Sunday, August 9, 2015

Not Like This

I didn't envision spending my weekend the way it has been spent thus far.

I had a vision of myself sitting in the den, organizing a 2 foot tall stack of miscellaneous pieces of paper. The majority of these pieces of paper came home from my work cubicle a couple of weeks ago when I needed to clear out my cubicle so that I could move to the temporary space at the other end of the building. Like most things I do in life, it turned into a panic-driven project with not a lot of effort being put into to minimizing what is now a gigantic task of going through the papers.

I had a vision of myself finishing the above reorganization of that stack and then moving on to a complete reorganization of the other aspects of the den that have been neglected due to, well, spending a lot of time in Elkader. I was going to put away the stacks of CDs that I've created, take the legs off of the foosball table and get that the hell out of the den and back to the main part of the basement. I was going to finish going through the bookcase in the closet and condense the kids' games and other stuff into the brown cabinet in the main part of the basement.

I had a vision of myself finishing the stack of paper, reorganizing the den, and then sitting down at the Yamaha drum set and playing along to the set list of the band I really REALLY hope to audition for yet this month. At one point, the thought was that the band would dismiss their current drummer and bring in a replacement drummer by their gig in early September. That gig is now a mere  3 weeks, 5 days, away from today so if that is indeed going to happen, there still needs to be an audition process. The last I heard, each of the 3 remaining band members know at least 2 drummers that they wanted to audition. I don't know if that includes me or not so let's just say there's 6 candidates to play drums for this band. That's not a lot of time to schedule separate auditions for each. Truly, I realize that the timeline of their process to replace their drummer is out of my control. I can only hope that I am given the opportunity to audition and blow their minds with my drumming skills.

None of the above has really happened.

Instead, I've only briefly been in the den a few times to retrieve something I needed, such as the first three episodes of Star Wars on DVD and a power cord for my laptop which I had left in the den on Thursday night because I thought I would be spending this weekend in the den, as explained above. Both our home laptop and my work laptop have been set up on the kitchen table. I have been moving around music files on our network drives in an attempt to consolidate a bunch of backups together because, and this nearly makes me sick to write this, I think my external hard drive is on its way out the door.

Or not.

When I plug it in, I get the following message, which really means I need to somehow access my external hard drive, locate autorun.inf (which I can't believe I intentionally copied to the root of the drive), and delete it, right?

You'd be wrong if you thought that would be an easy task. When I plug in the USB cable, the entire laptop hangs. I fully understand that this Symantec Endpoint Protection is trying to make life easier for me, by protecting me from myself, but damnit, it's sure frustrating to be dealing with this on a weekend when I thought I would be doing totally different tasks!


And to seemingly make matters even more complicated, Alex is using our home laptop to upload a 23 minute video to youtube.com. It is from the (excellent) Shinedown concert we went to on Friday night. Glancing at the screen now, there are 1354 minutes remaining and it's at 28% done. 1354/60 = 22.56666666666667 hours. It's 8:22 AM (now) so his single video will not be completely uploaded until 6:22 AM tomorrow morning?!?

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