The unusually warm, snowless winter appears finally to be coming to an end this morning when we woke up to several inches of the white stuff, which continues to fall with a fury. As of yesterday, nearly all the snow had melted and we could actually see our lawn, which never happens in mid-January. It’s also been freakishly warm this winter, with temperatures in the 40s and even 50 recently. Gotta love global warming. Finally it’s returned to a more normal 30 degrees and snow. Rejoice!
I spent yesterday evening backing up, reformatting, re-partitioning, and reinstalling my operating system and applications. It was my first full system rebuild since Thanksgiving 2004. Last time I went a little partition crazy and did not give enough drive space to my OS & Applications partition (only 10 GB), so I wasn’t even able to upgrade from XP SP1 to XP SP2 due to insufficient drive space. This time I gave that partition 20 GB and the rest to a second partition for My Documents. I neglected to backup the most recent version of my application data, the most important of which are my Firefox bookmarks. Enter Mozy, that great little app that runs tirelessly in the background, backing up your important data online. This will be my first test of it doing one of the four allowable restores per month. How cool is it that you can pick down to such a granular level of restore?
Saturday night we hit the town with Karen, Joti, and Justin. Following a deliciously greasy dinner at the Parting Glass, we spent the rest of the evening at Tin & Lint, including a trip to the bar within the bar, which was a first for us. It was a nice respite from the crowd and unusually loud juke box tunes. Earlier that day we had gone to Kinderhook for Seamus’ first birthday celebration, where the birthday boy dropped two really hard toys on my head and puked on my hand. Before that, we had a really ambitious Saturday morning — Jen cleaned the house, and I did some shopping and then organized my entire garage to make room for my minivan. I wish I had taken before and after photos ’cause I’m really proud of the job I did. Again I will say: There’s nothing mini about minivans. It barely squeezes into my garage; I had to do the tennis ball from the string trick to know when to stop without crashing into the end of the garage.
Friday night we picked my Dad up from the airport, following his first trip back to California since moving here. Before that we had spent a rockin’ evening in Albany for dinner and drinks with some of Jen’s coworkers.
