21 June 2009

Tonight I'm Gonna Sleep in the Basement

I was in Ohio this past weekend. More on that in a later post, because we did a lot of stuff, most of which was really fun. Unfortunately the one thing that sucked was that my mother-in-law's air-conditioning unit was out. And of course the room we were sleeping in was the warmest room in the house (although it did have a computer with internet access on the desk and a bathroom attached). I have the hardest time sleeping when I'm hot, and then I'm miserable the next day. That's been going on since Friday evening. I literally have been dreaming about coming home to sleep since Friday night, when it was over 80 degrees in the bedroom. And what do you think I came home to about 30 minutes ago? No air-conditioning. In the DC area. In late June. Two freaking weeks after it crapped out and was then fixed. WTF? I am literally so mad that I am seeing red. It doesn't seem to be the outside compressor unit now. This time, the inside furnace part doesn't sound right.

As an additional bonus, I wrecked my external hard drive. After looking in the furnace room to see if there was anything out of order (as if I would really have a clue) and obviously finding nothing, I closed the door a bit more firmly than usual. I heard a loud metal-ly/plastic sounding crash. I opened the door to see what looked very much like my external hard drive on the floor. With the cover half off the innards. I looked over at TheHusband's desk to see if my external drive happened to be sitting there. Maybe that's an extra one or something, I thought. Nope. No little black My Book sitting on the desk. SHIT! That's my drive. The one with every last photo and video that I've taken since 2001. All of my emails. All of the documents of various sorts. But just in case, I trudged upstairs and asked TheHusband if my drive was in the furnace room. He replied yes, why? Because it fell off of whatever it had been on and is now in pieces. Silence. Note that TheHusband kindly put it there so that the cleaning ladies wouldn't knock it off the desk while they were cleaning up. Thankfully, TheHusband is a computer hardware kind of guy. He has "undressed" it (i.e., removed the hard drive from the protective case), and has connected it to his computer and is dumping everything onto another external hard drive that he recently bought. Hopefully, the impact didn't ruin anything. It should take about 3 hours to transfer the data. And to add insult to injury, the video card on my laptop (which is my main computer, mind you), has finally crapped out.

TheHusband says, "Time for a new motherboard."
Neurondoc replies, "$!^%$@#$%^. Forget a new motherboard. I want a desktop."

Beware of any laptops for sale on eBay in the DC area with "slight video issues".

Back to the title of this post. We have an old beat up sofa in the basement. It is not the most comfy place to sleep (especially with a herniated lumber disc). But it is literally 15 degrees cooler down here. So I am going to sleep in the basement. TheHusband can sleep in the fires of Hell upstairs.

Oh, and please shoot me.

6 comments:

ExpatMom said...

I am not going to shoot you. But you could come visit me - I turned the heating on yesterday because I was cold. Really, not my fault! It's friggin' cold for June, even for Germany. Grrr.

Hope the drive data survived!

Hugs and pats from Germany.

vince said...

I don't have air conditioning, but even when it's in the 80's during the day (as it is now), it cools down enough that a couple of fans will drop the apartment temp to the upper 60s, which is cool enough to sleep.

Hope all your data on the hard drive survived. Suggestion: there are two kinds of hard drives - those that have failed and those that will fail. Photos and other types of data you want kept long-term should be burned to CDs or DVDs. External hard drives are great, and I use dual external drives for backup purposes (as well as off-site Internet backup), but external drives shouldn't be used for archival purposes.

neurondoc said...

Vince -- we burned all of the pictures/videos to CDs, and those CDs live at my mom's place. But I didn't burn new ones of the 2008 or 2009 data. Will be doing DVDs this evening.

The data apparently did survive.

It's still hot here, but the AC guy will be here sometime around 1 pm.

Jeri said...

Ugh on the A/C problems? Sorry you had to come home to that. I enjoyed the pictures (on M's site).

kimby said...

I feel your pain! We do not have A/C in this old house and in the past few years, the top floor where the bedrooms are..the candles have melted.
That is hot.
I do have a sleeve unit that can be put in, but the miser in me just can't do it. Too expensive on the energy bill.
Papa's rooms downstairs are always a good 20 degrees cooler in the summer,so lot so sleepovers down there!

neurondoc said...

Kimby, I can't even imagine that. As I've gotten older, I've gotten less and less heat tolerant, although the humidity really plays a role in that. Maybe someday I'll be the antithesis of the grandmother who tells you to put on a sweater because she's cold.