This morning, Connor and I took a trip to the pediatrician for a well visit. It was the first time either of us had been out in public in the era of social distancing, so we donned our homemade cloth masks and forged ahead into the weirdness.
On one hand, it felt like a big deal, leaving the house for realsies for the first time since March. On the other hand, like Connor said: it’s just a doctor’s visit.
Once I return to working in the office next month, I’m going to have to get used to wearing a mask all day. After wearing one for just an hour, I can tell that this is going to be interesting….
My husband bought me a weighted bag for my birthday last month. Still trying to figure out the best time to make use of it, since sounds in the basement can echo through the whole house.
It was a Friday afternoon, April 10th, when our dishwasher started making a weird whining noise.
I had originally planned to take the day off for a salon appointment, but the pandemic changed my plans to just staying at home instead of working from home. Aaron was about to go play video games with our son, and I’d been about to either clean my desk or weed the garden, when we started up the dishwasher and it made that funky noise.
We thought it was clogged. So we spent some two hours cleaning it, dismantling it (with help from YouTube), running it, dismantling it AGAIN… Once we realized that it was draining just fine, and that it wasn’t clogged at all, we resigned ourselves to calling in a professional.
No worries, right? Just call a plumber. No, wait, an appliance repair place.
Except that our go-to repair place was closed for COVID-19.
So was almost every other appliance repair place in town, except for one that would come out for “essential” appliance repairs only: refrigerator, freezer, washing machine, furnace, etc.
After four weeks of washing our dishes by hand, we called up our favorite appliance repair service on the day they reopened. They got us an appointment for the next day, at which we got the news that our dishwasher not only needed a new motor, but it was leaking into our subfloor and down into the basement. (Luckily, nothing got ruined.)
Today, after yet another week of waiting (and washing by hand), the repairman installed the replacement parts, and at least one aspect of our lives is now back to normal.
How did we live in our last house for nine years without a dishwasher? #firstworldproblems
I suddenly find myself in search of a new webhost for the first time in FIFTEEN YEARS.
Amazingly enough (my Aunt Sammie would say it’s ESP), I thought to save off a local backup copy of my WordPress database last month, so my blog is not lost.
Micfo never raised my webhosting fees for the entire time I was a customer (which could be one reason they fell behind on their own datacenter payments, resulting in their customers’ data basically being held ransom), so I’ve been overpaying for unlimited storage and bandwidth.
Party’s over.
So, current status: Trying to restore my SQL-based backups and get my blog back up and running. Also realizing that I didn’t actually have the sweet-ass grandfathered-in deal I thought I had.
Update, 10:15pm I’ve imported every blog entry from my backup, plus the few I’d posted since then (thanks to Aaron pointing out that our RSS reader of choice, Newsblur, had the text cached). I’ve made my theme look pretty seamlessly like it used to (for better or for worse). I’ve imported my blog categories.
Still to do in the near future:
import comments
upload and relink images
reinstall a few key plugins
Considering that it took me about a week of evenings to convert my site from Movable Type to WordPress some eight years ago, getting everything back up and running in a couple of days (including securing a new hosting service and waiting for DNS propagation) really ain’t too shabby.
This is what it looks like when you really don’t want to move your monitor to plug in a new HDMI cable.
Working from home for EIGHT WEEKS STRAIGHT OMG prompted me to buy an HDMI splitter for my widescreen monitor. It arrived this afternoon, and I can already tell it’s going to make my situation at least a teensy bit less inconvenient.
Granted, Skype is still going to be confused about where my microphone and speakers are every time I plug in the monitor, but at least I know WTF is going on now, and what settings to change back.
Working on code, data validation, report design, or pretty much anything that I do for work is SO much easier with multiple monitors. And plugging my laptop into a splitter is so much easier than unplugging the cable from the back of my tower — and then trying to plug it back in when I actually want to use my home desktop.
