LIFE: The Birthday That Was...

... a mixture of the best and the worst.

First, the BEST! An early start with nice words from an editor for my novel. Later, a relatively peaceful and quiet mid-day. Birthday treats in the form of TWO serving containers of lemon tarts (no meringue, naturally). And then I scored pretty good in the gift department, with the O'Neills doing the presentation. Another of the APC Pro 1000 Back-UPS was a welcome sight. And now I have a Slingbox. My TV wherever I want it ... with the Tablet coming in August. Or simply watching Dog Whisperer upstairs instead of traipsing down the stairs to see it on the big TV. And, it's a bit weird to hold a real life book, you know, the kind made out of dead trees, for the first time in a year. And I'm about a third of the way through it at this point. No surprise, it's the (17th) annual mid-year Stephanie Plum book by Janet Evanovich, a birthday tradition at this house. And I even got a Happy Birthday song from Georgia at Comic Warehouse.

But in to each day getting older, like officially older, there must come some doom and gloom. A couple of phantom unreproducible errors at two clients caused some consternation, although I found almost a reason for one of them. Then, I found out one of my clients screwed over a friend. I had to be talked down from firing the client right there and then. I'm still mad about it, but all that's going to happen in the short term is that the client has lost favoured nation status and the client's needs will be met when all else is done for everybody else. My upset eventually let to a fairly bad asthma attack right after the O'Neill's left. I could give you the details, but I'll simply say that it was unpleasant, as most stress-induced asthma attacks are. Lastly, one of the two terabyte drives in one of my network array of storage boxes is giving signs of giving up the ghost. I naturally missed the earliest signs last night and this morning. Soooo, after recovering (and cleaning up) from the asthma attack, it was a little disconcerting to see the big list of files on the backup drive disappear. From any computer connected to it. Patrick talked me through rebooting the NAS box and then rebooting Popeye and shutting down file managers on the other connected computers. After all of that, everything LOOKED normal. But, it's still clicking and clicking is NEVER good for hard drives. So, the backup is being backed up. Hope it lives that long.

Today is Angela's BFF Megan's birthday. I guarantee her's won't be like mine. Or at least I hope not. We are talking about an 'ornery' old guy (as I was described about 28 hours ago) and a 15-year old girl. Enjoy yours Megan.