I am an idiot.
Well, I don't think I'm stupid, per se, but I make some really dumb mistakes from time to time.
Case in point: yesterday, while trying to burn a data DVD, I overwrote basically my entire hard drive.
I'm not kidding, folks. The DVD authoring program I use on Linux writes to a temp file before it burns the disc image. There's a specific directory it writes to, and each time it burns a new disc it dumps whatever is in that directory, deletes it, and overwrites it with the new stuff. Yesterday, I accidentally selected the Desktop directory. Unlike in Windows, where most of your desktop icons are just shortcuts to those files on your hard drive, in Linux to make shortcuts to those files it's really difficult (depending on which OS you use, and which version). I, therefore, use the desktop as the hard drive, because it's faster and easier.
When I accidentally overwrote all the files on my desktop I lost countless files and tons of important data -- an estimated 60GB of podcasts I'd downloaded over the past year or so and archived, ALL of my stuff for the university (including every lesson plan, grade worksheet, quiz, and assignment I've written for this semester), my entire pictures archive of me and Daisy, all of my tax/insurance/important info, etc. Everything. Gone. Gone in a matter of seconds, and unrecoverable.
The last backup I made of all of this important stuff was in July, so I was able to stick that flash drive in and recover most of my most important stuff, but as for anything I'd done this semester for my classes? It was gone. I had to go out to Blackboard and re-download everything I had uploaded for my students. I had to completely remake my lesson plans and assignment sheets for the projects that are coming up but I haven't distributed to my students yet. I had to email my 210 students and ask if one of them could send me a scanned copy of the Business Letter assignment, as I'd given out all of my copies in class and didn't have a digital one to put on Blackboard or go from when it comes to grading (don't worry, one of my best students replied with that ASAP). When it came down to it, all I'd really lost was everything since July, and all of my podcasts. ALL of them. Most of what I've lost is either recoverable or re-do-able, but it will take some time to put it all back together. The podcasts alone will take weeks to go back out and re-download, and many of the ones I had cannot be replaced as they are now offline. The school stuff I tend to redo most of every semester anyway, or at least edit and streamline, and it's not like I lost any of my coursework from grad school. I did, however, lose a fair amount of resume/CV edits and cover letters/applications I'd sent out since July.
I'm trying to see the positives in the scenario; it did scrub most of my hard drive clean, and got rid of a lot of stuff that I didn't necessarily need but had kept anyway. The most important stuff I always backed up anyhow, but I thought I'd backed up everything since July, and apparently I hadn't. The best thing about it is that I didn't lose any of my email or important messages, or most of the paperwork I needed to keep for a lot of different things. The worst? Well, as time progresses I'll figure that out. I lost the sixteen-page letter I'd been writing to my grandmother, for example. I lost the pictures of, and stories about, my deceased sister -- including the digital copy of her obituary. It's the things like that which feel like a punch to the gut. Those are things that I really can't replace, honestly, but the important stuff remains mostly intact from my backups. I spent the entire day yesterday writing and re-writing the semester's lesson plans and assignments, trying to piece everything back together and make the rest of the semester work. By the end of the night, frazzled and stressed, I'd gotten most of that stuff back to normal, or as close to normal as it needs to be as we only have six weeks of actual classes left, and (aside from the 210 class) my classes are working on their last or second-to-last big paper assignments. The good thing about the 210 class is that I hadn't created most of their work for it yet anyhow, so this was exactly the push I needed to go in and make out some stuff in advance -- I'd already uploaded their lesson plan to Blackboard, so I knew what I'd be doing and when/how I'd be doing it.
That class is going really well, actually. Most of the students in it seem bright, ready to work, and enthusiastic about writing and learning how to write effectively in business environments. I try to keep it fun, I try to keep it entertaining (you have to when the material is sometimes quite dull) and they seem to have responded well to that approach. In the assignment for their Public Service Announcement (which I'll give out on Tuesday), for example, I told them that since their topics are pretty wide in scope, they can write on basically anything they want and be creative as long as it still falls under the large umbrella header of what the topics are. One of the topics is "a social issue" or something like that. That's really wide and vague. Yeah, they could write about drunk driving or bullying in schools, or they could write about the proper way to defend yourself against rabid bear attacks or zombie outbreaks. Or rabid bear zombies. It doesn't have to be dry and boring (or even real) as long as they hit the parameters of the assignment. That's what I'm looking for. I try to "pep it up," so to speak, as much as I can. For some assignments that will work, for others it won't. Again, as I've mentioned before, the last two projects in the class are big projects, projects that are a minimum of 10-15 pages each. The example request for grant funding/proposal project that I will upload to Blackboard for them is 22 pages. That's not a joke. It's 22 pages. Imagine collecting twenty different 22-page assignments for one class right before Thanksgiving break, not to mention the papers I'll be collecting and grading for my other two classes, and you'll know why I need as much time as possible over that week to get grading done -- as well as how hard it will be to not be stressed out the entire time and to be able to have fun with Daisy and her family when I'm up there for a few days. Again, it's not like there's a whole lot I can do about that in the meantime -- I am a professor, and there are things that I must take care of no matter what, things I can't just slack on. I can't come back after Thanksgiving and say "oh, yeah, I didn't get to grade all of your assignments, but you're still giving me oral presentations on them this week anyway because you have to." That's not going to work, and at best it's incredibly unprofessional of me.
I have a bit of leeway in my scenario, though; I collect those massive projects on the second-to-last day I teach before leaving town, and in the interim I have almost a week before I go up to Daisy's. While I collect other papers that week from my other students, I will have some time at least to work on them before and after the trip to Omaha. I told Daisy I'd be swamped during that time, and since it's the last week of classes when we return from Thanksgiving, I don't have any other choice -- we made our plans to work around everything we could. Daisy is understanding of my situation, at least, when many others may or would not be.
This weekend is me playing "catch -up," really, due to my computer issue and due to the fact that I have a bunch of stuff to do at the end of the month. I paid my electric bill and rent yesterday -- effectively breaking even after I was paid yesterday. In and out, that's how it goes. I am lucky in that all of my bills are now paid, and that I won't have to go shopping again for about another week, roughly. It's cold outside, but at least it's not snowing. I've been wearing pajama pants and long-sleeved shirts around the house just to keep warm and keep from needing to run the furnace constantly. I did laundry, ran the dishwasher, cleaned the catbox/room, and vacuumed the downstairs. This afternoon and evening, I'll be watching football while organizing everything I need to do for next week, printing papers for copies and reading through sections of the books which need to be covered in my classes.
My internet is still giving me problems, and those problems are much more prevalent now that I am trying to re-download my archives of podcasts that I lost. Again, it's not my modem -- that works fine -- it's the fact that they're kicking me off every few minutes when I try to download large mp3 files (some of my podcasts' episodes, for single episodes, mind you, are over 300MB) because I trip those "flags" or whatever it is that tells them I'm using too much bandwidth -- despite the fact that they not only raised their monthly rates by $7 over the course of the past two months, but I'm on their second highest tier for service and I don't and shouldn't have a bandwidth cap. I am very close to setting up my laptop out in the living room, jumping on the unlocked wireless connection I always have access to out there (from somewhere, anyway) and downloading all of my missing podcasts onto that machine just to get around them trying to throttle my own access for no good reason or because I won't spend $100 on their new fancy modem that I don't need. I've mentioned before that they've not said a word to me on my bills or via mailed correspondence that I need to, or should, upgrade things -- they've made no mention whatsoever about anything involving their systems being upgraded or that my access and speeds may be unreliable or anything like that. The only reason I know about any of this is because of two pop-up, in-browser messages a month ago that my ad-blocking software didn't catch. The least they could do is give me a rundown of my options in an insert with my bill, or mail me a flyer telling me what I can do. They haven't. As a customer, and a good one at that, if I hadn't noticed the in-browser pop-ups I would be oblivious to the entire situation and would think I had a hardware problem of some sort -- which is what, I think, they want everyone to think, so that if a customer calls and complains, they can say "oh, it's because you need a new modem." Again, it's all really shady, underhanded shit. I'm not a fan of subterfuge, and more importantly, I don't buy into it.
In other news, apparently my parents are in the process of, or are trying to, buy a second house -- a place they can live when they retire, on the beach -- and like I did seven years ago, they may finally be able to get the hell out of West Virginia and never look back. I support this, of course; I think it's really sort of cool that they're able to plan ahead and set everything up to be able to do this sort of thing. I am, however, a bit envious (understandably so), because here I am with $700 to my name, driving a seventeen-year-old car with almost 230,000 miles on it, and my parents not only own one house, but are buying a second beach house. For the moment, if all goes well, they're keeping both homes, but my mother asked me if I wanted to live in the West Virginia house with Daisy after we're married, and pay the bills for it so someone can actually use the house until/if they decide to eventually sell it. I didn't have the heart to say "with what money and what jobs will we be working to earn that money, since West Virginia is a black hole of employment for anyone with degrees like Daisy and I have?"
Not to mention that as much as I love that house and it's location, it's about as far away from town as I am from Wichita, and it's on top of a mountain where it's not uncommon to get two-foot snowstorms every week between November and March, and where the temperature will drop to -20 at night in the winter. It's like living in Alaska.
"If I could even get the Monte Carlo there," I told Daisy, "I wouldn't be able to drive it anywhere for about four months out of the year. Anything more than, say, four or five inches of snow, and even with as big and heavy as that car is, I'm not going anywhere. I'd need a truck or a big SUV or something to even attempt to get into town."
My parents both have big SUV's. My dad used to have an F-250 Super Duty for years before he got the SUV he has now.
Anyway, my mother told me that in preparation, they're doing a lot of cleaning of the house to get rid of a lot of the stuff they don't or no longer need. I told her not to get rid of anything that Daisy and I could use or want once we're married (it's mind-boggling the amount of stuff they have in that house, stuff they've never used or wanted, or have bought, used once or twice, and stuffed away into storage), and to definitely not mess with any of the stuff I still have there, like my thousands of dollars' worth of comics I collected for many years or my two expensive guitars. I told her I'd go through all of my own stuff the next time I came home and would decide then what needed to be shipped or carried back home with me when I was there. It doesn't look like my next trip home will be until after the wedding, as they already have plans for Christmas and after Christmas.
"You know you're always welcome up here," Daisy told me. "[Sister] and [sister's husband] are coming in for Christmas, and [other sister] will probably be here for one day during that time at least."
"I should probably make an appearance up there anyhow over the holidays," I replied, "as I'm sure, since we're getting married, everyone will get us stuff."
Daisy's family is extraordinarily generous and welcoming to me, and always has been. The sister who's coming in over Christmas adores me, and (obviously) her parents love me as well. I have no doubt that they'll get us a bunch of stuff for Christmas even though there's little either of us really need and even less that either of us would ever ask for. I don't ask anything of Daisy's parents or even Daisy herself, as I don't want to put anyone out, so to speak, and I don't want anyone to feel that they have an obligation to do everything they can for me (or, as the case may be, us). I have a real guilt complex about stuff like that, especially as I'm poor and cannot possibly provide the same amount of material goods for anyone that are provided or given to me during the holidays. Last year, Daisy spent way more on me than she should have over the holidays, and she was even unemployed at the time. That's part of the reason we decided on a small Christmas this year, with little things if any.
"Is there anything you even want for Christmas or for your birthday?" she asked me last night.
"Yeah, a 2DS and the new Pokemon game," I said.
"So you want me to spend hundreds of dollars on you again?"
"Hell no," I said. "Don't do it, don't get it. Obviously. But I have everything I need, and that's the only want I have that I literally can't afford to purchase for myself. I'm fine, love. You don't have to get me anything."
I didn't say this in a passive-aggressive manner or as a hint that I really want her to get that stuff for me -- I don't want that. I don't need anything. We're both saving our money for the wedding. I don't want her to spend money on me to get me stuff that I say "oh, that's nice, that's thoughtful" to, and mean it when I say it, but have no real use for. Case in point: last year I mentioned that I used to have the McDonalds promo Fozzie Bear stuffed doll from the late 80s, and I loved that doll when I was like, four or five, but didn't know what had happened to the one I had (because that was twenty-five years ago). She went out on eBay and found one, new, with the tags still on it. That was incredibly sweet and thoughtful, and a wonderful gesture, but I didn't have a physical or emotional need for it, obviously. The same applies this year. There's really nothing I need except for the big stuff, like, say, a new car. That's not gonna happen, so there's nothing else I need. I can pay my bills, I can keep food in the house and in my cats' bowls, and (hopefully) my student loans will be deferred. So I'm good, really. I'd rather we both save money for the wedding.
So, really, that's about all that's going on right now. Now, it's football time.
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