Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Safe and Sound, Except...

I managed to get back to my lovely Las Vegas home last night around 4pm. As nice as it was to be back in NY for a couple of weeks and it seemed like I had never left, once back amongst my stuff, it was like I had never had Las Vegas.

Except, I didn't recall leaving the funky smell. I swear I didn't fart on the way out, shutting the door behind me when I left two weeks ago. I came home to find that at some point while I was gone the bathroom sink overflowed onto the carpet. The smell of my upstairs neighbor's shower water wasn't terrible or overpowering, but unenjoyable nonetheless.

It was too late last night to get maintenance on the matter, so I aired out the apartment. The current temps in Vegas are the same as NY, mid 60's. Very cool and refreshing. It's supposed to get back into the 80's next week, but for now, I'll take the fresh crisp air that is replacing the stagnant water smell.

My next surprise involved my computer. My 500GB SATA hard drive doesn't appear to be working. This is really obnoxious as I had about 450MB of data on the drive. Nearly all of it is replaceable, but there is one folder that has no back up and is loaded with a bunch of personal letters and such that I keep. Like the documents that hold all of my blog entries. Again, at particular data is still available to me online, but if I want a convenient record of it again, I'll have to go through the entire blog page by page and copy it all over again. Naturally, there are plenty of other files that are not so easily replaced. I haven't looked at it yet to see if it is fried completely or if something else is wrong, but I am not enjoying the prospect of sending the hard drive out to be salvaged, but I may want to do just that enventually.

I should point out that none of my writing data was compromised and the hard drive that contains the partition where windows is installed remains fully functional, so my computer is otherwise fine. I simply cannot access the storage drive where I hold all the mass data that I store.

This morning, I went to the rental office to file my complaint about the overflowing sink. A maintenance guy just happened to be passing through the lobby as I was discussing the problem with one of the secretaries. Ten minutes later he was pumping out crud from the pipes. I pointed out the crack in my shower head. I cover it with a wash cloth as I shower or else water shoots over the curtain and onto the floor and he replaced that right away as well. Thus all is right with my apartment once again and before 10:30am no less. Too bad my computer hard drive won't be so easy to deal with.

After the maintenance guy left, I sent in my registration for the joint meetings in January. I was amazed that there was a separate registration category for unemployed mathematicians. The fee was $43 as opposed to the standard members fee of $216 (nonmembers are $335). Leave it to mathematicians to actually set up a fee schedule that makes sense.

Today's next most important duty involves grocery shopping. After that, I guess I better get back to work on the job stuff.

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