Dec 13 - organizing / leaving

Well, I wish that it were true. It actually did not take long to get organized. I have a couple of shelves in the garage where I accumulate things that are due to go back north, and Sandy had a bunch of stuff on a shelf inside. It did not take long to pack the car -- I had that done before noon, so that I knew if we were in trouble from a packing standpoint. So far so good, but somehow things "appear" at the last minute and we fill up.

I'm back from Mass, I just heard Sandy pull into the driveway returning from the grocery and drug stores. We needed milk & bread since we're packing sandwiches. We do that for the first day so that we are only Subway-ing-it for one day. I can't face a sub two days in a row and we've yet to find another lunchtime fast food place upon which we can count for wholesome food.

I spent a lot of the day screwing around (no better term to describe it) with VMware. If you remember my setup, I'm running VMware on each machine with Windows as a guest operating system. That way I can transport the Windows environment from place to place without transporting the PC. Well, I had copied the Windows environment to the spare PC and for some reason it wasn't booting (under VMware, that is). I thought that there was something wrong with the VMware installation, so I tried to update that a few times. Then I thought that there was something wrong with the copy, so I re-copied the files. Then I postulated that it was something wrong with the setup, perhaps I'd defined the environment too large for the spare PC. Next I tried ... oh, I forget all that I tried. It would start, pause and stop.

Finally I found that there was a log being created with the error and googled the error and found that VMware was complaining about working with NTFS files, which is what I had on the external hard drive on the spare PC. Windows NTFS is a useless filesystem, not allowing file level permissions etc. and it couldn't get an exclusive lock on a file. So ... there was something that I could use to override that, by editing a setup file and bingo -- awaaayyyyy we go. I was worrying that there was something that I was missing -- perhaps a file elsewhere -- that was critical and I would not be taking along. Time will tell whether that's the only issue -- I'll find that out on Tuesday at the cottage !

Nothing else really -- I got my haircut but did not do an oil change. It's not really required since I only have about 7-8,000 miles on this fully synthetic oil. That's since September ... it will last until the end of January, with another 4,000 miles or so. Perhaps if I had not been messing around with the PC I might have changed the oil.

We'll head over to the Sushi restaurant shortly.

Sandy spent much of the day cleaning the place. It's not large but still takes time. I think that she also finished up the Christmas cards. Perhaps I did something else, but I really cannot remember what ! Oh yes, I covered the barbecue -- woo woo !!

-----

Well, I meant to finish this blog this morning and post it but forgot. We're in Beckley now, an uneventful drive, which is always a good thing. The temperature is around 50F so as pleasant as we might expect this time of year. There are vestiges of a snowstorm still on the ground but melting fast.

We got away at 6:30 and arrived around 4:30. As usual, this segment is a 10 hour drive. Tomorrow's drive is usually longer but because we're stopping Oakville with Stef it's shorter.

That's about it. Abby was anxious to get out of the car, as were we. We're having a glass of wine now -- white because that's what Sandy brings -- and will likely head over to the Outback Steakhouse nearby for dinner. It's either that or Applebees -- both within walking distance. They both offer acceptable fare ... not as good as Sandy's cooking, but acceptable.

Over and out ..