Because I Promised Rosemary

I have been a bad blogger again. It's been a week since I've posted. Rosemary sent me a hilariouos email chastising me for my bad blogger etiquette, so here I am. What, pray tell, has kept me away? Busyness.

Thursday night, in advance of a day off Friday, I made sure to run all the various patches on our servers necessary to thwart the impending computer doom and gloom that is the DST change. Sling reported that he was being peppered with questions by his freaking out coworkers about the early onset of DST. Same here. I was the one back in 1999 saying "nothing is going to happen", but no one believed me. I've been saying the same thing about the DST change. That didn't mean there weren't tasks to complete in advance of March 11 in order to make sure there were no problems; there were. But it also didn't mean that if I hadn't run those patches everything would come crashing down on us. In a couple of instances, the updates for the Outlook calendar on a couple of staff workstations wasn't run, so appointments were off by an hour. Big deal. I ran the fixes on those yesterday. And in once case, I manually set the computer clock ahead. Wow! What an amazing techno goddess I am! Sheesh. But there was one glitch for which I was not prepared, and it is what has kept me away.

We use the Sharepoint services app that is built-in to Windows Server 2003 for our staff website. That website has our meeting room calendar, tutoring room calendar, and a host of documents like our policy and procedures manuals. It also has an IT trouble ticket creator that is used by the staff to report computer problems to me, and in which I track resolutions, etc. When I went to run the DST patches on this machine, I realized there is an updated version of Sharepoint Services available. We were running 2.0 and now there is 3.0. So, I downloaded 3.0 and proceeded to run the update. There were a few preinstallation procedures I had to run first. So, I did all that, installed the update, went to look at our site - and got nothing. I read all the documentation to see what was going on, thought I figured it out, but still nothing. I finally realized that the entire website was gone. Vanished. Wiped out. These sites are "virtual" websites, so they're a little different than our public website, with a folder and actual html files I can edit using any number of tools. At some point during the upgrade, I managed to wipe out the existing virtual website. So, most of the weekend evening hours, the time I usually spend blogging, was spent rebuilding the website. I will say this much - the new version is greatly improved, and includes a lot of features the old one did not, but what a royal pain in the you-know-what. We're still "missing" some documents, and the meeting room calendar has not been rebuilt yet, but most everything else has been recreated in the new, improved format. Still. And I have yet to figure out why we can no longer access it from offsite, despite the fact that the firewall redirects to the proper server. That is something really weird for which I have no solution thus far.

My cat is limping. I don't know if she hurt herself jumping off the bed or counter or something, or if she's just getting old and arthritic all of a sudden. She's 10. Not old, really, and she's always been very agile. But she's been limping for two days, and I'm a tad worried about her. She is a bit tubby, despite the fact that she gets only dry food. In fact, I think she's fatter now than when I was giving her a can of wet food every morning. I stopped with the wet food because about every other day she would puke right after eating it. I decided maybe she was allergic to something in it. She was also scratching a lot more, albeit with her clawless paws, but scratching nevertheless. When I took her off the wet food, her scratching diminshed greatly. And the puking stopped almost completely, with the exception of the hairball-related puking, which is expected. In fact, The Spouse, on his way to the bathroom this morning, stepped in hairball puke. He was not a happy man. At this moment, my cat is sprawled on my lap, sound asleep, forcing me to type with the laptop on the arm of the sofa. Sure, I could move her, but she's been limping. You know how it is.

Youngest Son has been much cheerier lately. He got his griping off his chest, and is now back to enjoying himself, despite the heavy class workload. He, one of the other boys, and the girl he hangs with the most (not in that way - she's getting married in July), went to see Blood Diamond. It was in English with French subtitles. He said it really makes you think, then went on to ask me if it's absolutely necessary to get your fiancee a diamond when you get engaged. It's such an American cultural thing. I guess the girl said she would always wonder if her diamond is a conflict diamond, but she still wanted one. Apparently, there is almost no way to know for sure if a diamond is a conflict diamond or not. In addition to the movie, they had recently watched a CNN International show on conflict diamonds, where it showed a guy easily selling a diamond in NYC to reputable dealers, no questions asked. Not a topic about which I know very much, but one a lot of us will probably know more about if we see the film.

YS and the girls he's going to Italy with over Spring Break, called me in a panic the other day. They had just purchased their train tickets for the trip, and found out they couldn't get a reservation for Friday night, but rather had to leave Thursday night instead. That meant they needed a place to stay for one more night. They had booked a hotel in Rome for the exorbitant price of 784 euros for two nights. I had tried to talk them into a hostel on the ocean, about 30 minutes by train from downtown Rome, that was much cheaper, but they didn't want to change their plans - until they needed a third night's lodging. Suddenly, that hostel looked very appealing. So, me being the ever helpful mom I am, got online and booked the hostel for them. Now, three nights of lodging, breakfast included, will run them just 24 euros a night each - more than half as much as two nights at the hotel was going to cost them. And the hostel is on the Mediterranean! What more could you ask for? They actually paused for a moment when I told them they had a 30 minute train ride to the city, but seriously, you do that twice a day. Big deal. It's worth the savings.

Given that they were in the cost-cutting mode, I found them an equally wonderful hostel in Florence for 288 euros for two nights for the six of them versus the hotel they have booked at 600 euros. Four of them are all for it. Two are leaning toward just staying at the hotel. Clearly, those two are not paying their own way. Mom and Dad must be footing the bill, or the opportunity to save 56+ euros would make it a no-brainer. Not only is it cheaper, the reviews said it has "the best breakfast in Italy", and it has free internet. The hotel has no internet. The hostel is maybe 6 blocks from the hotel, so it's not a location issue either. They're foolish not to make the change. We'll see. One girl is going to try to "sell" the idea to the other two.

Turns out YS could have flown to Rome from Paris, and then back from Milan to Paris, and bought tickets for the Rome to Florence and Florence to Milan sections, for half what his train ticket for that trip cost. The train ticket ran 300 euros - over $400. The airfare plus train would have run about $175. Live and learn. They are going down in a sleeper coach, so that will be fun, but still.

It's sunny out, but cold. And this DST change is not going over too well with me so far. I was liking the fact that it was light at 5:30 AM. It made me more energetic in the morning, my most difficult time of day, and more likely to go to the gym. Now it's dark again. Ugh. Yeah, it's cool that it's light later, but I'm making dinner, or often still working, at that time of day this time of year, so I don't really get to enjoy the later daylight hours. I read an article the other day that said the DST change might aggravate SAD in those who have it precisely because we rely on the rising of the sun to set our clocks for the day, and suddenly we're plunged back into a sunrise time that is the same as back in February. I guess if you live somewhere like So Cal, and you can take advantage, weather-wise, of the longer days, it's a great thing. But here in the Northwest, where it's still cold, often snowing or raining, and not yet conducive to being outside in the evenings, it's not all it's cracked up to be. This morning, it was 28 out at 5 AM. There is frost on everything. It's not really spring yet. Soon, but not yet. Yesterday, while I was out taking a walk at lunchtime, it snowed on me and walking partner. The wind kicked up and it got really cold. Today I'm taking my ear muffs for my walk.

The Spouse and Oldest Son are going to the first and second rounds of the NCAA tournament in Spokane this weekend. Ticket price? $250 each from a season ticketholder who didn't want to go, so decided to make a couple hundred bucks by scalping his tickets. It's a lot cheaper than the $900 one set of two tickets went for on eBay. If you were a season ticketholder, they only cost $145 each. Crazy. But The Spouse and Oldest Son are basketball fanatics, and seeing Texas and their phenom, Durant, play in real life will be a great experience for them both. Father-son bonding time? Priceless.