Well, today has been a complete bust of a day.
Our goal for today was to get up early, head out for a Dim Sum lunch at Yank Sing around noon and then head out to the gym in order to get in a couple of hours on the heavy bag. This seemed like a reasonable plan because we weren't planning on staying out late Saturday night, and we had no other pressing plans for the weekend (aside from buying new sneakers and vacuuming&#41. However, it seems that the fates had other plans for us this Sunday…

Fate's Intervention #1
After buying new sneakers at Copeland's Sports Saturday afternoon, we decided to make a side trip to this little Italian grocer in the Castro district to pick up dinner. So we grabbed some white beans, a small amount of Taleggio cheese (a semi-soft Italian cheese&#41, two types of prosciutto (one baked and one air dried&#41, some fresh ravioli, a meat sauce and a loaf of Grace Baking's Sweet Batard.

The Sweet Batard is not one of my favorite breads. It's not extremely flavorful, and the bread has too much air in the mix, which creates these large air holes in the finished loaf, making it impossible to spread the Taleggio cheese on the bread. Unfortunately, it was late in the afternoon… and the batard was the best bread available so late in the day.

At 7pm or so, we started plating up dinner. We decided to serve the meal in two courses, the first being an antipasto with the cheese, meats, beans and some of the bread which would then be followed by the hot ravioli and the rest of the bread. The first course went fine… then we started up on the ravioli.

While the ravioli was boiling, I went to cut the crusty Sweet Batard. So, I extracted my large serrated knife and started slicing the second half of the loaf. On what was going to be the last slice, the knife glanced off of a hard piece of crust and sliced directly into my left pointer finger… possibly hitting the bone, but definitely going through the capillary. Two seconds later my finger is under a stream of water in the bathroom and bleeding profusely. I immediately get a band-aid with some bacitracin on my finger and elevate it so it will stop bleeding. At 10pm I change the band-aid and find a horrible gash… but the bleeding had pretty much stopped.

When I woke up this morning, the gash was starting to knit back together, but it was in no condition for me to go to the gym and hit the heavy bag… so the gym plan was pretty well shot.

Fate's Intervention #2
Last night, we went to the Toronado (read the Barfly Chronicles for details&#41. Though we weren't planing on being there that late, we ended up not getting home until 2:30am. Factor in talking, and we weren't asleep until almost four in the morning. Forget waking up early.

Fate's Intervention #3
Janet tends to have a slightly more delicate system than I do. It's not that she gets sick every week or anything, but if there is ever anything wrong with food, she feels it the next day. Last night, right after I fell asleep, Janet got hit with some minor food poisoning. When she woke up this afternoon, she told me that she can't keep anything in her stomach… even Alka-Seltzer or even just plain water. At first she thought it might have been the beer, but since usually goes through 4 pints or so when we go out, and since she had only had two pints last night, she wrote that off as a possible problem.

The only thing that I thought could be the culprit was the meats from dinner. Since the slicer that they use for the prosciutto (fully cooked&#41 is also used for the pancetta (uncooked&#41, maybe she got a slice of prosciutto with a little raw pork on it. It's now 7:30 pm and Janet's back asleep.

Anyway, as I said in the opening sentence of this update: today has been a complete bust of a day.

I work in a relatively small office, with relatively old computer equipment. The company employs no real computer "professionals," so everyone plods along on a 20-person local network hoping nothing will go wrong. Unfortunately, something will eventually go wrong, like six months ago, when my computer was attacked by a virus (nobody had any updated virus-detecting programs&#41 that wiped out my entire hard drive. Of course, this being a small office with no computer professionals, there was no backup of my hard drive. At all. Needless to say, I had to recreate everything from scratch, which took just about forever.

After this episode, four, count 'em, four people in the office had their hard drives die. Just die, for no reason. All in a row. Still, no backup system was implemented by the person who was supposed to be the closest our company had to a computer "expert." Two weeks ago, I came in on a Monday morning to find a black screen on my monitor, as if it had been rebooted. Thinking that it had somehow gotten turned off during the weekend, I rebooted it again, sat down and waited for Windows to start running. Nothing happened. I tried again, and again, and again, then started to panic: I had to read my mail! I had to check the 'net! I had to do my WORK! The computer person doesn't get into the office until 9:00 or 9:30 AM, and by the time he arrived, at least 3 other people had tried to prove their computer prowess and had failed. ("I know how to fix it. Let me try. <tappity tappity> Hmmm. <silence> Is that my phone ringing?" [as they walk swiftly away.]&#41 Now it was ten times worse than when I had originally found it.

Nothing worked. My hard drive was fried. My company had it sent it out to one of those hard drive recovery places who pronounced it Dead On Arrival. EVERYTHING on my computer was lost, including intricate financial spreadsheets that I had been working on and adding to for nearly six months. All my saved e-mails and bookmarks are also gone, which sucks (I mean, who remembers their bookmarked URL's? That's precisely why they were bookmarked in the first place!&#41, and guess what? Though computer problems have been plaguing the entire office for months, there was no backup of any of my files to be found. Now I have a new hard drive with hardly anything on it and a stupid version of Outlook which sends mail but can't receive any, no matter how hard I try. At least my extremely pissed-off attitude helped the company buy a Jaz drive to back up everyone's files. Better late than never, right? Thpt.