A long night

I know I should get to bed earlier. But as I said last post, I have never been a morning person. I am far more inclined to stay up until the wee hours of the morning. Most nights though, I try to get to bed at a decent time, usually after watching Fraiser and the back-to-back Golden Girls episodes. The problem is that on Sunday nights, my usual shows aren’t on, so I tend to get distracted as to the time if I start watching a show. Case in point was the Travel Channel’s Samantha Brown. This time she is in Latin America. While kind of irritating, I find her oddly hypnotic to watch.

Anyhow, before I knew it, it was 1 AM and I needed to get up at 6:30. I had just climbed into bed, snuggled up between my sweetie and the cat, and had just fallen asleep when I thought I heard the alarm clock go off. Trying to shake off the sand man, I focused on the clock. 2:15am! WTF? Oh shit! It’s the buildings fire alarm going off. Adrenalin hits quickly as I leap out of bed throwing the cat about 4 feet in the air. I wake K up holler at Triskal to get up and start getting dressed. Barking orders for everyone to get up and start getting the dog and cats ready to go, I charge off down the stairs to find out what is going on. No one’s around as I find my way to the alarm panel. Auto alarm on floor 2. Shit, that means the smoke detector went off. Slowly people are starting to file down the stairs to head outside and wait for the fire department to show up. I grab another board member and head up to the 2nd floor and low and behold…nothing. No smoke, no flames, just the blaring of the alarm and the flashing strobe lights. Shit, another false alarm. I head back down to meet the fire department that is just pulling up. In the go carrying hoses up the stairs to find out what is going on. People are starting to mill around outside in their bathrobes and nightshirts, some carrying their pets or other things of value. A few minutes later the firemen come back down, shut off the alarm and tell us that they are not sure what set the system off, but that everything is ok.

Now with all the adrenalin going and confusion going on, you’d think I could be a little more concerned. But all I could think of was, damn these guys are hot! All look between 22 and 35, hunky, short hair and drop dead gorgeous! I’m thinking to myself how cool it would be to be rescued by a couple of them. LOL! That’s what happens when I get woken up from having so little sleep.

Well we all head back to our respective units. K and Triskal now are wide-awake and neither can sleep. All I want at this point is to have all the lights out so I can salvage some of the night. Not too much longer everyone goes back to bed, lights off, and now I am wide fucking awake. I hate it when I can’t sleep. It is like there is not one position you can lay and feel comfortable. An hour passes and finally the sand man finds his way back to our house and works his magic.

Next thing I remember is K shaking me trying to get me up. It is 5 AM and the fucking alarms are going off again. I swear I am going to rip them out off the wall. I trudge back down stairs and sure enough the same fucking alarm tripped again. I am now so irritated I head back upstairs determined to ignore it and screw the fact that this one might be real. K and Triskal have just stayed in bed this time. Here come the sirens again. Our neighbors have got to just love us at this point. I calm the pets down, get back in bed, close the window and pull a pillow over my head. The alarms finally silence. Back to sleep again. K, unfortunately can’t sleep this time and just decides to stay up since we were suppose to get up in an hour anyway. 6:30 finally rolls around and the clock is doing it’s oh so pleasant “Good Morning” wakeup song. Not 15 minutes later, here go the alarms again.

I turn on the TV and drag my sleepy ass into the shower and try and wash away this friking night.

Where Did Summer Go?

It's a windy, cold, cloudy day today. Looks like fall is finally here and what is sad is that it is officially still summer. I'm really not ready for summer to be over yet. In all honesty it isn't that cold, but 65 degrees after weeks of 80's and 90's is cold. On the sunny side is that it makes for great sleeping weather!. I have never been an morning person. In fact my most favorite part of the day is when I first wake up. All snug, comfy and warm, drifting in and out of consciousness. Days when the morning is cool or cold, makes it even better. Curse work days! This weekend I got to enjoy this guilty pleasure until around noon both days. Such a slacker, but God it was nice.

The java shack is hopping a bit more than usual today. It was the annual Aids Walk and I think that brought more people out. What is really bad is that I forgot all about it. Not that I was going to walk or anything (exercise, please...j/k), but the fact I forgot about it kinda sucks. In the past we would take the dog and walk down to the park and socialize. The past couple of years it has just come and gone. Now don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't support the cause. I actually donate to CAP every payday through payroll deduct. So I don't feel too guilty.

The weekend all and all has been pretty mellow. Thursday though, our external hard drive decided it no longer wanted to work. Talk about that old proverb, "Backup, backup, backup"! All of our photos from the last 6 and half years, music, videos, everything all gone. Ugh. Now most of it wasn't that important I kept telling myself. Music can be re-downloaded or burned, the program backups I still have on CD, the porn, well as important as that is, lol, can also be re-downloaded. But the personal photos and home videos, that is that part I was sick about. I tried everything to get it going again. Even went as far as taking it to Geek Squad where I was told that it could be sent to a data recovery service where they may be able to retrieve it (for a meager $500-$1500). Now the money factor not withstanding, I just don't feel comfortable sending in my drive and having strangers stumbling across all that porn! LOL! Well after a few hours surfing the net, I decided to try and simply take the drive from it's enclosure and try hooking it into and old desktop machine I have. And boom, it worked! Saturday I headed down to the big box store and bought a new drive. I then spent the next several hours copying data from the old drive to the new one. It is amazing what you discover doing this. 28,340 pictures. 12,000 songs. Jees, talk about being a digital pack rat. But I now have the important stuff back and the old drive is still working in the old desktop. I almost popped for an really cool drive that is actually two 500 gig drives. That would allow me to easily mirror the data from one to the other, but cash at the moment is not there. Instead I settled for new Seagate 500 gig external drive. It's pretty slick and even has a light bar on the front that pulsates like a Cylon. Now how cool is that. In a couple months I'll grab another one so that we have a more dependable backup than the old desktop. What a headache. But at least all our crap is back and safe! I really lucked out this time. The moral of the story boys and girls is to remember to backup your important shit.
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Life is going good all and all. Still status quo on most fronts. Work has been pretty mellow so that has been good. The task master is on vacation and that always makes things less stressful. On the home front, K and I are adjusting pretty well to having a roommate again. It is actually nice having someone else around. The best part is that he loves to cook! The house has been smelling wonderful with all of his creations. I know it has been hard for him to give up his place and move in with us, but hopefully it is working out ok for him. He is a good friend and it is good to have him around.

I still have a couple weeks of vacation left this year and am toying with the idea of heading to Phoenix to see my grandma. She hasn't been doing well recently and I know she would love the visit. It has been about 5 years since I was down there. K has always wanted to see Sedona, AZ so I am thinking we may try to arrange a drive trip where we can stop there and check the place out. It would be nice for K to get to see the Grand Canyon too. By driving we would also be able to bring the dog with us. K always worries about Rusty when we travel. so this would be nice. Hopefully we can arrange the days off together to make the trip happen. I'm sure it won't be as exciting as heading to the islands, but it would be nice to do for my grandma.

Well I know the post of late haven't been all that juicy or exciting, but I appreciate everyone sticking around through this dry spell. Still getting through some personal shit and hopefully soon I'll get back to my normal self. And start sharing more of all the weird fucked up shit that goes through my head. So stay tuned boys and girls. In the mean time, here is a photo to get your minds thinking. It's so fucking wrong... I love it!