June 20th, 2005:

Sunday morning we stopped by Fry’s Electronics and I picked up a 200GB hard drive and a external USB 2.0 enclosure for backup purposes. I’m not sure that I like the enclosure I got though. It doesn’t have any lights or indicators that it’s doing anything. And, other than that, has no “features” really. There were plenty of other models for the same price. So, I might swap it out for something else.

Later that night I came home and backed up all of my photographs, video, music, important documents, email, and critical log files on to the new drive. I found lots of stuff I had forgotten about. Sort of an interesting little trip to take. It took quite a while for everything to copy over, but, future incremental backups should go much quicker. Over the next week or so, I’m going to write a backup process that I can run once a week (or after a large update) to ensure that all of the important stuff is taken care of.

Now that I have a good backup, I’m considering wiping the whole machine clean and trying something new. Windows XP? Ubuntu? I’m not sure yet.

Saturday morning Jess and John took their sweet time getting out of bed (or maybe they were just anxiously waiting for me to get out of the house). Meanwhile, I mowed, edged, and weed whacked our lawn and 2/3rds of the next door neighbor’s yard. After getting *most* of the way through it, she came out and fired me.

So, I lost my first job. I’m really upset about it. Ha.

Actually, she said she had already hired someone and that they were just unreliable and didn’t show up last weekend. It’s not like I was hell bent on mowing her lawn, so it didn’t hurt my feelings any. But, it was weird because, the only “reason” she gave for keeping them (not that I asked for any) was that they would mow the lawn and “blow” it for $20 per week. She said she didn’t even know if they would weed whack or edge. Granted, I don’t have a blower, and, therefore, didn’t blow her sidewalks off, but I did sweep them with a broom. But, she wouldn’t have even known that, because she wasn’t there when I did it. I think she maybe assumed that I was *only* mowing for $20. Heh. So, maybe we’ll need to make another friend to watch the cats and feed the plants while we’re away.

Later Saturday morning we enjoyed some Salvadorian food with John before heading over to my parent’s house for my niece’s 1st birthday. Afterwards, we met Brad and Morgan and a very sleepy Zoe for coffee in Keller. Brad had something he needed to get done at his parents house so, eventually, they went home and we went back to my parents house for a while. A few glasses of wine later we headed home for the evening.

Friday night Brad and Morgan came out to our place. We grilled some burgers, had a few glasses of wine, and a few glasses of whiskey. We would have played cards or something (using the drinking rules we invented with Stacey and Alan a few weekends ago) but, we had fun just catching up. John found his way to our place later in the evening. After Brad and Morgan left the three of us stayed up for quite a bit longer. John decided to spend the night, but only after thumbing through the huge archive of unpublished photographs I have on my computer. I don’t know that there are many people I would be comfortable giving that kind of access to my personal files to, especially considering the incriminating photos of myself hidden away in there, but I was okay with John. Besides, I’m not running for president any time soon.

By the way, John, you never did mention if you fond something buried away that jumped out at you as worth publishing. Did you? Then again, you were probably just thumbing for the “dirtier” shots that I didn’t filter out of there. Anything I need to get rid of in case someone else should want to thumb through them? I’m sure there were plenty.