Picture Catch-Up Time...
Picture of the Day #30: This plant started with one open flower.
Picture of the Day #31: The next day, there were two open flowers!
Picture of the Day #32: And on the third day, there were three!!!
Picture of the Day #33: Morpheus has taken to ground. Usually he likes to lay at the highest possible point in the room but lately he's been laying on the ground. Often in places that he blends so I don't even see him half the time. This time he was lying with his head on Dakota's bed like it was a pillow, which cracked me up.
Picture of the Day #34: Cucumber plant seems to be doing ok.
Picture of the Day #35: Coolest baby EVER and also our number one softball fan!
Picture of the Day #36: My first Jalapeno! I dare those evil rabbits to nibble on this!
Picture of the Day #37: The toad I spent 20 minutes chasing around the garage, while it was still in the garage.
Picture of the Day #38: Triumph!
Picture of the Day #39: Apparently, I am growing a mushroom garden. There are a lot of mushrooms cropping up all over the place in the spots that I put the soil mixture I bought by the yard. I'm hoping that's a good thing.
Memories of...nothing...
I'm a bit concerned at the moment. I'm concerned that I have absolutely ZERO recollection of my 7th grade year. In the course of conversation about a saved bird, it was told that I had to dissect a worm all by myself because my lab partner, Kerri, was adverse to the idea of murdering a non-arthropod invertebrate animal. Ok, I'm not sure that at 12 the idea of murdering the worm was what was bothersome to her. It was more the ick factor. Fortunately, my morbid (but not sociopathic) interest in the inner working of things probably started at an early age, so I was probably a good lab partner for that sort of thing. The problem is I don't remember. Not just that, I don't remember 7th grade at all. I cannot bring to mind a single moment of that entire year. I remember stuff from 6th grade (that was a bad year with my dad having the cancer) and I very clearly remember things from 8th grade. But the entire year I was 12 is a complete blank. It's so weird. Was that the year my mom decided to join the Air Force and the house was put up for sale and we were supposed to move to Texas, but at the last minute she changed her mind and we stayed? I thought that was 8th grade, but I'm not sure now. I can't remember a single teacher I had in the 7th grade, nor any activities or vacations or anything. I'll have to ask my brother. Maybe he'll know something. Does anyone have any stories for me from 7th grade?
How My Hard Drive Destroyed My Soul...An Essay by Jennifer daSilva....
It was a Sunday when it happened. A cloudy unspectacular day, if memory serves. I had just returned from the Apple store, a place I would not normally have ventured. In this case, there was a drowned iPod and a very sad 14-year old boy who had learned the very hard life lesson that iPods do not know how to swim (not even with swimmies), nor are they particularly water proof. So, after an appointment was made, I drove to the scary fancy mall and almost drank some delicious Apple kool-aid after the Genius replace the iPod for FREE. Thank you, Warrenty and also Genius. (I did not drink the Kool-Aid, though, when I realized that all the cool iPad covers were for the iPad2 and that my 1-year-old iPad was completely out of fashion. Stupid technology moving fast.)
This event had got me to thinking that I should really take a look to what I had stored on my external harddrive and determine what I needed to back up soon. I also watched to test the download and upload speeds I could get when running uTorrent via ethernet cable vs the wifis. True Story: I'm a geek. I think most of you know that already. So, it shouldn't be surprising that I would want to spend an afternoon playing with my hard drive and testing download speeds. It's was cloudy out and I didn't feel like swimming. So, I settled in at the little table we have in the upstairs living room, looking forward to my geekfest while the soft sounds of giggling minions and battle came from the television where G was playing Overlord 2 on the Playstation.
I boot up my computer (Windows 7, I sort of heart you. Only when I don't hate you. But mostly I heart you because you are not XP). I plug in the USB to connect my terabyte drive (GBs are for wussies) and wait for Windows to recognize the drive. I wait. I wait some more. I see a rather strange message pop up that a driver is being installed. Um, this is Windows 7. No driver should need to be installed. It was just working 10 minutes ago when I unplugged it from the wall in the bedroom. I don't understand. I hear "whir whir whir...click click....whir..." and I realized that things were not ok. I go to Device Manager. The drive is listed, but the file system is not getting loaded. And that's when I said "oh fuck". File system not loading + wierd noises coming from the drive = bad things are happening.
I won't go into the excruciating details...well, not too much. Initially, being in a state of complete denial and hoping that the issue was just a corrupted file system, which I can recover from, I tried various file recovery programs but Windows needs to at least be able to access the file system to recover files that are corrupted. See also: Jenn's hopes begin fading. That was Sunday. I didn't want to panic quite yet, plus we had the minions and they sort of require more attention then I can give when I'm in full on "Save the Hard Drive" mode. Monday, I did some research and eventually came to the conclusion that I would need to copy an image of the entire hard drive, bit by bit to a new hard drive (which Boyfriend brought home for me and this one is TWO terabytes!!). DDRescue might be the droids that I am looking for, so I burnt me an Ubuntu boot up disk, wrote down some linux commands and got started. After removing the drive from the case (seriously, could they make that any harder?), I fiddled had to fiddle with the connections a bit to get Ubuntu to recognize the drive. But finally, there is was, waiting to take an excruciatingly long time to image. I had partitioned the new drive into two drives so that I could make the disk image go on one partition and then later recover it on the other partition. Unfortunately, the partitions where not big enough and I could not run ddrescue with a log file. So i let it run for 14 hours, into Tuesday. The numbers didn't look right. Something was not right. So, Wed, I stopped it, un-partitioned the new drive so I could have a log file, figuring if I could just get the image to it, I'd get another one to recover to. It's 2011 and 2 TB drives are less than $100 (I find that INCREDIBLE. I remember when I got excited because they actually made 1TB drives that got sold in like OfficeMax and then how excited I got when they were only like $150 and now you can get 2TB for under $100!!!). So, I tried setting everything back up and rerunning ddrescue only this time it would start and finish immediately with zero values for everything which is the equivalent to nothing happening. I tried every possible option all to no avail. Now I am left soulless.
I will make one final attempt tonight, using a Windows boot disk and the Recovery Console. I really don't want to lose everything on that drive, but most of it just downloaded stuff, so I suppose I'll survive. I don't think I stored any pictures on it or anything that I don't also have somewhere else. It's just aggrevating.
And now I have a meeting to attend. Bleh.
Jenn - I am a geek, it's true...
(This one won a Grammy and the reader earned a world record for the number of voices he did)
