This morning I stood out on our balcony drinking coffee, watching the sun come up over the lake, and listening to concert of geese, ducks and birds. My thoughts were about how wonderful life is, etc, etc, etc. I still think my life is wonderful, but, by the end of the day my mellow mood had gone downhill.
Things started going south right off the bat. I had TWO salespeople show up at 9:00 from two differenct companies. I was able to quickly deal with one, but the other was a rather rude dude from India, who insisted on telling me what I was doing wrong with my network. Not a good way to make a sale. Unfortunately, he was also the epitome of politeness to my boss, and gave me high praise during his actual presentation. So the question is, which is the real side with which we would have to deal?
Shortly after the presentation, my network went haywire. All of the equipment in the server room started acting like a pack of dogs – when one started howling, the others chimed in. We had one server that was actually moaning. I’m hoping we can keep it alive until someone can take a look at it on Monday. Our WAN also suddenly went offline for about 45 minutes. I wasn’t dare going to ask what could happen next because I was afraid I would find out.
I got the pack settled back down, and our network connections back. Then the storms hit. A severe thunderstorm that had generated a tornado in Pickens County ripped through our area at about 3:30. Many of our staff huddle in the office vault, but I figured we would be OK just staying away from the windows. Fortunately, we didn’t lose power, and the network held together.
By 4:00 things had cleared enough for me to make my escape. Traffic was heavy and slow on I-85, but passable. However, getting into my neighborhood was more of a challenge. Large trees were down everywhere — including one that had fallen across the bridge leading to our street. I had to turn around, and I feared the worst for the stately large trees in our yard. I got the the other end of our street to find it flooded and impassable. I was able to sneak down a side street and wend through service trucks to finally make it to my house. My next-door neighbor lost a large tree in his front yard, but all of ours were spared. There was only a small branch on the roof. Even the rotten limbs in the lower yard that I had been hoping to fall stayed put. With all of the trees down in the neighborhood, we had no power.
A quick break for a wine & cheese reception at Furman, then it was off for an evening rehearsal with the Chorale and Greenville Orchestra.
Saturday Morning:
Another beautiful day, but I have already been burned once this week by tempting weather. Our power finally came on about midnight – of course, after we were asleep, with lights that we had left on suddenly illuminating the house. I finally got around to turning on my desktop computer, only to catch whiffs of acrid smoke curling up from the CPU. Oh great.