Wow

What a whirlwind the last few days have been.

Yesterday began with getting up fairly early (8:30 AM) and working in the den to prepare for when my awesome neighbor John was coming over. For many months, I've had 4 PCs in the den, not plugged in, but sitting on the side of the room and taking up space. I had talked to John a while back about if he would be interested in coming over and helping me figure out either what could be taken to Goodwill, because it's junk, or consolidating what was usable into less than 4 towers. John arrived at 1 and we worked until around 3. I now have three towers that have been cannibalized for parts, including a power supply, a second hard drive for the one PC that is going to be used for the reconversion project, and putting a hard drive into the case that was used for my 1 TB hard drive that has died. We also wiped a hard drive clean in order to install Windows XP. I tried to install Service Pack 2 on it, but so far, that's not working. 

After John left, we went to the State of Iowa Boys' Basketball Tournament in Des Moines at the Wells Fargo Arena. Wade Rainey, our 12 year-old neighbor, went with us. When we walked in, the names of the bands that have played the arena, like Slipknot & Metallica, are displayed. It was a neat thing to sit in the arena and think that my favorite band has played their music in the same arena I was sitting in.

As for the game(s), first we watched Dubuque Walhert win the 3A championship and then, for the main event, we watched Iowa City West defeat Des Moines Valley. The Valley coach is Jeff Horner, who played for the Iowa Hawkeyes a few years back. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame at halftime and it was nice that the Iowa City West fans stood and cheered for him. It sent the signal that we respect your abilities as a player but, at the same time, we want to win the game. I am uncertain whether I will have the opportunity to watch Alex play in a state game for Iowa City West but it occurred to me that it would be awesome if his basketball career progressed to the point where he could play for a state championship.

During the game, the weather changed from a mild day to a snowstorm. Karen drove home. While my intention was to stay awake for her, without a cell phone to keep myself occupied, I eventually caved in and fell asleep. When we got home, I fell asleep on the couch before being instructed to go to bed. When I got in bed, I fell asleep almost instantaneously while Karen, Alex, Megan, and Logan sat in the living room and talked until after 2 AM.

This morning, we went to 11 AM Mass. Maggie played piano, Jim Porter played guitar, and the guy vocalist that is usually always there on Sunday was the only singer. I played drums. During Mass, a man required medical attention and was taken away by ambulance. Karen jumped up right away and was a hero, a rock, as she did what 23 years of being a RN has trained her to do. It made me happy to see her jump into action.

After Mass, Alex and I went to Wal-Mart to replace the windshield wipers on the GMC Canyon and to pick up some "needed" supplies for the upcoming Spring Break trip to Louisville, KY, and then the St. Louis suburb, Chesterfield, on the way home. We leave Wednesday morning and are returning home on Saturday.

I also spent a lot of time on the CD reconversion. I am now working on spindle #19 even though I'm not really quite done with spindle #18, which are 100 CDs of my "Life CD" series and other miscellaneous CDs where to do the conversion correctly, I need to spend time after each CD is converted to manually enter the name of the artist and name of the album because they are not found in the database that CDs that I received as promos or CDs like that. They are not found because they are not widely available - I assembled the songs. I also have CDs where I found songs from a specific band in my collection and put together a CD with two bands. Essentially, it's a collection of the songs I like by whatever two bands are named on the CD. Again, those CDs require manual effort. And, frankly, I will not work on the conversion from Wednesday through Saturday this week (4 days) and if I want to keep to my schedule, I needed to make progress on the conversion with the time I had and doing the manual work takes up more time than if I put in a CD that can automatically be found in the database and assigned artist, album, and other information.

All of that means that I am working on spindle # 19, but I also have spindle #18 being ripped at the same time. I was going to rip all of spindle #18 on the PC that had Windows XP installed yesterday, but since I can't get SP-2 installed, I can't rip the CDs as MP3 (only as .WMA) and I can't copy the files (apparently) from the hard drive to an external hard drive because of Windows not having the proper drivers. As of this moment, I have 70 more CDs to go on spindle #19 and when I ran the DOS batch file for today, I am well above 30,000 music files, even though the page for the reconversion states I had 29,000+ files for 20140315.

Again, that is a lot going on in my life.