is he strong? listen bud...

The other night, I was watching a movie and drinking a can of soda. As I neared the end of the can, I took a sip and felt something besides Coke in my mouth. Almost as quickly as I noticed it, I felt a stinging burn and spit out... a spider. It was a common sac spider- we see them from time to time around the house. The inside of my lip is swollen.

Unfortunately, it was not a radioactive spider. But I suppose our neighborhood does not need any supervillains, which I would surely attract if I were to gain the proportionate strength, speed and agility of a spider.

next pick

My schedule will look like this from 5/31 until 9/5:

Saturday, Sunday- off
Monday- 7:48 AM - 11:21 AM (r), 21 line; 2:22 PM - 7:56 PM, 11 line.
Tuesday- 8:24 AM (r) - 10:51 AM (r), 53/21 lines; 1:06 AM (r) - 7:40 PM, 2 line.
Wednesday- 5:52 AM - 8:30 AM, 11 line.
Thursday- see Tuesday
Friday- 5:03 AM - 1:57 PM (r), 18 line.

That Friday is really ugly. But my only other choice was to get done around 7:45 or 8:00 at night.

I'll really be getting done late. It's like I took two steps forward with the last couple of picks, and now I'll be taking a couple steps back again. I got the second-to-last Saturday off on the entire board. I think there were around eight or nine still open the last time I picked. And the work I'm doing now doesn't even exist on the 9-hour board. The scheduling department messed with everything again. Ah, well, such is life.

it's going to be me some day, and I hope someone waits with me until help arrives

My last trip of the day today was a southbound 4, starting downtown.

The Nicollet buses are detoured to Hennepin, where the 4 runs, so I can't get out of downtown on time. Too many buses.

I was about five minutes late when I turned the corner from 31st Street to Bryant Avenue. One woman got on, then an elderly woman stood in the door and asked me, "Do you go to where there's a bench?"

"Um, well, where exactly do you mean?"

"There's a bench and I can wait there until the bus comes and takes me home. At the end. Do you go there?"

I asked her if she meant the 82nd Street Station in Bloomington. She looked startled by that question. At one of my passenger's prompting, I asked her where she lived.

"Over there," she said, pointing in the general direction of a retirement home.

But I couldn't get any more worthwhile information out of her. She couldn't really say where she lived or where she wanted to go. It was clear that she was very confused.

At this point, another passenger asked her if she could look at her ID. The old lady was OK with that, but didn't have one.

I called Control and asked them to send someone.

Another passenger volunteered to stay with her until the police arrived. Awfully nice.

stupid hard drive

I have all our music on an external hard drive. Sometime last week, it started to make unusual noises.

whizz, click! ...then nothing for a little while... whizz, click! ...and on and on...

From what I've gathered reading MacWorld, we're not alone in our failure to properly back up our computers. But I've been meaning to get at least a second external drive to back up the music and our computers.

The odd noises were all the motivation I needed. I went to FirstTech and paid a little bit more than I should have for a 500GB LaCie d2 Quadra drive. I don't mind paying extra, though, because I got good help and information from the guy working there (as always) and it's a local business.

The first time I moved my music was when moved it from my computer's hard drive to the drive that's acting up. As I recall, it went pretty well. I followed some directions that I found online and got it right the first try.

Well, moving the music files from one external drive to another is easy enough, but making sure iTunes knows where they went is apparently almost beyond me. Two days later, I finally figured out the simple little thing I had to do to make everything work properly.

In the meantime, I lost a bunch of music that got deleted off the bad drive. In the process of trying to make iTunes aware of what I was doing, I moved the music around a few times. Every time I moved it, I lost more. Fortunately, we have almost all of it on CD. But it's a significant hassle to go back and rip it all again.

As soon as I back up my computer's hard drive, I guess that's what I'll do.