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The case of the missing hard drive - Closed!

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Something terrible happened to me during December, which I failed to chronicle here: I lost my external hard drive. This was a big deal because I had ALL of my photos and music on said hard drive. In early December I had FORTUNATELY and randomly decided to burn all of my photos to DVD, so I actually didn't lose a single photo. Still, I lost all of my music that wasn't loaded on my iPhone. That was a lot of music. Hundreds of albums worth. I spent a lot of time downlo... I mean, buying that music in college.

I tore my house apart on several occasions trying to look for it and had no success. I checked with public transit to see if I left it behind one day on the train. No luck.

You know that feeling when you can't find your keys and you're late to work? Multiply that feeling by five and extend it for weeks. I was devastated. My hard drive must have joined my Star Wars lightsaber in the lost bin.

(Tangent: Scott and I dressed up as Star Wars characters the Halloween after college. He was Darth Vader, I was Obi-Wan Kenobi. We had state-of-the-Toys'R'Us-art lightsabers as props. Our costumes were sick and everyone was super jealous of us. At the parties we attended people kept asking us to duel, which we gladly obliged to in our drunken states. Long after Halloween I got into a habit of bringing out the lightsaber and hitting The Wives with it. One day it went missing. I unconditionally accused them (namely Katrine) of throwing it away, until a day a couple years later when I found it in the back of my closet when I was moving out of the Ballard Burrow. Now I have a habit of hitting Amanda with it. The legacy continues...)

So I moved on. I downlo... I mean, bought some new music and restored photos back to my computer from the DVDs. I splurged on Black Friday and bought TWO new external hard drives. (Like women with shoes, I can never have enough hard drives.) I was again content.

Remember how I painted those kitchen cupboards? Yeah, well on Monday night I found that lost hard drive in the back corner of the tallest cupboard. I must have hid it from myself in the interest of safety and paranoia.

I was happy to have recovered some of the lost music, but I didn't really need it anymore. Like an old ex, I grateful for the storage we shared but had upgraded and moved on. It wasn't the hard drive, it was me.

I learned two important lessons during the Lost Hard Drive Fiasco of 2009:

1. ALWAYS back up your data, twice over.

2. When something valuable is lost (like a hard drive or lightsaber) clean out your cupboards and closets. Something is bound to be found.

From yellow to mellow

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When we first bought our house we went ballistic with paint. We painted nearly every corner of that house to make it our own and replace some absolutely gaudy colors that made the house feel gloomy.

Most of our color decisions were spot on and gave the house a facelift. The orange room is bright and cheery. The greens in our living room play well off of the softwood fir floors. The Caribbean blue in our bedroom is fun and zesty. (Yes, I said zesty).

However, some of the colors, as it turns out, were just too over-the-top. There’s a difference between a face lift and Joan Rivers.

Yellow was our mistake. It seemed a really good idea at the time. It really did. Just like that time in college when I thought it’d be a good idea to duct tape two 40 oz beers to my hands and force myself to drink them before I could pee. Bad idea.

Sergio took the initiative to take a light grey paint to the upstairs room that we had painted yellow during the summer. The dim color transformed the room from loud to classy. As soon as we get new carpet up there it will look like a total refinished attic makeover.

Now I’m halfway through a kitchen project painting our yellow cupboards to a “Swiss chocolate” brown. Oddly enough, the paint smells like chocolate, too. That could also be a side effect of paint inhalation. Hard to say. The brown is really tying in some of the browns in our living room, and we’re another step closer to looking like a Pier 1 showroom.

The funny thing about owning a house is having unrestricted freedom to do with it what you will. This leaves much room for error. Fortunately, we can just paint over some of them.

Giant Cranberry delivers giant service for Haiti

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Just when I was feeling all good about my $10 donation to the American Red Cross for Haiti relief, David (aka Giant Cranberry) went and one up'd me. David decided he would take his own plane down to Haiti to fly personnel and cargo in and out of the country. Pretty amazing, huh?

You can read more about David's relief efforts here.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Giant Cranberry!

The Story of Maxamillion (or how I became a cat person)

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When I was a sophomore in college, I received a distressed call from Mom that I’ll never forget. “Max is really sick, Paolo. I think I need to take him to the hospital. He won’t take any food or water and he hasn’t since last night.”

Max was my dog. He was a smart, handsome, leg-humping Sheltie that we got as a puppy when I was in the 8th grade. Actually, it was the summer before 8th grade because on the first day of school I recall we put him in the garage and he ate something that caused him to have diarrhea – to the point that Dad had to hose the garage out.

I loved that dog.

The day after that call from my Mom, Max died. Something had tied him up internally, and he was too weak to make it out of surgery.

He died by thong. That is, the vet found that he had eaten one of my sister’s thong underwear, which tied up his intestines. You can see how this was a particularly difficult loss to get over when you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This should also serve as a lesson that NO PRETEEN GIRL NEEDS TO WEAR A THONG.

There, I said it. The therapy must be working.

Since Maxamillion, I haven’t had another pet. Not even a fish. I was moving too often between college and now... but now I have a home with a yard, which is why we got the cat, Fabrizio.

We had originally looked at dogs and have a PERFECT, fenced yard for a dog, but we just couldn’t do it. We’re reminded every time we watch Mom’s dog, Simon, that dogs are high maintenance compared to cats. Cats are surely more self-absorbed, but they also take care of themselves. We ski on the weekends, we have a wedding and honeymoon ahead of us… We’re still not ready for all the responsibilities of a dog. Cat-ownership is like training wheels for dog ownership. Now I’m not sure if we want to take the training wheels off.

Fabrizio is crazy cool. For one, he’s bi-polar. Sometimes he will cuddle with Amanda for hours, and sometimes he’ll jump from around a corner five feet in the air and attack your arm. He keeps you on your toes that way.

Best yet, he only goes to the bathroom outside. He doesn’t use the cat box AT ALL. A pet that goes to the back alley and buries its own shit is IDEAL. He’s saving me time, effort and kitty litter cash, and I love him for that. It’s worth the love bites and scratches.

I really can’t complain about being a cat owner. Fabrizio had that one bad habit about scratching furniture, but it’s amazing how quickly a high-powered squirt gun can remedy that.

I had never intended to be a cat person, and never thought I would be. Nevertheless, here I am, with cat biting arm.