Hardware Annoyances

I'm not sure what's wrong with my computer. I've always had a twonky hard-drive; it has a beta release of its BIOS because it was a remainder from work. 250GB for $50 wasn't bad, but it has always had a problem with UDMA6 setting, and now the behavior between it and the DVD drive is crashing my linux box. It's always a hardware problem with my linux boxen. *Sigh* I'm looking for a good PCI IDE Controller, since I have four hard drives and the CD and DVD recorders.

I moved a lot of stuff around, and the problem drive gets its own IDE channel now. It seems to be stable. I'm beating on the drive, writing six streams of television, reading one, and a heavy-duty processing stream for a DVD transfer. I wonder if the 2.6.9 kernel has some stabilization of the IDE controller, otherwise...

I'm just annoyed. If it's not one thing, it's another.

Thursday

Well, after picking Kouryou-chan up from school, we went over the park and the library, where she played on the slide and the swings, and then we picked up Edward Fudwupper Fibbed Big and I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today, both of which Kouryou-chan can read without a problem. I fed her hamburgers and boxed up years of Child, Cooking Light, and Dr. Dobbs, all of which will get moved to the garage and, if I'm honest, will probably never get read again. The recipies from CL are all in a compendium, which we get, and takes up the space of maybe three issues. Plus, our subscription gives us access to the complete on-line recipie database, so it's not like any of this is problematic.

I gave Kouryou-chan a bath and let her watch Kimba the White Lion, and then put her to bed after reading the aforementioned library books. I didn't sleep well. A certain little girl crawled into bed with me about midnight and kept kicking me in the back.

I woke up when the alarm went off and crawled out of bed, most unhappy, made coffee, fed Kouryou-chan her breakfast (she asked for a breakfast bar, so that's what she got), made her lunch, and was getting her ready to go when tygereclipse asked for a ride to work. I was heading into downtown anyway, so I said "sure."

I wish I'd known how far north of downtown her work was. It was an extra forty minutes of round-trip before I made it to my destination: Re-PC, which took our dead monitor, dead computer, and miscellaneous parts and disposed of them responsibly.

That moment of overwhelm in a bookstore

Well, the Rockbox is psychic again. Bottle Rocket is rockin' instrumental, and in this case percussion. Good stuff.

Along the way of doing the errands, I stopped at Half Price Books and dropped off a paper bag full of mostly geek stuff. It was a little sad to finally let go of my Taligent stuff, but that was ages ago and I didn't need it for nostalgic purposes. They gave me eight bucks.

And as I walked through the bookstore, wondering what I could buy with eight bucks, I came to an overwhelming realization: I could buy anything I wanted, but I didn't want to. I have a backlog, you see: all three of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and Ventus and The Psychohistory Crisis, and goddess knows how many thousand other books are in my "to read" list. And I do mean "thousands". How many? I estimate there are, and I'm not exaggerating, at least 3900 books in my "to read" list-- and many of them are on my shelves! Not to mention the hundreds of hours of unwatched anime, and the thousand hours I have of audiobooks, and my Japanese classes...

You get the picture. To get me to read something "new", it has to be damnably compelling. Otherwise, it's just going to the end of a very, very, very long queue.

Late Afternoon

(I'm sorry for dumping these all at once. I write them on my laptop as I go along and only send them to LJ later, when I get home.)

I went over to Kouryou-chan's school half an hour early because I had to take her to her doctor's appointment. That was half excitement, half trial. The fun part was when we got there. The nurse was taking her vitals and doing the usual run-through of developmental milestones: "Can you hop on one foot? Can you skip? What color is this? And this?" And then there was, "Can she recognize any letter shapes?"

I pointed at the wall. "Kouryou, what does that sign say?"

"Which one?"

"The one on the door?"

"Please turn off your cell phone while in the examination room."

The nurse shook her head. "I guess she can." We ran through the rest of the examination in quick order. The doctor came in and gave her the same bit. We're a little worried about her persistent winter cough and her skin looks rougher than it should in places, but otherwise she's in great health. Tall and thin for her age, but not too drastic about either. And then it was time for her shots. She did not like that at all, especially since one of them was a tetanus immunization.

Oh, but that wasn't the worst of it. Oh, no. Then we had to go to another building to get a blood draw. And the intern fucked up the thumb draw. And she hated the thumb draw. It wasn't until the experienced nurse came over and did an elbow draw, during which she was freaking out and I was holding her down in that way that makes you feel more like a horrible monster than a loving father, but it had to be done.

Afterwards, I held her in the lobby and comforted her until she stopped crying, then hurtled north again to pick up Yamaarashi-chan from her daycare. We're home now and the girls are watching Kimba the White Lion. I'm going to go make adult Mac'n'Cheese.

My Yearly Dose of Angst and Anguish

So, while I was making dinner, my mother called. I think she was drunk, which is a rare condition for her these days, thankfully, but when she gets that way she calls me up and gives me an hour of angst and anguish. And oh, boy, did she have a lot saved up this time.

Y'see, my father and I aren't talking. Or, rather, my father isn't talking to me. I've sent him letters and tried to reach out to him, but to no avail. My mother suspects that my sister, who has contact with him, has been trying to poison my relationship with him, but we don't have any idea why. He sent Kouryou-chan a happy birthday card, but no return address on it. Omaha wondered if maybe he was trying to avoid having us throw the card away before Kouryou-chan got it.

Anyway, she said all sorts of things that were typical for her. And a few that surprised me. My father has a daughter from a previous marriage, and apparently she has come out of the closet, and my mother said, "Don't be mad at her. I know how you feel about those kinds of people, but, hey, if she's happy she's happy." I'm not out to my mother, obviously, and I think she was projecting since I don't recall ever having the subject of gays and lesbians come up in conversation. She also said that she was glad to send me away to a boarding school, "even if you were the token Jew because, you know, if you went to school down here like your brother did, you'd be in a school where your peers would all be low class, and I didn't want that."

She said a lot of other things that I tried not to take offense or be hurt over, especially not the racial epithets about the people moving into her neighborhood from "down south." I don't think I was appropriately contrite with some of the sacrifices she mentioned she'd made along the way. Oh, well.

So she has it in her mind that she's going to talk to my father and try to figure out what I can do to make amends to him. First, I think I'd like to know what he thinks is wrong. And if twelve years isn't enough time for forgiveness. I hate to think that the next time I see him is gonna be at his funeral. And heck, even if he doesn't want to talk to me, he should at least talk to his granddaughter. Of all of his children, I'm the only one who has a normal life. My sister never wants to be more than a cog in the service sector, has no children and no prospects and is probably going to wake up at 42, slap herself in the forehead and shout, "Oh, shit, I forgot to have a life!" My brother is wasting away as manager of some mid-range hotel and like my sister has no family to suceed him and no prospects. I'm the only one who did anything interesting with my life. I'd like at least to thank him for giving me all the tools I needed.

My only problem is that I don't think he'd understand what I was thanking him for. My parents gave me the finest secondary and college education money could provide and my poor scholarship could sustain, and they tried hard. I've gotten to the point where I understand what they were doing. Maybe I needed to have kids of my own, and a mortgage, and a cat and trees in the backyard that need me. Still, I wish he'd give me the chance.

Scrambled Elf Brains

After dinner, I sat Yamaarashi-chan down and made her read for 20 minutes, as her class assignment requires. She tried making it difficult by picking out three books that had almost no words, but I finally got her to read a Stuart Little adaptation that was lying around the house, as well as Baloney (Henry P.), which is a fun little exercise. Kouryou-chan read off in her corner, and everything was good.

The desktop threw more fits. I tinkered with it. I'm running another stress test right now. I don't think the on-board sensors are trustworthy: they're reporting that the CPU temperature is 101C, but the motheboard is only 37C. That can't be right; I suspect the raw-to-human-readable algorithms are screwed. I'm not running the sensors inside the hard-drives; I'm taking a definite don't monkey with it attitude.

Kouryou-chan, for being so brave during her blood draw, got a coupon good for a free ice cream cone down at Baskin Robbins, so I took the girls there. They both ate daquiri sherberts; I had a single scoop of blueberry cheesecake icecream.

By the time I got home, Kouryou-chan had fallen asleep in the car. I tucked her in. I'm going to do some housework and head to bed myself.