About That Weekend ...

Heading out. I'm bound for Westfield, Massachusetts. Google maps say it's 817 miles. I have until 02:30 tomorrow morning. No problem.

Of course, it would have made more sense if I had left yesterday. Ran half yesterday. Half today. But dammit, I wanted at least one day away from the truck. Besides, I had toys to play with.

Not that the toys amounted to anything. The new hard drive that I bought for my laptop had the wrong connector on it. Well, it had a standard connector. But when designing my laptop, Dell decided to used something different. So ... no new hard drive for my computer.

Options? Well, I figured I would just try to re-install Windows XP and see if that would correct whatever the issues are that my computer (my Windows installation was damaged by some spyware someone in my household installed on my computer once upon a time - performance has gotten steadily worse ever since). So I tried to install the new copy of XP that I bought (the original disc is in storage somewhere), only to be told that I couldn't do so due to a third-party something or another. I assume they were referring to the gobs of unnecessary crap that Dell loads onto their computers.

Aw, hell no. This was unacceptable. So I decided to back up the hard drive, reformat, and go from there.

Um ... have I mentioned that the computer is gimped? It takes forever to do simple things. And I'm going to back up an 80 gigabyte hard drive? You can imagine how well that went. I started backing it up at around 11:00. When I went to bed around 21:30 it was about 1/5 done. When I got up this morning I found that the computer had turned itself off sometime during the night. Doh!

Needless to say, none of the toys were played with. They're all laptop-centric. So I couldn't install my guitar and bass amps software. And even though my new keyboard controller (an M-Audio Axiom 61, if you must know) had come in, I couldn't tinker with it because I couldn't install my Korg M1 software onto the laptop. So I just sat on the couch with it and fondled its keys a a bit. At least now we're on friendly terms.

Since none of this worked out like I expected, I did the only thing an ambitious young man with a single day off could do. I played World of Warcraft. Of course. I created a new Draenai mage named Preusua, and roped my friend Victoria into creating a new toon and joining me on a low-level rampage. Believe it or not, getting to hurl firebolts at people and critters really did help to ease some of my tension.

So. That was my day off. Today I'm driving from Kings Mountain, North Carolina to Westfield, Massachusetts. My shoulder is already hurting. But I have a reasonably good outlook on things. As much as I'd rather be doing just about anything else, I won't complain come payday. And from Westfield, Massachusetts, my next load has to be a good load, as well. That means two good paychecks in a row. That'll come in handy.