Insanity Reigns/Rains/Reins

I think I am going to go crazy. Many who know me would say I have already done so. Perhaps they are right. What other explanation could there be for the constant state of "overwhelmedness" in which I find myself? I am overwhelmed at work by the chaos in my office, the never-ending call of computers that need upgrading or repairing, the continual stream of requests for assistance from staff and patrons, the stack of papers on my desk that grows exponentially on an hourly basis, the network maintenance needs that demand immediate attention "or else", the management responsibilities that are currently in a state of flux thanks to the boss and his zealous conversion to a new customer service model which he is pushing like a proselyte to the entire staff, e-rate funding with its looming deadlines, email, phone calls to and from vendors so I can budget for e-rate requests, mandatory reading of professional texts, and the time-sucking meetings we are forced to endure for hours each week. At home I am overwhelmed by overstuffed cupboards seriously in need of organizing and "de-junking", the clutter on my dresser, the mountain of filing on the kitchen counter, housework that has gone undone for too long, books I want to read for pleasure but for which I cannot seem to find the time, cooking, shopping, laundry. Personally I am overwhelmed by the things I want to do and learn that lurk in my brain begging to be given their audience. I want to take pictures - amazing, artistic, well-composed, interesting, pictures. I want to paint - watercolor, oil, acrylic, anything, just paint. I want to write - my novel, this blog, just stuff. I want to learn how to make awesome web sites. I want to learn how to really use Photoshop not just to tweak photos, but to create cool graphics for the web sites I design. I want to learn ASP.NET. I want to learn CSS. I want to learn Java, C++, Visual Studio.NET. I wish I could stop wanting to learn and do all these things. It seems like life would be so much calmer if I could just stop my brain. I lie awake at night thinking about so much stuff it takes me forever to fall asleep. I wish I could just flip a switch and shut off the noise in my brain. See, I AM insane. Insanity reigns in my life, rains down upon me, and has me by the reins. I need a long vacation.

What's next?

This has been a really strange winter. First, we had probably a record low amount of snow through the end of last year. Then, we finally get a few inches here and there, but not enough to really make it feel like a real winter. Then we get wicked cold, which means it's way too cold to snow. I have one of those nifty electronic weather station thingees at home with a remote thermometer outside so I can see both the inside and outside temps to the tenth of a degree. It got down to -3.8 one night and pretty much stayed around zero all day. These ultra low temps lasted for several days. The days were sunny, but cold and windy. Yesterday, MLK day and a holiday for me, I awakened to falling snow. I had planned to go in to work. Holidays are great for getting all sorts of maintenance done with no interruptions and the ability to restart servers at will. When I saw the snow, and no sign that it would relent, I decided to stay home and work from home. Ah, technology! I can work on at least half the computers at work remotely, running service packs and other updates, installing software, etc. It's great. The only thing I can't do is install operating systems, which requires I physically be at the computer. So, I installed Windows XP SP2 on all our new computers, installed some apps that I hadn't had a chance to install, and did a bunch of maintenance, all from the comfort of my sofa while I caught up on a bunch of stuff I had TiVo'd. All the while, outside it snowed and snowed and snowed - nearly a foot of the white stuff fell! My husband came home on his "lunch" break (at 4:30PM) and snowblowed the driveway while I made his dinner. The plows had yet to come to our neighborhood and he was worrying about whether or not the Beetle would make it down our street when he came home. The clearance is only about 4" and the snow was much deeper than that! When he left after lunch to head down to Coeur d'Alene to end his day, he drove his 4-wheel drive van up and down the street a few times to make a path for the Beetle. He called me at 7;30PM. He had left Sandpoint at 5:40PM for the drive to Coeur d'Alene (normally an hour drive) and was only just leaving CdA to head home. Ugh. The roads were nasty, accidents and slide-offs abounded. The news was stating that in Spokane freezing rain had been falling all day, coating the roads, sidewalks, and cars with a thick layer of ice. Apparently, that's what Tom had run into on his way to CdA. Jonathan called to tell me that school was cancelled for Tuesday. I'm sure the president of Whitworth had decided not to force his staff to travel treacherous roads. Jonathan said just walking to the dining hall was a test of balance and ice skating skills. Fortunately, by the time Tom started driving home, it was warming up and the roads were a little less slick. He actually made it home in about 75 minutes. Still no snow plows. So, he went out and plowed out a lane the length of our street. His fear was that if the plows didn't come before he left for work at 5:45AM, he definitely wouldn't get the Beetle out. It had started raining and the foot of fallen snow was holding water like crazy. It would be too high for the Beetle to get through and he'd likely end up high-centered. So, he snowblowed for an hour. This morning, it's raining like mad, it's about 40 degrees outside, but in the higher elevations the roads are water on ice. The plow finally came down our street at about 7AM. Schools are closed all over the region. Of course, it's Winter Carnival in Sandpoint. Every single year, without exception, we get a huge warm-up, usually accompanied by Chinook winds (warm winds like the Santa Anas in California), and all the snow melts. You'd think they'd figure this out and move the date to a week earlier or later. It used to be in February and we had beautiful snow sculpture competitions, with scultpures on nearly every corner in town. For the past umpteen years, the snow sculpture competition has been ruined by rains and warm temps. I miss the sculpture contest. I wish they'd get a clue and change the dates. Anyway, it is now warm, raining, melting the snow, which will bring flooding in some areas....what's next?

Murphy's Law

Tuesday night was awful. I got really sick. I don't know if it was the flu or what, but I was nauseated, alternated between being brutally hot, then I'd break out in a cold sweat, then get the chills, and then do it all over again, all night long. I also had back spasms and shooting pains down my legs all night. I was afraid to take any ibuprofen, cerrtain that I'd vomit it up. I didn't sleep more than 15 minutes at a time. It was terrible. I got up to do the whole mocha/lunch thing for my husband and lasted about 5 minutes before dizziness and nausea sent me right back to bed. At 6AM I called and left a message at work that I would be home sick. I finally fell asleep at about 6:30AM (I got up the nerve to take the ibuprofen, which knocked out the fever and back spasms, allowing me to sleep). At 8:30 I was jangled awake by my cell phone. It was work. "I'm so sorry to call you but....." was how the call began. Naturally, the day I'm not coming in, the servers decided to break. Apparently, our webserver wasn't working. To be more specific, once I had the caller go to the server closet to check on the offending machine, the hard drive seemed to have crashed! Why!?!? Why when I am SICK is it doing this to me? I could just say "oh well, no web server or online catalog today. I'm sick." But no, I feel compelled to go in. So, I throw on some clothes, brush my teeth and hair, and head to town. I was figuring I'd be rebuilding the server, which is a huge undertaking, so planned to be there all day. Fortunately, the SCSI controller for the hard drive has a nice utility that verifies the hard drive and moves data from bad sectors to good ones. After a few minutes of trying some other things, I ran the utility. It did indeed find bad sectors and remapped them to good ones. Voila! The server rebooted and all was well. Elapsed time - about 90 minutes. Back I head to my bed. Unfortunately, sleep eludes me. I channel surf for a bit, until the mind numbing garbage on the tube puts me in the mood to sleep once again. I head to bed. About an hour into the nap my phone rings again. No way. This can't be! "I am so sorry to call again...." Yeah, right. If you were sorry, you wouldn't call!!! This time, both the web server and the proxy server are down, meaning no internet access, no online catalogs, no web site. The caller tells me that there are no lights on the two servers and the monitor won't come on. Hmmm... no power, obviously, but how can that be? They are plugged into a battery backup and the power is on at the building. The battery backup must have died for some reason. So, I attempt to walk the caller through hooking up a brand new backup I have by the servers. Easy. Just open the box, plug it in, turn it on, then plug the servers into it. Why is this difficult? Three people get involved. They can't seem to figure out how to trace the power cord from the back of the server to where it's plugged into the old backup so they unplug the correct power cord and plug it into the new backup. I am pulling my hair out on the other end of the phone. I can't figure out how to explain this more simply. Finally, they claim to have them plugged in to the new backup, but still no power. I ask them if the new backup is on - are there lights on it? They say there are, it is. I am at my wit's end. I head to work. I go to the server room.... the backup is not turned on. I turn it on, all is well. Elapsed time, 45 minutes including drive to and from. Unbelievable.

Why is it I can work day in and day out, 9-10 hours a day and the servers are fine. I take a day off, call in sick, whatever, something goes down? This happens almost without exception. Murphy's Law.

I went to work on Thursday at 10, was tired, weak, so I went home at 4. A record short day for me.... I'm well now.

New Year's Resolutions

I never make them... well, not officially. I make them in my head and don't tell anyone so if I don't stick to them, no one will be the wiser. Smart, eh?

Internet at home has been FUBAR for nearly two weeks now. When Jonathan was home, he experienced frequent outages at hours I would never have had occasion to know the status of our connection, like 1:00 AM. For the past two weeks service has been sporadic. I have called and complained five times now, three in the past two days. I have had NO connection whatsoever for three days. Since I rely on that connection for blogging and working from home, I have been a less-than-happy camper. I have relentlessly lodged my complaints and frustrations, have provided the cable provider with my cell phone number so they could reach me wherever or whenever. Do you think they've called? Of course not. Now, this is a small town. The gal who manages the local cable office knows me. She knows I know a LOT of people. I thought she'd have called me by now. She hasn't. So, I called her this morning. She was very nice, just like the people I talked to at the 800 number when I reported my outages. All very nice, all very apologetic. The local gal told me they were experiencing "trouble with a distribution line" in my neighborhood and that others were out as well. Well, gee whiz, why didn't someone tell me that??? I have been wondering if the problem was mine alone, was my cable modem, was my "box" outside... wondering. If someone had told me that they know there is a problem, that it isn't just me, that they are working on it, I would have been a lot less frustrated the past few days. For crying out loud, they have all my phone numbers! Why not a call or a message saying "we realize you're having problems, we're working on it" instead of just ignoring me? Very poor customer service. I told the local gal as much. I was nice, but explained that not letting a customer who has called repeatedly about a problem that things are being worked on is poor customer service. Supposedly, I will have internet when I get home today. We'll see. In the meantime, I am going to write a letter to someone at Northland Cable telling them they need to work on their communication of outages to their customers. I just need to figure out who that person is.

It's snowing, finally. Not a lot, but it will help the ski areas. Unfortunately, tomorrow Tom and I have to leave Sandpoint at 5:30 AM for a trip to Spokane where he will undergo surgery to remove the atypical fibroxanthoma melanoma on his left upper cheek. It is outpatient surgery, so he should be ready to go home by noon. I hope he doesn't get sick from the anesthesia. The doctor's office did call the hospital here to find out what anesthesia combo he was given when he had a tonsil removed last year because it was the first time he had been anesthetized that he didn't get violently ill. They will, hopefully, use the same concoction and he will be fine when he wakes up. It won't be a fun day, regardless.

Jonathan is taking snowboarding and Internet Applications for his Jan Term classes. He goes 3 hours a day (9-12) Monday-Friday to Internet Apps and then Wed/Fri from 12:30-6:00 for snowboarding. The term is 3 weeks long. He had his first snowboarding class yesterday. The snow is pretty pathetic at Mt. Spokane, but it was acceptable. He was in a lesson pretty much the entire time, which did not thrill him. He has been boarding for 8 years and figures he knows all he needs to know since he doesn't plan to race. He has likely picked up some bad habits, which I'm sure the instructor is trying to correct, to his chagrin. He was pretty tired when he got home. Internet apps is a different story. They are going to learn an awful lot in a very short period of time. I hope he learns some stuff he can use to help me with the web sites I maintain. It could be really great!

I have tried to work on my novel, but work is too busy. I just fall into an exhausted heap when I get home. I have just finished setting up 20 new computers on the main floor. I have 9 to go (not counting mine). The remaining 9 are for staff so they will require a lot more work as I will have to transfer settings and files, reinstall apps, etc. I'm kind of dreading it. Speaking of that, I should get cracking. One of my resolutions - be more productive at work.

I did start working out regularly. I have not been going in the early AM, preferring to blog or write, so I decided I'd go when Tom takes his break. That means I leave work about 3 or 4 and go workout, then come back to work for an hour or two or three. So far, so good. Now, get the diet under control and I may reach my goal of losing 20 pounds by my 50th birthday on March 8. I am not going to be fat and fifty!!! My new mantra!

Back to work...