Posted on Tuesday, June 13, 2006 10:18 PM
The First Noble Truth: Life is difficult.
Wednesday we had a faucet start to drip. It turned out to be the hot water faucet.
Thursday, I apparently pinched a nerve and lost most use of my arm due to weakness and pain. It was accompanied by a slight tingly numbing sensation, so usually the worst thoughts are heading through your mind when that comes on. A trip to the Dr. put me on a regime of Ibuprofen, Codeine, and Prednisone.
Friday the plumber came 4 hours late. He narrowed the cause to a bad stem valve but couldn't tell what stem valve we needed to replace it with. Obviously he couldn't take the stem valve with him. That posed a problem.
Saturday, I regained the use of my arm, all pain subsided though it was still fairly stiff. We went to Home Depot and I matched up the valve stem to a universal fit. They didn't have it in stock. I called the owner of the plumbing business and left a message for the plumber giving them the information they needed about the part. Oh, and the AC went out.
Prednizone apparently doesn't like me to sleep. I feel asleep somewhere around 5:00am Sunday morning.
Sunday...Still can't sleep. Finally doze off around 5:00am again.
Monday I wake up late...really late. I decide to try and get some work done. I remote into the office, but can't access my work machine. Apparently the power went out. Messaging a friend, I have her turn on my PC. Several minutes later still no luck. Hmmm.
The AC repairman came out, fixed our AC. It's a bad capacitor. It couldn't get enough power to get the fan going on the outside unit. We also got the freon refreshed in both units. $600 later and we were living in coolness. There are people in this world that don't have AC. I am thankful for mine.
The plumber returns as well. He returns with two valves. One for hot water, one for cold water. We might as well replace both he says. 30 minutes later and the leak is gone. They wanted to charge $400. Does that sound off? Apparently there was this issue with A) Spending time to locate the part and B) Time it takes to drive from their place of business to our house and C) Hey...we replaced two parts (yes but only one was broken). If I had known either would have been an issue I wouldn't have chosen the plumber. I chose option D) which was to call the owner of the business and discuss the charges. Apparently we didn't see eye to eye. I still paid 300$ to replace a valve stem. A job that I could do in my sleep...with the right part..well two right parts because “I'd be stupid not to replace both“.
Monday night I have a plan to get to sleep. Step one of the plan. Stop taking prednizone. Step two, take two sleeping pills at 8:00. At 8:30 my plan is in action. My body feels like a lead weight. A lead weight that wants so badly to fall asleep. A lead weight that besides not being able to actively move, can't actively shut its brain down. I fall asleep around 2:00am. At least I wake up on time.
Tuesday (that would be today). I get to work. My work machine can't find the default registry hive. No problem, let's boot into Last Known Good. “Unfortunately Stuart, I cannot comply.” That may as well have been what it said, instead it continued its continuous loop of dumping physical memory to disk. My hard drive must have taken a nose dive over the weekend. No problem, I have a backup. Let's see. It's...on this drive here...in the backup directory...last backed up 6/11/2006. Good. Oh...hmmm...It's only 10kb. It should be closer to...10GB. That's a lot of missing data if you aren't sure of the difference. Consider if you will, you purchased a copy of War and Peace and only got page one. No, in fact, you only got the book cover. That would be what that 10kb was. My book cover.
Seven hours later I was back up and running. I had gotten another system, was able to mount the drive, copy all the useable data (which thankfully was ALL of what I needed) and the errors appeared to be logical ones (which meant the drive wasn't bad). I wiped it clean, started over and, it turns out the drive is possibly still faulty so I get to do it all over again in a few days when the replacement comes in. At least I get a new hard drive.
Well dukkha.