We got home late yesterday afternoon, capping what must be our most leisurely stroll ever across the western half of this country. When we left Cow Bay, a week ago this morning, we intended to stop and visit a couple of couples along the northern route. Typically we leave Vancouver, point the hood ornament east and head directly to Buchanan. This time we angled northeast through Jasper and Edmonton. Unfortunately for our visiting plans, our friends must have had word of our impending arrival which enabled them to vacate their residences.
We could have just booted straight through to Buchanan but we had set up a couple of other appointments which tied us to a more leisurely agenda. So we adapted by working in an Edmonton shopping trip. That meant West Edmonton Mall for Marilyn; KMS, Busy Bee and Princess Auto for me. Then we spent the weekend re-uning with my Class of ‘79 summer group in Saskatoon. Eric and Deanne had (bravely) opened their house to a weekend potluck. Calling it “potluck” is a real stretch because Eric did all of the important cooking – namely the meat and the desserts – the rest of us brought a few salads. And the desserts – oh my goodness! I’ve always wondered what Deanne sees in him but now I know.
Yesterday we swung through Regina, stopped at Costco and were unloading the car by mid afternoon. And what a job that was. We had literally every nook and cranny on the poor old Lincoln stuffed full of “stuff”. We started with over 15 gallons of wine and port plus 6 milk jugs of crab so there wasn’t a lot of space left to work with but what there was we made good use of. We actually had to limit our activity at Costco simply because we had no place to put anything more.
As I have alluded to previously, I have had more or less non-stop computer grief since we left here in January. Between dead keyboards, corrupt UAC and loss of network access I have had a miserable time of it. The cloud over my head may have finally lifted however. Last night I stumbled onto a registry utility on Tweaking.com which appears to have fixed not one but both of my sick machines. The utility still hasn’t made a clean pass through the registry but after the first pass on my backup machine it had cleared the UAC problems that have been plaguing me for a couple of weeks. So I thought “what the hell” and ran it on this machine as well. This is the one that all of a sudden lost all network connectivity after an antivirus “update”. On this machine, as on the first one, it has yet to make a completely clean pass through the registry but after the first pass I noticed that it had restored network access. So that’s good. Really good.
Right now I’ve got the Mozy restore paused because it was consuming too much horsepower and preventing me from typing this weblog post. This has been my only computer for years and I never lost any data so I don’t need to do a huge recovery. I was always well backup up – I never worried about data loss. I just couldn’t connect to any networks from about the time we arrived on the boat. Which was a huge pain in the ass but in the recovery sense not a great big task. My biggest worry all along was that I would end up having to do a clean install of Windows but it appears that I may have dodged that rather large bullet.
This morning I installed a new 1 TB drive in what ended up being my backup machine and I’ve cloned the hard drive that was in that machine onto the new drive. Its now getting started on a week long data restore from the cloud. Right now it is estimating just over a week but it will no doubt take longer.
Now that I can relax a bit on the computer front I have been slowly firing up my collection of antique equipment. The mighty Ford coughed a bit and stumbled once or twice once it was running but no big deal. The Exploder lit right up so I kicked it out of the garage to make way for a more deserving resident. The little Perkins in the skidsteer is such an easy starter – the batteries were getting a little soft so it barely rolled over but it caught on the 2nd or 3rd piston that hit TDC and fired right off. I haven’t fired up the oriental wonder in the little excavator but its a pretty easy starter too and it has glowplugs.
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