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July 18, 2005

Screeeeccching Halt!

Friday I so eloquently proclaimed that my third quarter of culinary school was
rolling right along. That was until the Mother of All Storms (that is since I
moved to Dallas) decided to roll right on into town. The WENCH! Anyway. I stayed
late at work on Friday to make up my hours from going to the neurologist on
Wednesday and then I attempted to go home. My first plan was to get to my side
of town, find a nice warm plate of cheese enchiladas and then work on homework.
The plan was stalled when it took me an hour to get home (13 miles) at 7:30pm.
The Wench had succeeded in knocking out the power to all of the traffic lights
near my apartment. I finally get closer to home and I see that the origin of my
warm plate of enchiladas had no electricity either. Well heck! I usually check
my email and such from work by remote connecting to my home computer but about
4:00 I noticed that my home computer had gone offline. Apparently that is when
the power problems started. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the
electricity was on in my apartment, I just had to deal with all the 12:00
flashing clocks. I walked up to my computer and pressed the power button. I
beeped at me and then gave me an error, asking me to start up in safe mode. I
said ok, safe mode is fine with me... And I left the room to go put on my
pajamas, and to gather up the ritual Friday night laundry. I came back in the
room 10 minutes later and it was still sitting there. So, here it is. Friday
night of my 1st week of my third quarter. I have a paper due Monday (that I had
already started) and a Journal due Thursday.. And my computer wouldn't boot.
Luckily, I knew that my harddrive was having problems and had already bought a
new one and had it loaded up with XP and Office. All I had to do was switch the
drives and I would be back online. Great! But what about all my stuff? I needed
to pay bills, but I couldn't because my Money file was on that hard drive, I
needed to finish my paper but I couldn't because my paper was on that hard
drive, I could have started on the paper that was due next week but the
reference materials I had emailed from work to home prior to the power outage..
Was.. Guess what? On that hard drive. And my warm plate of cheese enchiladas
turned into a Totino's Three Cheese Frozen Pizza. Saturday I was exhausted. The
weather, the frustration from the computer, the end of my first week back to
school... All I wanted to do was sleep.. And that is what I did most of the day.
I think I took 2 naps on Saturday. Maybe that explains why I was awake at 7am on
Sunday. Sunday morning... Ok, time to get down to business and fix this
computer. I set the old harddrive to slave and prayed to God that the new
harddrive would recognize it when it booted. And what do you know? The new
harddrive didn't even boot... The old "supposedly fried but instead I guess it
was just in a coma" harddrive booted. WTH? I switched the cables and the new
harddrive came up. It was at this point that I made the wrong decision. I said
to myself, "self? Why don't you just go ahead and set up the new harddrive since
you computer is already in 100 pieces all over your living room floor?" You
know, that sounded like a good idea. Until I started pulling stuff over from one
drive to the other. I kept getting these "you do not have privilege" errors. And
the errors weren't on the folders that contained my English papers from my
freshman year of Baylor, oh no.. They were the folders that contained all my
mp3s, my email, my money file and my entire Culinary School folder. I am a geek,
but all this hardware and fixing computers is still new to me .. So under the
advice of Mr. Boredom Himself.. I switched harddrives again and was going to
moved these folders in the opposite direction. Well, guess what... That
harddrive decided to go into another coma when I tried to boot off of it. 30 or
so minutes later I finally get it booted and then starts freezing trying to load
the few things I had in the startup folder. Another hour later I finally get up
and running on my old hard drive and start exporting .pst files from outlook and
copying all those folders I wasn't supposed to have access to, to a central
location on the C drive that I knew was working earlier. Outlook is the slowest
thing in the world when it is exporting. I seriously think I could have manually
typed out all the emails in that .pst file faster than it exported it. So while
it was doing its thing I decided I might as well go take a nap in the bathtub.
Then I cooked 6 pork chops to bring for lunches this week, and packed a
microwave bowl, a measuring cup and 6 cups of Minute Rice in a ziploc baggy.
Yes.. In case you haven't kept up with the time.. I am cooking pork chops at
1:30 in the morning. Then I go hang-up and put up all the laundry that I had
done this weekend, put the clean sheets on the bed, switched hard drives again
and started importing that email file and moving those other folders to the new
drive, watched the rebroadcast of the opening night at Lakewood Church in
Houston, cut out and organize all the coupons from Sunday's paper, get my books
and stuff together for class tonight, and I even untangled about 20 paper clips.
Then outlook finished importing on the new drive. 4:15... BED. 6:00 Alarm
Clock... DAMN! Snooze, DAMN!, Snooze, DAMN!, Snooze, DAMN!, Snooze, DAMN!,
Snooze, 6:45 DAMN!, I finally get out of bed, rejoicing in the fact that I had
taken a bath and washed my hair before I went to bed in clean sheets and that
all I had to do was to get dressed, brush my teeth and put on a little makeup. I
get to work and the first thing I do is to start formulating the email to my
professor asking for more time to turn in tonight's assignment because
"MotherNature, TXU and DopplerRadar" had it in for me this weekend. Luckily, he
responded and I have until Wednesday to get my paper done. I have beverage class
tonight.. We will be tasting and discussing all sorts of different teas and
coffees this week. My computer class tomorrow evening has been canceled in
exchange for our field trip on Friday. So tomorrow night when I get off work.. I
will go do exactly what I had planned on doing Friday night before my plans came
to a Screeeeccching Halt.. A warm plate of cheese enchiladas and to finish my
paper. P.S. I'm pretty darn proud of myself for fixing my own darn computer this
weekend. P.S.S. QueenB, otherwise known as my mother, wanted me to clarify to my
blogworld that the gun my grandfather was holding in the picture at my cousin's
wedding was a PLASTIC. Duh!

Posted by FutureFoodTVStar at July 18, 2005 01:16 PM

Comments

Posted by: Karagape at July 18, 2005 08:20 PM

Posted by: -S at July 22, 2005 09:32 AM

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