Wednesday, October 7 2020

Dear Journal,

Late last night, Marissa and I filed into the bathroom. We took turns wringing a near-empty tube of toothpaste onto our toothbrushes. I stared blankly into the mirror, raised the brush to my mouth, and heard a loud snap.

I froze, then a wave of relief washed over me when I realize it was just my toothbrush that broke in half. Marissa and I broke the silence with laughter.

Because of quarantine, I haven't been to the dentist in so long, I guess part of me is just expecting my teeth to start falling out. This is it, I thought.

Once we had finished laughing, we discussed how to best parlay back into the world of good oral hygiene without feeling too judged.

"I think we should just say that we have never been to the dentist," Marissa laughed. "It's basically true."

"Maybe we can take it further and just say we weren't familiar with the whole concept of dentists," I mused. "Nobody ever told us they existed. It's not my fault - just another failure of public education."

Sip. Happy Wednesday. How's your morning going? It took a while to warm up today. Climbing out of my bed felt like climbing out of a coffin. But I think after a shower, brushing my teeth with the broken end of my toothbrush, and two cups of coffee, I'm finally ready to begin the day.

I feel like after putting up with all the meetings this past Monday, I had some good karma come my way. Yesterday, I didn't have a single meeting until the late afternoon, and it's the same situation today. That means I get the whole morning to put on a podcast, clean up my notes, and dig into some interesting, deep thinking kind of work.

Meanwhile, every hour or so I open a browser tab to check on the data migration on the new NAS. Would you like an update? The failures on the old drive were even worse than I thought. The old server has four disks total, and two of them our mirrors. That means for each drive, there is one drive that is just a complete copy. I discovered that I actually have two drives that are offline.

If I had lost one drive and its mirror, that would have meant disaster. If both a drive and its mirror our gone, than the data is gone - the equivalent of throwing it into lake Manona or hurling it into traffic. But fortunately, the second drive to go offline was just part of the other pair. To sum up, I unknowingly won a dangerous game of Russian roulette of hard drive failures.

The export has been happening for the past four days. I have only 0.3 terabytes left to move, then it doesn't matter what happens to the drives. Maybe as a science experiment, I'll keep them around to see how much time I still had.

Meanwhile, Marissa was working on a pretty interesting project. Using a picture of our house taken from the front yard, she was using some photo editing software to make a mock-up of the spots she wants to paint, and even split it out into two different options.

"What do you think?" she said. "It's kind of a hack job, but I think it gets the point across."

"It definitely does," I said. "For how long you've been talking about painting our siding and panels, I confess I had no idea what you're talking about. Now I get it. Nice job with this."

"Thanks," said Marissa. "Rodney helped me."

Rodney didn't really help, per-say. To keep him occupied while she figured out the software, Marissa handed him her phone and let him take pictures. Rodney did his usual thing, squirming around the room taking close-up, blurry shots of the dogs, his toys, and other things. I still insist that Rodney may have a good eye for pictures. Some of them, the ones where he doesn't cover up the lens with his finger or accidentally take a one second video instead of a picture, aren't bad.

And so without further ado, I present Still Life, as seen by Rodney.

And of course, he also included a selfie. Doesn't really fit the theme, but who am I to judge? I'm not the artist here.

For dinner, we had to improvise a bit. Woodman's goofed up our usual routine, and we had to bump Marissa's night to Wednesday and figure something out for Tuesday. I went with my fastest version of Penne in pancietta red sauce, and just because I had some cycles to spare while the sauce was simmering, we also had the rest of the tomatoes stuffed with bread crumbs and cheese.

"It's too hot," complained Rodney. "I can't eat it."

I reached across the table and stuck my thumb in Rodney's bowl. "It's not hot, dude - just eat it."

Rodney pouted, pleading silently with his eyes.

"Can I have some cream?" he asked.

"Some cream?" said Marissa, confused.

"I think ever since I added sour cream to his chili to cool it down, he thinks we can do that with every meal," I laughed.

"You can't put sour cream in your pasta dude - that's weird," said Marissa.

"But," I said wagging a finger. "I suppose we could put a scoop of ricotta in your pasta. That... wouldn't be terrible."

Rodney nodded and smiled. "Yes please," he said politely.

"Dude, you're a wingus," I teased as I stirred in the cheese.

"No - YOU'RE a wingus," Rodney yelled.

"Hey hey hey," I said, backpedaling out of the yelling match. "Sit on your butt, and eat your pasta."

Thanks for stopping by today. Have a wonderful day, everyone.