Well Saturday. The array finished rebuilding around 5pm. Spent a little while preparing for the failback. Nervous moment as after a remote reboot the machine didn't come back - turned out the network interface just didn't come up - a common problem on 2650s. Met up with Jim and we began the failback and restore procedures. Files finished copying back in the middle of the night on Sunday. So Sunday morning checked all the files and reenabled the server service. And that was the end of that little drama.

Then this morning I got paged because the server room temperature was rising. I was running in slow motion after quite a lot of wine last night (dinner at Alan and Marylon's, needed to unwind of the stress of the weekend), but eventually dragged myself into work. Dead aircon. Yay. Opened up the server room door and mounted a couple of fans in the doorway. Waited for people to turn up to come and fix. Turned out other circuits were dead too. The sparkies switched back on the other circuits but wouldn't touch the aircon circuit. So had to wait for the aircon contractors to turn up. They flicked the aircon curcuit back on but it died a minute or so later, taking the other circuits with them. Yay. So they left it off, brought up a portable aircon, and decided there was a faulty compressor, which will take a few days minimum to have replaced.

So I was a zombie for most of today. Went home early and had a bit of a sleep, only interrupted by occasional calls from telemarketers etc.

No more disasters allowed for at least another week. It's the rules.

Gosh today was stressful. Well at least the morning was. Hammering, drilling, partitioning, NOISE! And trying to fix broken live things and get everything done before the weekend. The afternoon was a little better, although worried that when Jodi comes back next week and everyone moves in they'll want to start throwing things out. Bit stressed out I won't be there for moving day :(

Have had some Drambuie and vodka and watching the Grammys and feeling significantly better...

I don't deal with stress. And odd things stress me out.

Like tonight I practically had a nervous breakdown because my monitor keeps dying, and sometimes the only way to get it back is just turn it off and on until it comes back. But that can take up to half an hour of fighting with it.

It stressed me out rather a lot.

And what's the deal with the weather? It's 11oclock at night and it's *still* 30C !

I spent most of today without internet! Without even a mobile! I felt terribly cut off :)
But had a lovely day with Dave & Yvonne and The Child (and Stu of course ;) , swimming and 4 wheel driving (in my laser, it was a bit hairy!), and barbequeing and just generally relaxing. Feeling extremelly tired now though. And a detour at the M5/M7 interchange was a bit stressful. But got The Child dropped off safely and now about to crash in the general direction of a bed.

I've had "one of those days".

Starting at 6am waking up from a horrible dream where I'd deliberately made a friend go blind.

Tailgater number 1: (tailgaters distract me more than just about anything else on the roads, I can't just let it go because of the stress and worry that they're going to hit me), distracted me while changing gears, turning a corner, trying to avoid the passing traffic, trying to decide whether the pedestrian was close enough to the crossing to have to stop for. In the end I was distracted enough to not know which gear to put the car into and just rolled slowly over the crossing. oops.

Morning was blah. Was feeling insecure over something that happened last night, but when I told Stu about it he got sad and so I got even sadder. A very sad downward spiral.

Tailgater number 2: ever tried to find parking with someone on your butt? (and they'd been up my butt for the last kilometre) So trying to park with idiot behind me, distracted, scraped my car on another. Yay. Scratched their bumper, which the dude wants to replace, gonna be up for hundreds of dollars I reckon.

And Stu's internet connection isn't working.

Maybe I should just go to bed and get the day over and done with.

As seen at Dave's, then Karla's: (editor's note: just saw it on Neil's too, but I'm a bit behind on his blog cause he posts so frequently heh. Second editor's note: it was on Kevin's site too, but I'm a bit behind there too heh)

Seven things I plan to do before I die...

1. Get married. Preferably to Stu if he'll have me
   
2. Spend at least three months touring Europe
   
3. Tour the south/east of the USA/Canada
   
4. Learn to scuba dive
   
5. Watch a (human) baby being born
   
6. Go to Tasmania
   
7. Go into space. OK so this really isn't a realistic one, but I'd still love to do it
   

1. Give a half decent massage
   
2. Touch type
   
3. Play the recorder at a basic level
   
4. Keep tropical fish
   
5. Take care of windows servers
   
6. Program perl at a very basic level
   
7. Follow instructions
   

1. Eat wasabi
   
2. Eat blue vein cheese
   
3. Lie convincingly
   
4. Play the piano (more than the very basics)
   
5. Not stress over "insignificant" things
   
6. Relate well to people
   
7. Imagine life without Stu
   

1. Smile
   
2. Eyebrows
   
3. Skin and hair
   
4. Confidence
   
5. Humour
   
6. Generosity
   
7. Affection
   

1. Ping
   
2. It wasn't me, I didn't do it
   
3. Are we having fun yet?
   
4. Can I go home now?
   
5. Doh!
   
6. Damned flipping
   
7. Good morning!
   

1. Star Trek VI, by JM Dillard
   
2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by JK Rowling
   
3. The rest of the Harry Potter books
   
4. Boy, and Going Solo, by Roald Dahl (actually anything by Roald Dahl)
   
5. Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton
   
6. Fox in Sox, by Dr Seuss
   
7. Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, by Robert O'Brien
   

Although I just noticed there were only six groups of seven.. odd..
(editor's note: the seventh group of seven is for tagging seven people, but I don't *do* tagging heh)

My mother has recently gotten email, and keeps getting sent those soppy/inspirational chain mail things from a friend of hers which she passes onto me. Normally I read them and go "that's nice" and that's it. But there was a line in one of them recently that stood out. It said:

"You can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights."

Which I thought was fairly inspired. I don't know so much about the rainy day. I guess it depends on what you had planned to do with it :) Rainy days don't affect me all that much for the most part, because I'm rather an indoors girl. I can get mildly irritated if I have to get wet, but given Sydney's drought conditions and the scarcity of rain, I generally consider rain to be a good thing.

Lost luggage. Fortunately this has never happened to me. But I imagine I'd get pretty stressed out about it. A lot would depend on whether I was coming or going, who I was with, and what options there were for its retrieval. But in terms of getting stressed out by crap like that, a lot depends on who I'm with and how *they're* reacting to the situation. That is, if the person I'm with is getting stressed out (for example, my parents), I will remain relatively calm. If noone else is getting stressed, then I probably will. Go figure.

Tangled Christmas Tree lights. Well that depends on whether it's me trying to untangle them first up, or someone else has been doing it and has given up. If it's just me, I might get a bit flustered if the temperature is high, but probably not. Untangling I see as more of a puzzle situation that needs to be solved. Especially if someone else has given me the task.

I don't do a whole lot of thinking. I try and avoid thinking as a general rule. Some would see this as strange I guess. My mind is always full of *noise*, often from the tv, or reading blogs, or chatting. I don't stop. This could also be why it takes me at least half an hour to get to sleep, because it's just so noisy in my head. And not with anything useful, just clutter.

The only time I do any sort of thinking is usually when I'm driving. It's the place where I get the least mental input and can actually ponder over things, or more usually stress about stuff. It's where I usually get great ideas for blogging, and I sit there and think about how I should word it. The problem is, you can't blog legally in the car, and by the time I've gotten home, had dinner, chatted, watched tv, read emails, read blogs, it's far too late and I have no energy to write. Although strangely, this entry was going to be a quick entry saying how I didn't feel like articulating all of this, and yet here it is.. go figure. Must be Friday. Fridays rock.

On an unrelated tangent, Stu gave me one of his treble recorders to play with, and I've found O For a Thousand Tongues works quite well on it (the little descant recorder goes into "screech" notes making it quite difficult to play). Sadly I found only three other hymns that I know in the hymn book that don't go down too low to play on it (it only goes down to F, and most stuff goes down lower than that, so I'd have to rearrange the octaves - far too complicated!

I have a busy weekend ahead, and hoping to get more than a ten minute stretch of time to talk to my boy.

I felt strangely at peace today. Of course a solid 8.5 hours of sleep helped immensely. But unusually I wasn't stressed about being late for work or adding 15 minutes to my trip by crossing to the other side of the road to get petrol (a trip which involves crossing the highway twice and three sets of traffic lights), or crazy people on the roads, or the impending deadline for our new website (which Peter is much more stressed over than anyone else). I felt vaguely like there is much more to life than day-to-day trivialities. That Stu is probably the only thing of any real importance in my life at the moment, the only thing worth worrying/caring about. I had all these ideas about some sort of profound blog entry about it all, but two sentences was about as good as I could get it, heh.

I did get moderately stressed out when I spent most of the day trying to get one thing done that should have taken an hour or two, but blew out to four or five after interruption after interruption after interruption. I was getting ready to disconnect my phone and shut down icq just to get some peace.

Spent the evening catching up on blogs, chatting to Arian and half watching reruns of CSI and will wander off in the general direction of bed shortly.

.. oh I forgot.. I also spent a couple of hours after work today flying up and down the coast on Google Earth, marking out points where I took photos out of the plane. And only did about half of them too :)

No matter that it may be irrational, I hate being the cause of angst in others. I find it distressing. Apologies to all of you.