The beating continues

So yesterday morning I woke up around 4:45 am. I was really tired so I tried to get back to sleep, but the hard drive problem so weighed on my mind that after an hour of tossing and turning it was apparent that I was awake, so I got up. This will become important later. The day was relatively uneventful, I even talked my boss into letting me go home early so that I could work on the hard drives before the play I had tickets to that night.

So when I got home I pulled one drive out of the freezer, I stuck it in my computer, I booted it up and viola! There she was in all her glory. It happened to be the C: drive, which fortunately had our financial records and my wife's e-mail, but was mostly devoid of any other data. I got everything I wanted off and it still wasn't having issues, so I shut down and decided to try the other drive. As soon as it started up I could hear the dreaded click, and as you might imagine it didn't come up. So success for the freezing method is currently at 50%.

This leads me to believe that the D: drive was the one with the problem, and either because of heat or something else it managed to cause C: to have problems as well, as evidenced by the fact that C: was also clicking (not as loudly) and that the computer wouldn't boot at all. In any event D: is back in the freezer and the time has come to try other more desperate tactics, like hitting it, hard, and then if that doesn't work I'll open it up and try spinning the disks by hand... But in all honesty we're probably out of luck on that disk. C: performed well enough that I'm going to put it back in the computer and see how long it lasts, particularly now that I have a backup.

In any case after spending a couple of hours fooling around with the hard drives it was time for the play. We were going with some good friends of ours. Normally we do dinner before the play, but they couldn't get a babysitter early enough so we ended just having dessert at a nearby restaurant. Even though it was less time than normal the dessert portion of the evening, with the good conversation, ended up being the highlight of the evening. The play was pretty bad. The creative director of the local theater fancies himself a playwright, so he decided to do a loose translation of a french farce and toss in elements from a bunch of other french farces, and stage that mongrel. It was heavy-handed, over-acted, poorly constructed, sophmoric, messy and loud. Without that last element I might have been able to catch up on my sleep, but no such luck.

As a result by the time I got home I could barely keep my eyes open. Unfortunately (for them as well as me) my youngest had missed us so much that she got up and started crying, and the oldest son had come down with a migraine so he was throwing up (excellent timing on his part to wait until the baby sitter was gone) so in between the piteous wails of one child and the retching of another (perfectly timed to go off as soon as I had fallen asleep) what I experienced resembled the haze of dementia more than blissful slumber. The youngest quickly ended up in our bed where she kept her mind of her limitless sorrow by periodically elbowing me in the throat or kicking me in the solar plexus. By 3 or 4 in the morning the next youngest had wormed into bed and using superior numbers they smothered my wife and pushed me so close to the edge of the bed that only the counter-balancing weight of enormous gut kept my center of gravity over the mattress.

I whine therefore I am