5 Things Make Quite a Day

[hrj]

1. The two local brothers showed up last night to stage for a flight out of SFO this morning, courtesy of HRJ's Park-and-Fly service. I set the alarm for 5:30 (assuming worst-case traffic and airport security). Somehow, in the process, I also managed to set the clock ahead two hours. I was up, dressed, had the car half packed, and pulled out the 'Phone to play solitaire while everyone else got ready when I noticed ... what the bleep? Why does my phone say it's 4am? (Quoth cryptocosm on his way to the bathroom, "I was wondering what you were doing up already.") I went back to bed in my clothes and managed to get most of another hour and a half of sleep. In retrospect, given that I had carefully planned to go to bed at 10am in anticipation of an early morning, I should have twigged to something when the clock read 12:30 as I turned out the light. And I thought I'd just gotten sucked into reading e-mail for too long.

2. Current news on the mom front is that they'll start making the arrangements tomorrow to move her home under hospice care. The mobility-unfriendliness of the house has become irrelevant. "Hospice care" still means we could be talking anywhere from days to months, depending.

3. I took the iMac to the local Apple genius bar for diagnosis and, alas, it seems the motherboard is toast. A bit more literally than the usual sense -- it seems to have overheated at some point and fried some of the capacitors. It's technically repairable, but the cost (instead of a couple hundred for new RAM) would be up in the same ballpark as a decent external monitor (see previous discussion of my analysis of my computing habits). So, with regret, I don't think I'll spring for repairing it. The Macworld expo will be soon enough to think about monitor shopping. The genius bar guy also pointed out that many components are still quite usable, e.g., I could stick the hard drive in a housing and use it as an external drive. If I can set it up with a usb connection, that would be nice, since my two current (non-Time Capsule) externals are firewire, which my Macbook doesn't support.

4. In view of #3, I would like to reiterate my love and wholehearted endorsement of Apple's Time Machine/Time Capsule automated continuous backup system. This is the first time I've had a major computer failure that involved absolutely no loss of data. (In fact, I've already gone ahead and moved all the iMac-based files onto the laptop.)

5. In view of #1, I am now about to go to sleep at 9pm. The last thing I need at the moment is to get sick because I ran myself into the ground.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Home care will probably be comforting for her, at least. Best wishes.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

It's what she specifically said she wanted. When she started the cancer treatment, they had her fill out an extensive "end of life care" questionnaire. However creepy it may seem at the time, it's really helpful at the end.

[goldenstag.livejournal.com]

...since my two current (non-Time Capsule) externals are firewire, which my Macbook doesn't support.

That's kinda funny in a technogeeky way ... since firewire was invented by Apple ...

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I feel the irony. It burns.