It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m home, vacation ended this morning as I went back to work. I wasn’t ready for it and I had something like 300 e-mails waiting for me on my work account.
It has been an interesting couple of days. Thursday I was set to get together with one of my friends but I hadn’t heard from my friend at the time we were supposed to get together. I was really worried about it because it was my last day there and it wasn’t like my friend not to contact me.
Hour after hour passed and I pretty much figured that my friend wasn’t coming. I feel so dumb for just waiting around and not going out to dinner or anything, but I hadn’t heard anything and they were set to meet me at the hotel. Then I flipped on the news … snow storm. 4 to 8 inches expected by morning rush hour. It was supposed to cover all three states that I was going to drive through.
I had planned on leaving at 6 am and getting home at 4 pm but with the snow, and since I was already up, I said “hey, why don’t I try it earlier?” This was probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. At that point I hadn’t had any rest all day. I really needed a nap and I should have made time to nap … I didn’t.
Heard from my friend about midnight. No big deal; relatives had come over and they couldn’t get away. Of course I was set to leave at 1 am so we got an hour to talk before I had to go. During our talk I put my big old 17″ Sony monitor on my bed with the rest of my stuff to go out to the car. When I sat down it flipped off the bed and fell about a foot and a half. It seems to be okay, I did plug it back in and it came on just fine. Bad sign for things to come though.
I did hit the road at exactly 1 am. The first hour or so was okay, I was over prepared with food and with sodas. By 3 am though, I was a mess. I almost fell asleep at the wheel. I found a rest stop and cleared my head. It was something like 10 degrees out and for some reason I had to go to the bathroom constantly. It was like I had the bladder of a small child. But I think that helped because I started a pattern of stopping at nearly every rest stop, going to the bathroom, walking around a bit and waking up, then hitting the road again.
I couldn’t just stop and sleep because snow was coming by morning. With that in mind I bought a couple of caffeine tablets at a rest stop. I will not recommend them to anyone. While they did pick me up as soon as they hit my system, every time the passed through my system, they actually made it worse than it should have been. I will NEVER do that again. I’ll just stay an extra day and wait out the storm instead of doing the stupid thing of driving all night.
With all the stops I made it home in 11 hours and 30 minutes, instead of the normal 10 hours and change. I don’t even know if it snowed there. It was clear the entire ride home.
Got home and at that point I had been up 30+ hours straight, the last 11 and change were spent driving. I was dead tired. I brought my stuff inside the house, said hi to my dad and explained to him that we got my mom Valentine’s day stuff, then crashed for a couple of hours.
When I got up I didn’t immediately put my computer back together. I sat there looking at my computer desk. I decided that I was going to get a usb 2.0 hub and put it on top of my computer desk to cut down on the number of cables I had on my floor (it was a total mess), I also decided to get a LCD monitor to take with me on the road.
Then I got to thinking. Shuttle XPC kits are on sale. I could take my DVD-RW drive and graphics card, get a new hard drive, sound card, some RAM and a processor, and that would make a nice little TV/VCR/tivo replacement unit. So that’s what I’m doing. With LCD, existing copy of Windows XP, old keyboard and mouse and make all my insanity come true.
After the last time I tried to build a computer … god I am insane.
k9