My wife is great!!!

Lately work has been a bit hectic and I've been dazed and confused (for so long, you know it's true). But my wife has been very supportive especially when I've had to work a little later than usual and leaving way early and things just haven't been going right at work. This weekend was the worst. I had been spinning my wheels on a problem that had been plaguing me for all of Thursday and Friday which left me really really behind schedule. In short, something that had worked, stopped working. And to top it off, I still didn't have any solution to the problem. So I came into the weekend feeling like complete crap. But my Mrs tried her best to put me in a good mood.

This included going to the Weekend of Fire in Cincinnati. It was basically a hot sauce festival. We got there and paid our $5 each. And it turned out to be much smaller than I had hoped. Then one of the hot sauce makers I was hoping would be there wasn't. Then I spent way too much on stuff I'm not even sure I wanted. And didn't get a T-shirt that I at least kinda wanted. So now I'm behind schedule, $30 poorer and no t-shirt.

To make matter worse, I tried to go into work on Sunday and of course I couldn't get into the building. Grrrr. But my wife tried her best to cheer me up in any way she could. She's a trooper.

So Sunday night, I decided I would try to have something go right for me. I decided to finally reimage the machine downstairs. I was going to partition the small 20 GB drive so I could have multiple XP images that I could swap in and out using Drive Image (pretty much the precursor to Ghost). So, in order to do this I needed to find my copy of XP Home. Yes, a legitimate copy of XP Home with the holographic CD and little yellow sticker. Well, mostly legitimate copy. ;)

Anyhoo... I thought it was downstairs since I had moved much of my stuff down there. I looked downstairs where I put my plethora of system CDs, but didn't see it there. So I figured it must still be upstairs. I rummaged around and 'ahhhh delight', I found the nice glossy green envelope that said XP Home. I opened it up and... no CD. Now, I knew that they had been separated at some point, but kinda remembered what I did with it. I remembered putting it with a bunch of stuff that needed to go downstairs. So I went back downstairs and riffled around some more. No go. Stuff that I thought was with the XP CD was down there, but no XP CD. So I went to bed Sunday night disappointed.

At some point in the middle of the night, I had an epiphany. At work, I have an MSDN account. I could simply download the XP Home iso and use that. I have a legitimate key, so I just needed the disk.

Monday came along and I got up early and went to work at 7am. I worked with the Devs (which I should have done long ago). It at least pleased me somewhat that the Devs couldn't figure it out either. So they came up with a workaround for the moment. Which was good. However, by the time we figured all that out, the day was done and that put me now 3 days behind schedule.
But I had my ISO, so that was good.

My wonderful wife continued blowing sunshine up my arse trying to make me feel better as well as allowing me to continue my little project. Monday night I burnt the ISO and PRAYED that it would work. Luckily, it did and the rest of the evening I got the partitions set up and XP Home installed and patched. But I looked again and STILL could find that damned original XP disk. On top of that, I realized that another thing that was in that batch of CDs was the CD copy of Drive Image. I have floppies (it takes up two disks), so that part wasn't a big deal for now. But sooner or later those floppies are gonna croak and making the CD, from what I heard, was a big pain in the arse and since I hadn't done the original CD (I had tried and failed), I had no idea how to make another working CD copy. So on top of my original XP disk being missing, now my MULTIPLE copies of a working Disk Image CD were missing as well. *sigh*

So, I got up uber early again on Tuesday and got into work by 7am again. I made some progress so that was good. But the missing CDs were still bugging the crap out of me.

I came home and my wife had dinner ready. She even made me some fried zucchini which is one of my favorite fried things. Mmmm... Baking Miracle n Zucchini. Tasty! Maryann put Norah to bed and I was going to go back downstairs to continue the project, but I wanted to have one more go at finding those disks. I remembered I had taken a bag of music CDs downstairs and hadn't filed them yet. Maybe I had put the disks in there thinking that I would put them where they needed to be when I filed my music CDs. I check downstairs and there was the bag and the music CDs, but no XP or Drive Image disks. *censored* *censored*

I went back upstairs and rummaged around some more. I looked in drawers that hadn't been opened in months, I shuffled and organized all sorts of things on my desk. No disks. So I sat in my chair and harumphed.

My wife comes in and I explain that I just couldn't understand where the hell they went. I knew the disk was very important and that I wouldn't have thrown it out and I remembered seeing it and putting with some stuff to go downstairs but that SOB wasn't down there. She had heard the story at least 10 times over 3 days. But she said, 'Well, lemme help you look'. And I pointed to all the cleanliness and said 'I've checked everywhere in here'. So she poked around in a basket that I hadn't looked in (bad Darrin!) but it wasn't in there. I even double checked after she had checked... but it wasn't in there.

So I took at seat in my office chair. Defeated.

Then my wife hands me this old decrepid waste paper basket that I've had for eons and said 'Is it in here'. The minute I saw the computer cord poking out, I knew it was in there. And it was, as well as the Drive Image disk and several other computer related things.

I said, "Where in the hell was this???" and my wife pointed to the middle of the floor and said "Right here". Once again, my wife had saved me from my perfectionist, I-have-to-be-right-all-the-time, cause-I-can't-possibly-make-a-mistake self.

So I gave my wife a kiss and went back downstairs to finish my project, which I can say is complete. Well for the most part. I still have some stuff I'd like to do with different images, but the main goal was to reimage the box and set it up so I could swap in and out images. Done and done.

My wife as of late has really been very cool and supportive and helpful and has saved me from myself way too many times for me to admit. Well, that is until recent, where I now sing her praises for proving my arrogant arse wrong. :)

Oh... and my wife just called to inform me that I had forgotten my lunch. This was likely 'cause I got up at 6:00am to come into work. She's going to drop off my lunch. Like I said, my wife is great and I love her very very much.