It's been a long day, fraught with frustration towards things mechanical... mostly computers.

Today was Patrick's Tenth birthday, too... I got to take him out for lunch. We went to the Cracker Barrel and he had a grilled cheese sandwich, and I had chicken livers and okra. Patrick doesn't talk very much, he reminds me of Tyler... hard to get him to open up.

And I can't believe that I've been a grandpa for ten years...

Back to the computer(s)... I gave up on the CDRom and put another one in... and it worked, even though WIN98 told me it was the controller. So that part was working, but then I lost the HDs. Well, shit. This all happened in the morning, and after Patrick and I ate, we went to Best Buy, where they just happened to have a 10.1 GB HD on sale. So I got one, and went home and put it in... installed WIN98 just fine, after screwing around with the Quantex Drive Rocket or whatever it is that they call their installation routines.

Then I installed the other two drives back into the machine (this is the Compaq that I'm working on...) and they work just fine now.

So, I don't know what the hell was wrong, but now I've got 18 gigs in the compaq. Eventually I'll move the 10.1 drive to the new machine. Right now, I'm downloading the update for MS Office 97, so I can get outlook going correctly... I hope that I can recover all of my mail, I think that I can. I've got it backed up, anyway...

I was going to spend some time today ranting about the anti-smoking lobby, but I'm too tired right now to do it justice, so you can look forward to that at a later date...

Karen and I met Kim and Bob at Applebee's tonight... it's been a while since I've been out there, and a while since I've seen Bob... come to find out, he and Kim have been... seeing less of each other for a coupla months. I just found out about that, and now they're... seeing more of each other.

I don't even try to keep up anymore. I can't keep up with what's going on in my own head, much less someone else's. Should that damned apostrophe be there? I'll leave it there, just in case. Someone will let me know.

I need to transfer this by hand to the other machine, because it's got the FTP setup on it, and I need to re-boot this machine for the network to work since I changed some stuff... and I can't reboot right now because I'm in the middle of a two-hour download of the MS Office update.