Ash the Mighty

SonofaBitch

So I’m typing along on my laptop this morning. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, all is well in the room that once was mine but now is my father’s office. I scoot back in my chair so that I can stand up and go grab my PDA as I realize that it has been a day or two since I last synched it. To my everlasting dismay, as I am passing the edge of the desk, I knock my knee rather hard against it. This caused a small but heavy pewter sculpture of, of all things, a duck to fall off the upper shelf built in to the desk.

Said duck tumbled down, struck the surface of the desk, and then bounced onto the floor. I remember breathing a sigh of relief that it had missed my laptop . . . right up until my precious computer started making the noise. It was a kind of sickness-inspiring clicking coming from the hard drive. The hard drive that I realized must have been what was hit by the suicidal semi-ferrous duck.

At first I restarted the machine and when it actually did restart I thought I had dodged a bullet. I immediately tried to start burning as many files as I could just in case it was going to self-destruct. I got right to the point where the CDRW was warming up to burn when everything froze. Deep breath. No need to panic. It’s just freezing again. Restart and try burning again. Resta–. Nothing. “No Operating System Found.” NNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

So my laptop is dead. I’ve tried to take it apart to see if I could replace the hard drive myself but no dice and I don’t really want to snap the plastic or something similarly brilliant. So instead I’m going to go buy myself a new (and bigger) hard drive and take it to some pros. I’ll pay them to put the new HD in and then I’m taking my laptop and running. As mentioned in the header of my wishlist, I am going to owe over $1000 every bloody month for the next ten years to my various student loan lenders and so I’ll be damned if I’m gonna pay some monkey to reinstall a $200 copy of Windows at $50 an hour! Nah, figure get the new hard drive in, pay them way too much for it, and I’ll have something to occupy my time for the next week as I slowly try and find all the wonderful things that I managed to install previously.

I tell you, what I’m really upset about is the other stuff. Beowulf (the laptop’s name. Yes I name my computers. Shock) has been my primary computer for a couple of years now. That means there is no end of irreplaceable documents and images on there. At least two photoshop projects are now gone that I’ve been working on for over a year. I don’t even want to think about the stories that are now gone forever that I’ve been slowly adding to for the past FIVE years! Ugh! Somebody shoot me!

But what can you really do?

Take care everyone. AND BACK UP YOUR FILES!

~DTAR

Well I’ll be.

As of yesterday, I’ve been back in the states for one month. I’d say that things have gone more or less as I thought they would during that time. I took all the trips I had planned on taking, I helped all the people that needed it, and I’ve gotten to hang out with most of the people that I really wanted to.

What will the next month bring, I hear you asking me as if you actually care? Well I don’t really know. It’ll at least bring three weeks of Real Estate school at the Arizona School of Real Estate and Business with my cousin Travis. It’ll hopefully involve a visit to Palm Springs where I’ll get to hang out with Braden some time around Christmas. And if we’re really stretching things, I rather desperately hope it’ll involve receiving a Nikon D2x; an X-Box 360; or, dare I say it?, BOTH!?! . . . for my birthday, Christmas, or graduation.

Oh, and about that. When I arrived back from Florida, I had a letter waiting for me. It was from the University of Glasgow, and it claimed that the writer was “delighted” to inform me that I had . . . wait for it . . . passed! Yay! So I really will be able to make everyone call me “Massa” from now on! Was that a little un-PC? Yeah. But that’s why you love it.

Keep it chill, y’all.

~DTAR.

Ah, back.

Well, that was an experience. I am in no way a stranger to long car rides . . . well, relatively long ones. The summer I was 17 I drove to Colorado a couple of times, and then when I was a freshman at Redlands I drove back and forth from SoCal to Phoenix pretty much every weekend for three months. Most recently, I made that same CO to AZ drive only a fortnight ago.

None of that prepared me for the insanity which is involved in driving from the Florida Keys to Mesa, Arizona. It’s rough. It’s made even more rough when your vehicle is a 26 foot U-Haul towing an auto transport, all made even more unpleasant by the fact that you’re stuck in the cab of said vehicle with no CD player, no cruise control, and two other relatively big guys sitting on either side of you. The smell was . . . icky.

But it’s done! Three-thousand-some-odd miles later and here I sit at my computer, alive and no worse for wear. Now all that remains is for me to find myself some gainful employment and while I’m at it, a flat of my own. On that front, I’m actually looking into attending Real Estate School. It came to me that while I’m very well educated . . . over educated some might even say . . . I still have pretty much no practical knowledge of the business world. The housing boom is still wild in Arizona and if I can manage to make a few bucks before that bubble bursts, then it’ll be worth the three weeks of night classes and four hundred bucks. After all, I spent nearly eighty grand at Glasgow just to learn some stuff that I wasn’t sure I’d need, what’s four hundred?

I hope everyone out there is super-groovy and I’ll speak to you all soon!

~DTAR.

I am so going to hell.

Is it bad that I really really want to do this to some unsuspecting Mormon (or indeed Christian of any flavour)? Cause you see, I don’t think it would be that bad. But then, my concept of funny has been pretty warped ever since that fateful day when I started laughing at Dennis Leary making fun of people with voice boxes.

So when the bus to hell comes for you, keep an eye out for me. I’ll be the driver. Or maybe the tour guide.

~DTAR.

One more reason to hate ASU . . .

Yesterday, members of the highschools of Arizona gathered at the Mona Plummer Swimming facility to compete in the State Swimming Championships (States are the Olympics of the highschool world, for those of non-American origin who might be reading this). States have always been held at the Mona Plummer. I myself competed there at least twice. Well, this time around, once the swimming competitions were over, the ASU swimming coach descended on the pool and kicked everyone out so that he could hold practice . . . the only problem was that the divers were still in the middle of their competition. Now I, like pretty much every swimmer on earth, don’t care one whit for divers in general. But you can’t interrupt the one meet that they’ve been training for for the past several months just so that your crappy swim team (and ASU has a very crappy team) can have an extra hour of practice!

So there you have it. If you needed any more of a reason to hate ASU, there’s one. As if the fact that they take up the entire town of Tempe and turn it into a haven of stupid wasn’t enough!

Can you tell I went to the UofA?

~DTAR.

P.S. For the British or indeed those not from or in AZ, ASU stands for “Arizona State University” and is located in Tempe, AZ which is right next to my home town of Mesa (right next to as in you cross a road and you’re in Tempe). UofA is the “University of Arizona” and is in Tucson, AZ, about 120 miles south of the Phoenix Metro Area (which both Mesa and Tempe are part of). ASU and UofA have been rivals pretty much forever and the weekend wherein they play each other in football (that’s real football, not soccer) is always accompanied by many pranks, stunts, and once or twice even some riots. Just so you understand the automatic hatred that I am required to have for all things ASU . . .

Been busy . . .

Sorry it’s been a while, but things are always crazy in my world . . . or at least will be for the next few weeks. For the past week or so I was in Colorado helping my gran (Gigi) get her Denver house all ready for the winter, as she will be spending the next six months or so living in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was really nice being in Denver again after such a long time away. I could so see myself living there if only I could figure out a way to afford it (CO is mega expensive to live in compared to AZ and since I’m having trouble even handling AZ . . .). So anyway. Wednesday I got into Gigi’s 2001 Jaguar and took off in a generally southern direction. I stopped for a truly lovely dinner with Meggan in Colorado Springs where I ate entirely too much ravioli at the Olive Garden. After that I just drove like a bat out of hell through Colorado, New Mexico, and into Arizona where I arrived pretty early yesterday morning sans accident and speeding ticket, both of which makes for a happy Ash.

Last night was Tom Proffitt’s visitation and while it was great seeing my brother again, it was a shame that it was on such unfortunate terms. I was meant to go today to the funeral, but thanks to the incompetents over at Mapquest, I spent over an hour looking for the church and never did succeed in finding it (presumably neither did the dozen or so other people who were driving all over the neighbourhood looking for it either). So since then I’ve been running all over town trying to get things done. In my small amount of free time, I have gone to extreme efforts and created a wishlist (complete with links) of things that I would love to receive from any charitably minded individuals out there. Just because I’ve got my Master’s graduation, a birthday, and Christmas all coming up within the next month and a half, I figure there have got to be loads of people who want to buy me stuff!

Take care everyone. And seriously, don’t buy a motorcycle. It doesn’t matter how old you are, they’re always going to be too dangerous to make worthwhile!

~DTAR.