Not Even Close!

A year later, those WM XXX predictions read like horrible fiction. Not a single one of them came true! Not one, unless you count that there was a divas battle royal. The predicted winner (Charlotte) hasn't been in the limelight. Oh well.

I didn't spend a lot of time doing what I would have thought I would spend time doing at this time last week. A few things changed. First of all, I spent a lot of Saturday morning ripping CDs and copying files from the 2 TB external hard drive that had died. I did this to get every thing *off* that drive because I do not intend to resume taking it back and forth to work. I wanted every thing off of it before the drive itself died. I will say that I was pleasantly surprised that the drive was merely a victim of some electrical snafu and not an actual hard drive failure. My plan was to copy every thing off of that drive and move it to the My Cloud drive and, for the most part, I was successful. The next step is to consolidate the files that I had already located on the My Cloud drive and the files I copied from the 2 TB hard drive and to weed out the duplicates. I am not going to update the reconversion stats page because I don't think the number would be accurate since I copied the same files into the 'master' music_shell folder structure and instructed Windows to create *(2).mp3 files if there was already a file in the destination directory. Using SeachMyFiles, I should be able to get rid of those duplicates fairly quickly.

Later, since we had brought Grandma's China hutch to our house, I went through the furnace room and retrieved the China place settings that we had received as wedding presents. This was a large project and while it was time consuming, I do like that I got it completed. As I worked, I listened to my recordings of last Wednesday's Uncle Rico rehearsal - I liked what I heard.

Allow me to write about it. We rehearsed from 6:30 (by the time we were ready to go) until 9:30. As of now, the two songs that gave me the most trouble were "Dancing with Myself" and "Suspicious Minds." Honestly, I'd be willing to dump both songs. I'd justify "DWM" being dismissed because we already play "Mony Mony" and I'd justify "SM" being dismissed because, frankly, I just don't play it well. We messed around with "Jailhouse Rock" and "Hound Dog" at rehearsal and those were much more fun to play than "SM." I guess every band / group I play in is always going to have a song that takes a bit longer to get into the groove on, as I recall how the drumbeat for "American Girl" took longer to "get" but once I nailed it, it turned into a fun song for me - the most difficult song became one of my favorite songs. I plan to practice each and every night this week to prepare for our next rehearsal on Monday, 4/14, at 6 PM.

Back to Saturday's activities. Mark, Susie, Jonathan, and Tyler came to our house. While the boys played, Mark and I defeated Karen / Susie in Euchre. We won both games. I blame the Euchre app on my phone for making me a better player. They were still here when it would have been time to leave for 5:15 Mass. We ended the night watching the semi-finals of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. WI lost to KY and CT defeated FL, which sets up KY v. CT for the national title tomorrow night.

On Sunday, we went to 11 AM Mass and I played drums. It was nice to play again during Mass. Father Paige called me Little Drummer Boy and I told him that not many people called me little. I also talked to John, a longtime member of our parish, about the retreat last week. He went to all three nights whereas I went to Monday's session only. I also had a conversation with Len as I told him about the songs Uncle Rico is playing. Then, after Mass, I had a conversation with Perry, who sometimes plays drums at 11 AM Mass. Overall, I may sound like a chatty Paul doll when I write about all of that, but I really enjoyed each of those conversations.

After we got home, I ended up making two trips to Lowe's to purchase 10 and then 12 bags of cypress mulch for $3.98 / bag so nearly $97 in mulch. Karen, Alex, and I spend most of the afternoon spreading it around the house. Later, I helped Logan and Alex put together a table we bought at Menard's on Friday night.

As for this week, it is going to be busy. There are haircuts, derm appointments, ACT Prep, PT (Alex) and baseball practice among the other normal things going on around our house. I predict I will spend time at night working on work since my big project is due 4/15/14 and, frankly, the work I've done is being remolded from what I've done into a different style and, equally frankly, I don't yet see the benefit of redesigning it. I used an existing doc system that was done for a recent project and I thought it was looking pretty good.

As kind of a side note, that project's style was to do something like this:
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Heading

To do..., follow these steps.

Access Menu Option 1
(graphic)
Select A
(graphic)
Enter the details and select Save.
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The rewrite is shaping into this:

Heading

To do..., follow these steps.

1, Access Menu Option 1

2. Select A
3. Enter the details and select Save.

The results of doing these steps are....
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What's kind of odd is that I'm seriously questioning whether numbered steps are useful when the procedure to do something is so few steps. Will it cause confusion to have unnumbered steps when there's so few steps? I'm not really sure.

Anyways, it's nearly midnight and I'm going to bed. I wrote this long-ish post tonight because I can't say whether I will have a lot of time to write this upcoming week.