly felt crab hats that we all wore on our walk back to the hotel room. Dinner was the first meal of the day, because I do not count the snacks on the plane.

Things are starting to feel a bit surreal. So I'm going to hit the hay now and try to get up early enough for a run and for the complimentary hotel breakfast. I'm hoping I won't feel as dazed after some sound sleep.

Running with Giraffes

The 5k fun run this morning went well. We all managed to get out the door at half past ridiculous and arrived at the race site on time. The race itself actually started a half hour late, but while we waited, we got to see lemurs, a hornbill, giraffes, gazelle, Scimitar horned oryx, and other wildlife.

D & S walked it and R & I ran. Actually, R sprinted then walked then sprinted then walked while I jogged, and we ended up crossing the finish line at about the same time. During the few hours that I sleep tonight (before leaving at 4am for Orlando), I may have nightmares about the horribly steep rocky hill and the narrow trail that we all scrambled up during the first mile of the race. Or maybe instead I'll have happy dreams about the fact that I got to actually touch a giraffe's nose, after the race, when we were feeding leaves to a baby giraffe. Or maybe (and this is looking frighteningly likely) I will only be in bed for 4 hours and so won't have time to dream at all!

Because we'd gone so long without construction

Worker Ant Husband Starts New Project

D has torn down the fence between us and the new (not-yet-moved-in) neighbors. He's also put in the first of 3 fence posts for the new fence, which will be tall and strong and magnificent.

We're not sure when the other neighbors will move in. Allegedly, the deal might have fallen through because they couldn't get the financing. But this is coming from D who heard it from a neighbor who heard it from the wife of the older brother of the previous neighbor. So it is just a rumor at this point.

At any rate, there's now a pile of old fence in the middle of the backyard waiting to go to the dump, and D is wiped out from digging fence post holes in the adobe. Too bad, too, because in just 10 hours, we'll be doing a 5K (as a family!) through a nearby zoo, Safari West. I'll report back on how we all survive it tomorrow, somewhere in the middle of my preparations for going to Orlando for a few days on business.

Roller skating and music

The girls and I went roller skating after school. I'm not a great skater, but I get by. I like the physical movement of about rolling along, getting lost in the beat and tune of the latest music, even though there's something socially depressing about knowing that the songs I'm hearing, which I've never heard before, are songs the kids all know. Does this mean I need to change the radio stations I listen to, to be able to keep up with the world my kids are growing up in? Or should I stick to NPR and the local "alternative" station with its folk and bluegrass and lesser-known artists, so that I can expand their world? I realize that there's a HUGE world of songs out there available to be downloaded, too, but don't own an iPod. More alarming to some people, I'm sure, is the fact that I wouldn't even know what to put on an iPod if I had one. I just don't listen to that much music that often. I love some songs, and like music on car trips or when cleaning the house or as background in a book store, but I don't have music as a constant in my day.

Here are the extremes I compare myself to, however. As far as I can remember, my father flat out never listened to music, and in fact I do remember him saying he didn't like music. I mean, in general. At all. Have you ever met anyone else who didn't like music, at all? Hmm. My husband, on the other hand, listens to music all day and owns hundreds of CDs (mostly sound tracks). He suffers from tinnitus, and finds the music a good distraction from that. But besides that, he's very musical. He has a great ear - so my violin practicing is very painful - and he can whistle songs wonderfully when he wants to. So music is very important to him, and wasn't at all important to my father, and is fairly important to me. It will be interesting to see what happens with the girls. So far, their exposure to D's tastes and my own means they can tell John Williams from Danny Elfman, and the theme from Fresh Air from that of Car Talk. But I'm guessing they'll find their own musical way, and it'll be something completely different.

Back up to speed

Well, after more hours than I care to admit, I've resolved the virus issue on my drive. Part of the problem was that the virus (adware junk that the latest Norton didn't protect against and couldn't remove) so degraded system performance by hijacking resources that it took forever to even download and run the fixit tools I needed (thanks HijackThis!) I also installed SpyWare Blaster & Spybot Search & Destroy. The system is now back up to speed & better protected against spyware and adware. And I got to play with command lines to boot.

I miss DOS.
I miss vi editor.
But I also know there's no stopping the GUI march of Progress.

Noisy hard drive?

As I said in my comment reply to Max, "Where have I heard that story before?"

I did the math.

For 5.5 years, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, I talked to an average of 40 people a day who needed data recovery. About half of them had hard drives that made unusual noises. (Maybe more than that, but I'll be conservative here.)

I took 3 months off when S was born.
I spent another 3 months working half time.

For the last 3 years in my new role at work, I've spoken to an average of 20 people a day who needed recovery (though this number is ramping up daily), and I'd say more than half of them - probably 15 of 20 - had at least one drive (in a RAID/NAS array/device) that made bad noises.

I've taken about 21 weeks of vacation/personal time apart from maternity leave in the last 8.5 years. Add to that another (on average) 7 days of paid holidays per year.

So if I'm doing this right:
(20 people a day x 20 workdays a month x 12 months a year x 5.5 years) + (15 people a day x 20 workdays a month x 12 months a year x 3 years)

less
(20 people a day x 5 days a week x 21 weeks personal time off) + (20 people a day x 7 days a year x 8.5 years holidays) + (20 people a day x 20 workdays a month x 3 months maternity leave) + (10 people a day x 20 workdays a month x 3 months for the half-time)

Which means I've talked to about 32,110 people who have a story about a noisy drive.

And I'm just one person answering the phone at our company, and we're just one company (the best, true, but just one) that does data recovery, and only the people who know about data recovery as an option or who care enough about their data to look into it call us.

Considering all the hard drives out there, it's not as though they're really failing left and right. But a drive is, as I've said one or two (thousand) times, a "man made object with parts that are microns from one another moving very, very fast." And it's subject to failure just like any machine.


Back up your files.

Before you become another part of my crazy middle-of-the night statistics.


(Apologies to those of you who have already had to go through the horrific experience of data loss. I didn't mean to make you revisit your pain.)

Blessings great and small

While I remove a virus from my PC, I'm grateful to have the Mac to post on. I have to admit that the main reason I use the PC anyway is not a love for Windows. Instead, it's that our iMac (the graphite version, which seemed so cool at the time) is friggin' loud. I'm pretty sure it's just the fan, and am also pretty sure I could fix it. So really, I shouldn't complain. But even the keyboard is especially clunky, and liable to awaken children sleeping one room away.

We're hoping to get a new Mac soon (but *don't* tell our current one, or it's bound to crash). Maybe a sexy G5, if we can afford it. For now, though, what had seemed so snazzy is now old faithful, the reliable workhorse.

I really am asking for it, aren't I?

But enough about the small blessing.

The great blessing is my birth mom whose birthday is today. Having to spend it in the hospital is *so* not okay, but I thank God she's still around to celebrate. Here's to continued recovery!

Ghost story

So, as Halloween approaches, I find myself writing a Ghost story.

One of our family "legends" is that when I was young - perhaps as young as three, and certainly no older than five - my parents went to visit friends or relatives and sent me off to play in another part of the house. The adults hadn't been chatting long before they heard a pattern of banging sounds and short shrieks coming from my general direction.

When my mother went to investigate, she found that I had been stepping into a closet, shutting the door behind me, and standing there until a primal fear of the dark or my hyperactive imagination (or both) had built up enough that I was terrified. I would then scream and slam the door of the closet open again. I was doing this over and over again.

When my mother asked, "What on earth are you doing?" my answer had been, "I'm scaring myself."

By the time I was around 10, having suffered plenty of nightmares and anxieties thanks to my imagination, the fear thing had lost most of its glamour, and to this day, I seldom intentionally chose scary movies to watch or books to read (Donnie Darko was an exception).

But I'm enjoying writing this story all the same. We'll see what comes of it. Maybe if it unsettles me, it'll unsettle others. One can only hope.

Time enough to write

But did I write? No. The girls played so well together today, making up games & talking about fairies and generally keeping themselves very entertained. But I did chores - including removing a desk from the office, shifting its contents to a box, then moving a bookshelf and all its contents to the desk's spot. (The desk, which I got when I was 10 but am no longer attached to, was put on the sidewalk with a sign that said "FREE" and disappeared by mid-day.)

I could say that if I'd sat down to work on my story, the spell would have been broken, and the kids would have immediately been asking for me. But that's just based on past history, and is not a known fact.

I did, at least, get a little writing done at the Box with Suzanne. And I have about 20 minutes more tonight that I *could* use to write. So there's hope.

My birth mother is still doing all right, as far as I know. I'm going to try a call again in the morning.

All better with the world

My birth mother is out of ICU and in her own room. Thanks to all for your kind thoughts and well-wishes and prayers - I believe that made a difference! She and I had a great conversation this evening. I was afraid I had worn her out by keeping her on the phone for too long, but my half-sister J. told me that earlier in the day, they'd had her laughing so hard, they were afraid she'd have another brain clot and need another surgery. Actually, the problem was a hematoma that they had to drain. We're so glad she seems to be back on the slow but steady road to recovery. I tell you, I think I come from a line of very tough women, and I'm so glad. Not so much for myself in this case, but for her. So glad.

The difficulty of distance

So my birth mother is in ICU three states away, recovering from surgery. The surgery was for bleeding in her brain she suffered after having been in a car accident on Saturday that she and her husband had thought until a few days ago had left them with only bruises and a totaled SUV. (Thank God they had the new vehicle - it was a semi that hit them.)

And all I can do at this point is pray for her and the family that is there with her, and for the medical staff taking care of her. Half the people who might read this blog (and she is, I think, one of the most constant of my readers) already know all this. My thoughts are with them, with you. Here's a hope that you sleep well tonight and awaken feeling better than you do now. I may not be there in body, but I'm as present as I can be in spirit.

Spider

spider

legs finer than a
newborn's eyelash
you
rap-
pel
on
in-
vis-
ible
silk
backlit by the screen
on which these words appear
your body would fit in a 12-pt Palatino
8
with room to spare
you are gone before I can type my name





August, 2000

Read This!

Inside Job by Connie Willis.

I adore Connie Willis' fiction. I mean, adore it. Her latest book is a quick read novella that is just nothing but completely satisfying. So incredibly fun, especially if you like light but brilliant speculative fiction stories.

In terms of rating, I give it, like, a gazillion hundred million stars.

You may not enjoy it quite as much.

How's your Italian?

I didn't see Life is Beautiful, but I've heard nothing but good things about it.
The same director, Roberto Benigni, has a film coming out next week in Italy. It's La Tigre e la Neve (The Tiger and the Snow).

Why do I care? Not because it's a foreign film from a reputable director and actor who plays a poet in post-war Iraq. It apparently didn't do well in a screening this week, anyway. No, I care, and I'll see this movie, for the same reason I saw Rollerball. Because it also stars Jean Reno. A French actor whose parents were Spanish and who was born in Morocco, here playing an Iraqi poet. In an Italian film.

Why not? I'm pathetic. But at least I admit it.

Blip

Perhaps you missed the fact that I wrote 10/3/2005?

Perhaps your computer has experienced a hiccup or blip of some kind, and just didn't read this post that I posted 10/3/2005? Or...a router was down somewhere and so there was a delay in you seeing an updated setdownthis page.

Yes, that's it.

I'm sure that's all it was.

Amazing what a full night's sleep and a couple of encouraging comments can do for one. Truly amazing.

Why, exactly?

...am I posting every day, when most days I resent or dread doing it?

Strike that.

Make it *every* day I resent or dread doing this.

So either I'm going to change my feelings about this, or intentions, or execution, or *something* - or I'm going to stop doing it, regardless of whether I'm two months away from the pre-determined "one year" goal.

I've whined about this before.

Which is, actually, pretty much my point.

So we'll see what happens.

Old Enough for Hogwarts

R is eleven years old today.
(Kate may recognize the sweater.)












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