Whew!

I'm thinking I need to rename this blog to something like "will I ever get enough rest?" This is truly a working mother-related tale of yesterday. If I start rambling, please forgive me. I'm working on 3-1/2 hours of sleep. I worked from 8:30 AM until 3:45 AM, except for riding the bus home from work. I had to drive back into work after I got home because of a recalcitrant computer.

It was a fairly normal day up until about noon. I had to open a service call for a computer that had a disk drive going bad. It would have been better if it was an all-out failure, but it was just faking most of the time. Unfortunately, the vendor didn't ever call me back. I decided the best course might be to take the bad disk out, but that wasn't working either. Then I thought that rebooting the system would let me take the disk out until it could be replaced. I started that after I picked DS#2 up from school.

I planned on making supper and was all prepared to do so when the stupid computer wouldn't come back up. It's not very often that I let work interfere with home, but it's the nature of my work that when a system is down, it takes priority over everything. I really was a working mother last night.

So, I finally got a hold of the vendor and it turns out that they never did anything with my ticket for 10 hours! 10 HOURS! Okay, this will put it in perspective: we're supposed to have 2 hour response for that system.

I had to drive back to the office and wait for the technician to arrive with the new part. No big deal. It wasn't even midnight, yet. After the part was replaced, it looked like we would be out of there in less than an hour with the cleanup, but thanks to the help line for this vendor, I ended up having to reload the entire operating system. If it were a PC, it would have been easy, but this is UNIX. And not a small UNIX system either. We call it "big iron."

Fortunately, once I was able to get things started rebuilding, I could go home and finish the process from there. Unfortunately, the restore from backup took waaaaay longer than I expected. Fortunately, I planned on taking the day off. Unfortunately, it's a day off with exhaustion.

One of these days I'll be able start a weekend without a huge sleep deficit. I would sleep more today, but I have to get my chaperones ready for the out-of-town football trip this afternoon. I have to buy snacks, supplies, make sure I've got things ready for the marching festival tomorrow, etc. We won't be home again until 1:00 AM and then have to get up tomorrow to do it all again, except the going out of town part.

Check out the patch I designed for the marching festival:

Okay, I didn't design the logo, but the over patch is my idea. Normally, for our school district logo, that bass drummer would be a student sitting at a desk, but for the marching festival, they did this little guy. All I did was make him bigger so that the detail would show up in the embroidery.

Well, I'm off to clear some fuzz out of the brain. I know I need to sleep, but I have so much other stuff to do, too. I'll let you know how the weekend turns out later. Hope you all have a good one.