jimsjournal
This was just a quiet Autumn weekend...
About all I did Friday night was to write and post an entry... didn't even fix dinner... Sean had some friends over, with plans to go into town to catch a movie at 7pm but those plans fell through (not that unusual for plans put together by 16-year old males) but then two of his buddies were going to sleep over so he persuaded me to get some pizza (one large sausage and two large bacon-and-ham) and I decided that while I was getting that I would pick up some falafel for Nancy and me. The boys and the pizza and vast quantities of Mountain Dew disappeared into Sean's room and Nancy and I enjoyed falafel and a beer in peace and quiet (Jennifer was out with friends)...
Saturday morning I tried to get up before seven but just couldn't manage -- I'd been up earlier to feed a certain cat who insisted that he was starving but after accomplishing that mission I headed straight back to bed -- Jennifer got home from work around 7:30 and a few minutes later she brought us coffee and then she brought Nancy breakfast (I prefer to sit at a table for breakfast) so we did manage to avoid sleeping-in too decadently late. Read the paper, do some household chores, drive Sean and his friends to the East Matunuk Fire Station (annual Boy Scout food drive), then go to the library, and then go grocery shopping. Come home, have lunch, do some other stuff (can't even remember most of it), mail delivery brought the latest issue of New England Runner magazine (with a great story about a 5k race held in Binghamton, NY -- our former home).... then while Nancy went to five o'clock service at church, I got in a brief workout with weights, take a shower, make a salad, grab a bottle of wine... off to Nancy's mother's for dinner... a very pleasant gathering including Nancy's sister and brother-in-law and their kids (middle school, high school, and college graduate... plus his girl friend) plus another one of Nancy's sisters (yes, I really do like my mother-in-law).
If you thought Saturday was wild and exciting, just wait until I tell you about today... This morning I got up and fed the cat around six a.m. and then went back to bed until almost 7:30 again. Read the Sunday paper... peaceful Sunday morning, fat Sunday paper, two or three cups of hot black coffee... ah... Nancy had gone to meet her mother and sisters for breakfast out (after they went to eight o'clock mass)... Sean had slept over at a friend's house Saturday night (sleepover = stay up all hours playing video games) and he and I had plans to drive up to Warwick to shop for a harddrive for his computer. He added plans to meet his girl friend (who was shopping with her mother and younger brother) at the Sears store in Rhode Island Mall... so we dashed up there and she joined us as we went to CompUSA where I bought Sean a 40 Gigabyte Maxtor drive... he said he was more interested in size than speed so we got a 5400 rpm model (besides which, I think his current drive is that speed)... then off to Barnes and Noble books where I bought myself three books -- JSP: Java Server Pages (Barry Burd); Java Objects: From Concepts to Code (Jacquie Barker); and Building Java Enterprise Systems with J2EE (Perrone and Chaganti) -- that list was in increasing size order, 425 pages, 665 pages, and 1496 pages (yeah, that's not one for reading in bed)... So I ended up spending more than thirty dollars more on those books than I did on the new drive! (Actually, it's worse than that because that book store has a Starbucks coffee shop in it and I joined Sean and his girlfriend there and ordered a cappuccino -- big mistake -- I'm not a huge fan of Starbucks -- but that's partly because of all the hype -- there are many coffee shops with better coffee at lower prices -- but usually their coffee is not bad -- this was vile!
Came home -- helped Nancy take down the spideweb decorations I had put up on the front porch -- then I got Sean to help me clean leaves and debris out of the rain gutters -- actually, he did the most of the cleaning while I held the ladder steady because, as he put it, his bones could handle a fall better than mine could. Hmmm, an sixteen year old weightlifter vs. a fifty-eight year old software geek, yeah, guess he had a point. Then I got into yard work -- raking leaves, mowing an area of grass in the front that was green and long and shaggy looking (unlike the rest of the lawn in front that had already turned brown and gone into hibernation for winter), then raked more leaves... and then raked still more leaves... and then it was too dark to do any more yardwork. Told Sean that there was an area along the side of the house and in the backyard that could benefit from being mowed Monday or Tuesday after school, depending on the weather.
Made pasta sauce for dinner (with Italian sausage made from chicken), served with mini penne pasta, crusty French bread, salad. I was feeling pretty tired by then so I was glad that Sean's girlfriend's mother came and picked her up so I didn't have to drive her home (she lives fifteen miles away and I don't think there's a speed limit greater than 40 mph anywhere along that route)
Started this entry, paused to watch Band of Brothers (tonight was the tenth and final episode), then got called in by Sean as a consultant to his drive installation. It seems he really doesn't have a free bay... currently has a CD (a burner as well as a reader), his original harddrive, a Zip drive, and a diskette drive. When he got the CD burner he had to install it where his original CD drive was because that was the only fullsize bay with an opening available. I had thought he still had an internal bay, but he doesn't (damned mini-towers)... I asked if he could install the new drive below the other drives... he thought he'd try that but then discovered the cable wouldn't reach from ATA to master to slave... so right now he is trying to install both drives together below the other bays. Either it will work or it won't.
Anyway, that was my not-so-exciting weekend... Guess I'd better upload this to Geocities and go see how Sean is making out with his computer...
He was successful... partitioned it as drives D and E at twenty gigabytes each... and says that now that he has an empty bay (since he moved the old drive and has both hard drives installed in the lower part of the case) he's going to find the original CD drive and put it back in.
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