Last Sunday afternoon we returned from Sacramento. We decided to try and skip the L.A. area completely, and so went south on the 99 then cut off on the 58. I don't remember ever driving along that stretch of highway before, and so enjoyed seeing some new territory. I really liked the foothills above Bakersfield, and all those enormous wind turbines outside Tehachapi. Eventually the 58 brought us to 395 south and finally the 15. We did indeed skip all that L.A. traffic, and managed to miss any inland empire traffic as well.
I didn't get as much knitting done as I'd hoped, DH had to take a conference call on his cell phone, which lasted over 2.5 hours. So I took over driving duties at Kramer Junction and brought us all the way home. He was still on the call when he got out of the car. During that entire time, no conversation and no radio. sigh.
On Monday afternoon the Younger Offspring decided he was ready to start a major upgrade to his desktop system. Can you guess who most of the work fell too? Plus I was trying to finish up rearranging my bedroom and cleaning the carpet before dinner time. All the components of the system were going into a new case, along with a new motherboard and new graphics card. Oh, and the new power supply that was needed to drive the new components. (insert trip to big box electronics store on Tuesday here)
On connecting all the cables, I realized the mb only supported one IDE cable, and YO's system had 3 IDE drives. We were short one. We decided to get another SATA hdd, and just copy the 2 IDE hdds over to it. Cut to Wed. morning. I get up early to order the new hdd online instead of another trip to big box store. We were planning on heading out to Joshua Tree to meet up with some folks and play around on top ropes. I didn't really want to go (odd), but DH really wanted me to, and I knew I wouldn't have time to work on the system on Thursday, so figured waiting or parts to be shipped wouldn't hurt.
As it turned out, DH had remember wrong about the dates for the J-Tree meet up, so we didn't go at all, so I cancelled the online order (mostly) and YO and I went to the big box store after all. This turned out to be a great move. I was looking for some cables and found an adapter that allows IDE devices to be plugged into SATA. Yippee! No need to buy 500 gig hdd, saved about $80. Too bad it didn't work at first, but we found ways to work around the lack of the DVD-ROM. The adapter only works properly if the IDE device it's connected to is set to master mode. I finally remembered to check that this morning, and now everything is working beautifully.
Last Tuesday was my finally whale watching trip of the season, and both offspring agreed to go with since they're on spring break. We didn't see any whales, sadly, but did get some good looks at one of the submarines leaving the sub base. I'm told it's a Los Angeles class fast attack sub, but I really have no idea. Monday the solar panel installation is set to start, I wonder how smooth all that will go?
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