LostWoods Blog

…or not so phun (fun)…

Greetings for sorta sunny Philadelphia. I’m waiting for a backup profile to regenerate so I can do a restore, so I thought I’d take a short mental health break and write in the blog. Much more fun than real work.

Our phun filled five day trip started out with omens of the doom to come. It snowed quite a bit on Saturday night, and we had light snow continuing on Sunday morning. Our flight was scheduled to leave Helena for Minneapolis (then on the Philadelphia) at 8:00 a.m. Unfortunately, both (yes, Helena’s airport is small enough that it has just two, count ‘em TWO) de-icing trucks broke down. We did not leave Helena until 10:30. Then we had to stop in Billings to refuel — something necessitated by a very full flight and the need to keep the fuel load light to get us over the mountains and out of the Helena Valley.

We landed in Billings, refueled, and were de-iced. Off we taxied to the run-up area where we sat waiting for Flight Operations to recalculate the weight and balance for our flight. Somehow they had lost our flight info… We sat there so long they sent us back to the terminal to be de-iced again. Finally we were back in the air on the way to Minneapolis. As you can guess, we missed our connection in MSP. Part of the group was rescheduled on a flight leaving MSP at 4:10, but some of us (me included) weren’t able to get a flight until 7:45. We finally made it to the hotel in Philadelphia just past midnight.

Yesterday morning we started all our work at about 9:45 a.m. (The mainframe and network staff started earlier, but without their parts working, I couldn’t do all that much.) We had a fairly decent day yesterday and miracle of miracles, we went back to the hotel around 8 p.m. Had dinner and a couple drinks, went to bed.

We started work again this morning about 8 and have had our ups and downs. We had hoped to have everything up and available for testing by late afternoon (like right about now) but one group will have to be rescheduled for morning, meaning we won’t be able to tear down until midday. But it’s still looking good for getting done at a decent time tomorrow — which means I’ll get to go to dinner with a local NFC breeder and get a kitty fix. It’s hard being away from cats completely for even one day, let alone several days. It’s just not right to go to sleep without a cat in my bed!

I haven’t posted a song of the day since Christmas time, but I’ll share a few that seem to be theme songs for recent days — two for the DR drill and one for NFCFA…

DR -

Sloop John B - Beach Boys (referring to our travel phun & games)

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/beach+boys/sloop+john+b_20013644.html

M.T. A. - Kingston Trio (this relates to how we felt stuck on the planes, waiting and waiting for de-icing in both Helena and Billings)

http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/the_kingston_trio/m_t_a.html

NFCFA

Whistling in the Dark - They Might Be Giants

http://www.lyricsdepot.com/they-might-be-giants/whistling-in-the-dark.html

Well, I suppose I ought to get back to work. My restore is nearing completion, at which time we may be ready to restore something else. Maybe.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Other Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.