A few weeks back my wife decided to sign us up for dance lessons that were being offered by the local community center where we live.  I didn’t say anything in the hopes that my atypical ailments would per chance leave me be this time and I could actually do something that would make my wife happy.  For those that don’t know I have some nerve issues on the bottom of my feet, ankles that roll in, gout, weak knees, and a pinched nerve in my back.  Now, in my normal day of doing life & business these things are manageable.  It does put limitations on how long I can stand or walk, but for the most part I either have adjusted or I just deal with the pain and go on about things.
So we go to dance lesson #1; there are issues that I won’t go into but suffice to say by the end of the lesson I felt as if someone had jabbed a hot rail spike into the side of my leg (pinched nerve) and I essentially had no feeling from my back down to my left knee.  But hey, the wife was happy.  Well, no she wasn’t.  She didn’t like the fact that I didn’t enjoy myself.  Now I’ll save the details of our discussion because it involves things I just can’t stand to discuss as they will cause me to go into an unrelated rant regarding inter-couple communication.  ((Really?  You want me to ‘want‘ to do this?))  At the end of the talk, which was a few days later, it was decided that we would forgo the dancing.  I hate it, and it helps serve as a reminder of the things I’m not able to do for her . . . but that just adds to my self-loathing and doesn’t really apply to anything else.
So tonight, Thursday when we would normally be at the dance lessons, I’ve come home and gotten right to work.  I’m a little behind on several projects for geekFoundry and I’m just trying to get caught up.  I’ve recently updated to Win 7 64-bit so I’m still putting my software back on the PC and my business partner had brought over his drive that had some essential business tools on it that I needed to learn to use.  Since it’s a back up drive you just install from it.  It’s an IDE drive so you set it on a flat surface, plug in the IDE to USB cable and the power adapter and away you go!  Yea it looks like a hard drive just sitting on top of the PC but it’s spinning and whirring away doing work.  For the non-technical people out there these disks spin at about 7200 rotations per minute with a magnetic head at the tip of an arm much akin to an old LP player.  The space between the disk and the reader is thinner than a human hair . . . heck even a particle of smoke!  With all of that going on it’s very important that the hard drive stay nice and still while in use.
Well, I should have known it would happen.  My stupidity had it out like that (because it’d been out like that for the past week and nothing happened) while I was working.  I was focused on work while Nik was talking with the girls.  Nik was sitting right behind me and saw GB start to pull on the cable but didn’t think anything of it.  There are few sounds in the world that would make a geek go all splankna . . . that was one of them.  Immediately the drive sounded different.  I disconnected it and tried reconnecting it to which the drive simply grounded away.  Now I have a perfectly good paperweight that used to have a lot of important source files on it.  Looks like I’ll be buying a new drive for the company.
It makes me sick honestly, and I’m pissed as hell.  I’ve done a good job of focusing the anger towards me because in the end I’m responsible for my gear.  DR asked before bed tonight what the difference between Ignorant and Stupid was.  She hadn’t heard me say anything as after the crime had been committed I went to buy diapers while Nik and the girls went to the pool to swim and play.  Anyway, I explained that Daddy was stupid to leave a drive in child’s reach and try to work from home and that perhaps everyone else was ignorant to the fact that gravity is a hard drives worst enemy (well, the sudden stop actually is the issue)
That’s my night . . . I’m being blasted out by a mother-in-law that has the TV loud enough for the entire building to hear the game.  A game which I care nothing about YET she still feels the need to tell me the score or let me know what’s going on from time to time.  Again, like I care.  I have steered clear of tonights dinner in hoping to prolong my life (full of salt and my blood pressure is high enough).  I don’t know that I’ve ever been so angry . . . well, in a while a good long while.

You know . . . I wish we’d just gone dancing.