So I get home today, look at the carpet, and start moving stuff off one corner of it. Then I pull it back, grab a carpet knife, and start slicing and dicing. The white paint that I expected to cover the entire floor... didn't. Turns out there's actual hard wood under all the crud in quite a large area. Not in horrid condition, either, although someone obviously knew they were going to carpet over it and didn't take care to avoid getting white paint everywhere. We think this is because there's damage by the front door. Possibly even a hole there, I dunno. There was always a hump like someone carpeted over a welcome mat. Turns out the hump is a piece of plywood with old kitchen tile (the original kitchen tile, mind you) tacked down on top of it. Either they wanted that in front of the door, or something happened to the hardwood there and it's a makeshift cover. Dale reminded me that there was water damage that required some reconstructive surgery at some point in the house's past, so perhaps it's related. Regardless, we've decided to have the floor refinished so the rest of the carpet is gonna come out. This might take the rest of the summer and fall but it'll happen. The hardest part is moving all the crap out of the way.
On top of all that, we're not sure if we are going to repaint or not. I'm telling Dale, if we want to do it, now is the easiest time. Move all the stuff, paint, and then have the guy refinish the floors. It won't get easier than that. We wouldn't even use dropcloths. The baseboard would be off, the walls would be bare, nothing in the way. Now's the time to do it. But it makes it feel much more daunting. We just repainted the kitchen's back wall. It was definitely some work we're not keen on doing again so soon. So we may leave things as they are as far as that goes and just do it the long way over time. Of course, doing all this as soon as we moved in would have been best. I knew that going in and didn't care. At the time. LOL. I look at it this way... instead of moving, we get something very different done in the house and it's like moving without as much back-breaking hassle.
Yesterday, a coworker called me at the office asking me to restore a bunch of user files from backup. I said, "Sure, give me ten minutes." I went into my backup files and... the user files were not there. None of them. When I first began working there, that entire directory wasn't being backed up. I eventually noticed this and thought I'd fixed it. I could even swear I'd restored something to verify this. Apparently my memory is worse than I thought it was. I had to admit to my colleague that the user had lost two years of work. Then something occurred to me. "Give me a while," I told my colleague. I went in and found our safety net. /This/ backup is pretty much the backbone of the backbone, a last-chance of all last chances. Not the easiest to restore from but if all else fails... well, you get the idea. After some finagling (this was the first time I'd tried this), I got to where I could see the user's files, but I had to do some really fancy footwork to get them back to where they needed to be. After almost three hours, I had resolved the issue by calling another colleague and he had this wonderful idea of using two virtual NICs on the same VM to transfer the files. It worked beautifully. In four hours' time, I went from being angry at myself for overlooking the original problem to being somewhat afraid of being fired for not doing my job properly to being ticked off at myself again to being hopeful and finally excited that I figured it out in the end (even if had help - it would have eventually occurred to me, but the help sped things up). And, happy the user was happy. I'm still fighting with our backups, which have been wonky anyway. I swear I thrive on winging it, though. Tonight I logged in and started a backup, which lagged as it has been for days now (UNACCEPTABLY FAILING IN THE PROCESS GAHHH), then in sheer desperation, I uninstalled the antivirus while the two fought. I said, "Fuck you both, play nice," the antivirus wanted a reboot, I told it no, it killed off my backup and stuck its tongue out at me, and I swore some more as I watched three hours of painfully slow backup just disappear on me again. Then, more determined than ever, I restarted the accursed backup despite not rebooting and now it's moving much faster - my goal. So hopefully I get my backup tonight. Damned computers. Even virtual ones are frustrating. Perhaps more so!
Meanwhile, my sd card slot has failed me completely and so has the usb headphones driver. Or it's something in the usb hardware. Either way, I'm really ticked off at macs right now because both items work fine on other computers. Dammit.
But, I have a nice cup of tea, my backups are running nicely (for now), and I can wiggle my toes on cool hardwood floor, grungy though it may be at the moment. Life is good. Even if I have to threaten it with a carpet knife, an unwieldy uninstall, and a rather kludgy restoration at times. :D
~w
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