Saturday, June 27, 2009

A Family Working Weekend

“Unsettled.” That’s the weather word this weekend. Saturday could see some of those boomers that hit other parts of the state give the Greater Portland Area a whack. Or not. Possibility of more on Sunday. Or not. In fact, the weather folk tell us those chances could continue right into at least the middle of the week and the Weather Channel says all through the week.

The Channel Six weather person says this morning it will be partly sunny with those precipitation chances along with thunder and lightning. A lot will have to change as the day progresses, though, as it’s not starting out here in Gatorland very nicely at all.

I know Gator Daughter and her Golden Retriever will be here on Saturday. She is going to help us do a massive cleaning in the cellar. If we don’t get it all picked over before we run out of ambition Saturday, the project will continue Sunday.

That will give her dog and Gator Golden an opportunity to do some heavy playing. When the weather is not making wet, they’ll be on the outside, and that means a lot of running and wrestling. My bet is that they’ll probably also spend some time down in the cellar “helping” us.

We had a project similar to this one two or three summers ago. GG went behind a petition and came out with a mouse, no longer a challenge to her, in her mouth. It really was rather funny watching the rest of us react. GG just walked calmly over to her ‘mommy’ and gentle placed a present down in front of her.

I suspect all of us are hoping a repeat gift performance will not be forthcoming this weekend.

Because of my computer project (see post right below this one) Friday, I never did get out for that second mowing to vacuum up the rows of grass from Thursday. By the time a tech person from Dell and I finished getting my kitchen computer running again, the clouds were taking over and it looked like some rain. So at Gator Wife’s suggestion, we postponed for at least another day the lawn chore.

There are times when a suggestion is favorable to me that I marvel at what wonderful ideas she has.

I’ll probably spend some time this weekend reinstalling some programs on the now rejuvenated computer. The two Raid hard drives have become two separate drives to facilitate my automatic backup program. One would never believe how much time making that change consumed.

As I said the other day, my problems began when the computer was regularly crashing. The Dell diagnosis was the situation was a computer software problem so we reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP. The tech person hinted that if we had missed a “cancer” on the drive, this procedure would cure it.

Now I have to put my programs back. That’s an easy task, but if you’ve ever done it, you know it’s time consuming. My new backup program creates a bootable external hard drive, assuming one exists on the system, and copies everything, literally making a bootable mirrored image of the old drive. That eliminates all the work of putting individual programs and data files onto a new drive or a reformatted one.

There could be some sort of a cookout one of these two days, too.

That’s how the Gator Clan will be spending this weekend. Like I do every weekend, I’ll be making a loose list of ideas for the coming week. You might learn about one of them when we return Monday. Have a really super weekend.

GiM

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