Post 3895 - Limping Along

And... another week has gone by.

What a week. What a couple of weeks.

I took a sick day nearly two days ago. I am glad I did. I ended up sleeping until nearly noon. Maybe I was over doing it. I would get home from work and eat and unpack a minimum of five boxes of whatever in the recroom. 35 or more boxes a week. There were a lot of boxes.

Several weeks later, most of the boxes are emptied out, replaced by dozens of cardboard boxes lashed together with twine. I have learned knots designed to keep bundles of cardboard and the like together. I have gone through nearly a whole thing of twine, but there is plenty more where that came from. I am hoping that within two weeks' time to be finished.

And the packing paper. My goodness, the packing paper. I have stuffed more packing paper than I thought possible, in to several large clear plastic bags. I will have to do more such stuffing in the coming days. The recroom is over run with such paper, and the many many bunches of cardboard boxes.

Some boxes contain things that I must sift through at a more leisurely pace than this process will allow for at the moment. That is about 10 boxes so far. Those have been put aside until such time as I have the time to do so. I do not look forward to that.

Yesterday we did a run to a local thrift store. The backseat was full of several boxes of contributions: Books. CD's. Even old music cassettes, which they politely refused to accept. They showed me a big dumpster, though, and we tossed them into it.

The couch remains a major sore point with us. The mover back in May took it apart to make it easier for him to transport it on to the moving truck. He claimed that the instructions for putting it back together were stored in the manifest or something. They weren't. When we got the couch back, it was still in two pieces. I complained to the restoration company. They sent someone out, and then it was in three pieces. Two more pieces than I wanted the couch to be in. The last several weeks have been alternating silence punctuated by an email from the company offering us pitiful compensation for the couch. We could never replace the couch for that amount of money. The insurance company that is underwriting the entire enterprise is not happy either. This whole thing with the flood and the moving stuff out and the restoration has been going on since March, nearly a full five months now. We are losing patience over this process and want it over. Yesterday.

Last week, a bit of a calamity. I had to reboot my Plex Media Server. When it came back up, one hard drive would not mount. I found the drive and it was hot to the touch. Literally fried. That makes two in the last couple of weeks. I deployed a fan from the laundry room and it has been running non stop for days, blowing admittedly warm air on the other hard drives in an effort to keep them cool enough not to over heat in this stifling weather.

I researched the heck out of this. I discovered a linux tool called ddrescue. As long as the computer the drive is attached to can "see" the drive, which it could, then this utility can run against it. It has been running for three days now and harvested a whopping 7GB off a 2TB drive. At this rate, it will need about a year to copy the contents from the failing drive to an image file on the destination drive. The computer is running full time and is starting to run hot, itself.

The humidity has been killing us. We are irritable with one another. We cannot wait until September gets here and the really nice weather arrives.

So, that's about it. The previous two weeks in a nutshell. Working. Coming home and sweating my bollocks off unpacking boxes and bundling up empty boxes and stuffing packing paper into bags. Then, frying a couple of hard drives for good measure. Yippee. Yahoo.

I feel awful for not writing more frequently in recent weeks. It has been one thing after another, conspiring against me to keep me from sitting here and saying hello. I do hope to improve, and soon.

You all take care of yourselves. I hope you are all well. I think about you. I worry about you. And I hope the feelings are reciprocated.

Talk to you... tomorrow? Yes. Tomorrow!

Bevboy