Oct 29 - Mom's birthday

October 29, April 11, June 6 ... dates that will stay in my memory even though birthdates won't be celebrated, the first two in remembrance, Mom and Dad lived their 4 score (almost); the third in sadness, health and happiness not realized.

I loaded pictures onto the family website today -- www.wdthompson.com -- updating "recent" with all of the pictures from our trip to Europe and also adding "alexander", comprising the pictures that Jeffrey and Sara had accumulated. As I saw them, a wave of sadness hit me, melancholy ... they are hard to look at.

I accomplished another tier of getting up-to-date with my computer setup, updating GRUB, the boot loader and installing that on the two external bootable drives, eliminating a point of failure. That also allowed me to upgrade the file systems to EXT4 from EXT3 (Linux file systems). Running the old version of GRUB caused a number of problems - out-of-date blocksizes and file systems etc. I've also partially created a duplicate drive, so I'm almost finished this exercise. This has been pending for two years and it took the disk failure kick-in-the-pants to get me going.

Also on the to-do list since we got here was replacing a broken sprinkler head. They are pretty short lived, shouldn't have been installed alongside the drive. I've also got a leaking kitchen faucet. I managed to get the top cap off and need a hex allen key that is larger than 10mm and 3/8. I'm not sure of the exact size nor am I sure whether it's Metric or Imperial. Another day.

I went to Mass this afternoon because I'm planning on doing 200k tomorrow. We had heavy rains today and it's supposed to rain Monday too. Monday is the last day of the month so tomorrow is my almost-last-chance.

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While we were having dinner I had some file copies running from the operational (new) drive to the drive that wasn't dead but seemed to have developed corrupted files. I'd restored the operating system on it and it booted fine so I was hopeful that the issues were a fluke ... but that doesn't seem so. I checked it at one point and about 50gb had been copied, out of 200gb. All seemed well. Later I checked again and the computer was frozen ... oh oh. I rebooted and there was no problem with the aforementioned operational drive, but the formerly crapped-out drive seems to have files on it that I cannot see. I'll do a little more investigation but don't have high hopes.

We had shrimp for dinner last night, fresh never-frozen shrimp caught locally. Sandy gets them at the Saturday market. Broccoli and rice completed the picture of a simple yet excellent meal.

I'm planning on 200k today but it's terrifically windy. According to the weather forecast the wind was supposed to be from the NE but I can see the waves running from the south by the lights of the yacht club and see our banana trees blowing. This could be tough.

Speaking of fruit, I've had papaya from our tree out front and it's great ! There must be another two dozen on the tree ... does anyone have a good recipe for papaya ? What does one do with so much papaya ?

It's going to be hard not to wimp-out and skip this 200k.

Onward ...