The last few sniffles

Most of the cold is gone. I'm still dry-coughing once in a while, not enough to be annoying in the daytime, but it isn't helping me to sleep. Speaking of which, I didn't get much last night; my anger and frustration kept me tossing and turning despite the cough medicine (man, that codiene ain't doin' diddly!) and melatonin. I've had mild flushes of fever on and off. My voice sounds like me again.

I have a Linux box again; all 540 gigabytes are on-line once more, and the second drive device is my boot device. A combination of serendipity and persistence won out in the end; I re-installed RedHat 9, which only took about twenty minutes, by saying "Just build me a Gnome development station." I can excise the crap later with the software installation tool; it was enough to get me up and running. By luck, I had recently backed up my $HOME directory in anticipation of moving it to a larger partition, so that was intact-- my gnome sessions and X settings were there. Also, /usr/local was on a different partition that survived Window's evil, so all of my non-RedHat-approved extenions, like a working movie player, were all there. Much of the rest I was able to suck out of the laptop. I'll have to rebuild the kernel eventually to get USB and cryptography working, and I want (but don't need) the latest graphics drivers, the latest screensaver, and the MultiMediaSystem with MP3 (Redhat doesn't ship with it because they're afraid of legal crud).

Replacing the Windows disk looked to be troubling. 40GB drives, which the old one was, are about $90; so, for that matter, are 80GB drives. And Office Depot is selling a 120GB for $70 (after mail-in rebates). That's about 59¢s a gigabyte, not too bad. But work came through, offering me the same thing for $50, or 42¢s per. There was one 120GB drive left over from the last qualification round, when we went with a larger drive instead, leaving these in the closet. Go me.

I'm going to unplug all of my Linux drives from the power supply before I install Windows. Maybe I will invest in an XP upgrade; I quail at the notion, however.

Nicer parts of the weekend

I had a fever spike Saturday night that's probably best explained by the fact that Omaha, FallenPegasus and I hauled over a ton of rubbish to the dump: the last of the retaining wall, collected crud in the garage, fallen branches from the ice storm back in January. It was hard work, but we got it all done and "now we have room for more stuff."

Sunday, I spent a good chunk of the day with Kouryou-chan. She wanted to do "letter sounds" in the phonics book. We worked our way through the one-syllable 'e' sounds: 'bed', 'wet', 'ten', things like that. She's doing amazing things. Best cash we ever spent at a garage sale. She's barely four-and-a-half and Omaha informed me this morning that she can read Hop On Pop. FallenPegasus and I played a furious round of Old Maid with her. She helped me make the bed and clean out the car. I love spending time with her, she's such a marvel.

We ran out to the second-hand store and bought some soup bowls to replace the old green set, since I'd managed to drop the last of them on the floor while emptying the dishwasher that morning, shattering it into a million pieces. And we stopped by the supermarket to pick up some eggs, fruit, and tortillas, and she loudly reminded me several times, "I'm looking at the candy but I'm not going to touch it."

Gads, but I'm so tired right now. It's mostly a lack of sleep, but I'm also feeling flushed and hot, like the fever is trying to come back. I've hit most of my deadlines at the office and am just waiting for, as one person put it, "to let slip the leash" and let me write the next rev.