T.G.I.M.

Yay! Monday!

I don't say that too often, but putting this past week and weekend behind me, and seeing the weather reports for the coming week have me pleased it's Monday. Cold temperatures kept me on the rollers last week, and my workouts suffered from very low motivation. Thursday night, I was getting excited because Friday's forecast was for reasonable weather, and I was planning on skipping out of work a little early to get in a nice long road ride to start the weekend off right.

Early, er, scratch that, *very* early Friday morning, my pager went off. A battery in one of the big UPSes in the computer room at work had split open, dumping acid onto the floor. Like a rip-off of Aliens, the acid was eating through the floor panels. Sparks were flying and electricity arching across metal bits. The operators shutdown the main power to the UPS, and it brought several of my servers down hard.

I checked the clock: 3:52 AM. Wow. That's early. It'd take a while for the UPS engineers to arrive to fix the batteries, so I had time for a quick shower and a real breakfast. This would turn out to be a blessing in disguise, because if I arrived at work around 5:00, I'd be able to get out early in the afternoon and do a very long ride. Sweet.

Fast forward to 7:15 AM. I was back in the office, after having rebooted and checked all the servers to find them coming up pretty well. Then, bang, the phone rang with word that the main web server was down. Corrupt data on the mirrored drives. A rebuild and restore from tape would be necessary. Then, the second part of the Perfect Storm. My cell phone rang with the phone number of my 93-year-old grandmother's house. My mom had found her in bed mostly unresponsive and apparently unable to speak. The medics who arrived guessed she'd had a stroke and they whisked her off to the hospital.

I hung around work long enough to get others involved in the server restoration, then hopped in the car to zoom through the nearly 1.5 hour trip to the hospital. I arrived there to find my grandmother sitting up and doing very well. All tests came back very well. Heart good. Lungs good. Brain good. Kidneys good. The worst part of the ordeal was her left hand where they'd stuck the IV in the ambulance. Her 93-year-old papery skin had bloated with blood upon removal of the needle at the hospital, and her hand looked like a big purple party balloon. The official diagnosis was just lack of oxygen. She'd must've slept wrong, heavily on her ribs or something, and her O2 level had gotten so low she had the symptoms of having had a stroke.

By 6:00 in the evening, we were all back to her house, with oxygen bottles to get her through these times in the future, and I was in the car speeding the 1.5 hour trip back to the office where my supervisor and co-worker were still toiling away on the problem. A disk had gone bad during the restore, and hell was breaking loose.

Fast forward three two-hour restores later, and at 2:30 AM Saturday, I was finally able to declare the server back up and running, and I went home to climb into bed around 3:00. Awake for twenty-three hours, including a trip to Binghamton and back. Welcome to the weekend.

Weather over the weekend was spotty at best, rainy and cold, and very windy when not raining. I got in a few hours out on the road, but after 14 years of bike racing, I have to admit that the novelty of training in nearly freezing weather has worn off. It's no longer fun to feel like the Michelin Man with so many layers of clothing on, to feel the sting of cold set in to my fingers and toes, to feel the bite of the frozen air inside my chest.

So, it's Monday and I'm excited about the week ahead. My grandmother is doing just fine taking a hit of oxygen every now and again to start the day off right, Mother Nature is promising us temps touching the 50s during the day, I'm promising myself some early departures from the office for some long rides, and I'll be happily busy at work trying to finish the web migration to new servers project that has just been bumped up several notches on my priority list.

See you on the road.