Saturday, August 30, 2003

Baghdad Cafe for brunch: coffee and Greek omelette for Patrick, large orange juice and Western omelette for me. Our waitress was a new one here. Her name is Michelle, and she's Jewish-mom sassy and in-your-face friendly, almost to the point of being overbearing. "You better eat that whole omelette, coz you're too skinny!" Patrick said, "I'm glad they finally hired someone with pep." There was never really anything wrong with the other wait staff; they just didn't go out of their way to wish you a Happy Labor Day Weekend or call you Sweet Pea or or Sweetie like Michelle did. My glass had lipstick stains ("I took a sip—thought you wouldn't mind!"), our table wasn't wiped completely (still had syrup in one corner), and every fork I touched felt sticky to me (but Patrick didn't notice anything wrong). Otherwise we had a great meal here. We like Baghdad Cafe very much. After brunch, we walked around the Castro, stocked up on 2-for-1 Tom's of Maine peppermint toothpaste at Walgreens, bought $5 needle-nosed pliers at Cliff's Variety because Tina told us we didn't need $47 tweezers for removing bones from fish, and eventually sat in Sweet Inspirations (quieter than Flore and free coffee refills). I re-read from Ethan Mordden's How Long Has This Been Going On? (almost done) while Patrick studied Mandarin. Went to Rainbow for grocery shopping. Spent several hours trying to fix one of our computers. It was a chain of situations all gone wrong. It all started about a week ago when we found that the Chicago DVD we had rented was skipping frames. After some troubleshooting, we found other DVDs were skipping too—others we had known to work fine. Our music was skipping too, so it wasn't the DVD player software. Hours of troubleshooting over the past week led to the emergency purchase of a new hard drive, the arrival of which I'm still awaiting. However, I'd been trying other avenues of troubleshooting. For example, I had a spare drive and wanted to copy the old drive (which was suspected to have problems unfixable by ScanDisk) to the spare drive. However, I couldn't load PartitionMagic from floppy disks coz this computer didn't have a floppy disk drive. I couldn't install one because all the drive bays were taken up. I temporarily removed the tape backup so I could put in a floppy disk drive, plugged in the spare hard drive, and when I loaded up Partition Magic the spare hard drive claimed to have only 2 GB instead of the 6 GB it's rated for. Must have had some platters that were damaged. Another troubleshooting path: took out the combo drive which was suspected of having tracking problems since April 3 and put in the old DVD drive which worked fine but didn't have CD-RW capability (okay for now). Attempted to install Office XP—good news: it got farther than it did with the bad combo drive! However, shortly thereafter it rebooted without warning in the middle of the installation! Restarted in safe mode and used system restore to wipe its brains clean of the bad incident. Now I'm out of options—I suspect the primary hard drive to be the primary cause of all these problems—perhaps the virtual memory page file is sitting on bad sectors. Can't do anything until that new hard drive arrives sometime next week—I feel like the drive will crash at any moment. Dinner at home with Patrick: garden vegetables linguine, bread. Watched the Will and Grace episode with Madonna starring as Karen's roommate. It was so bad that Patrick apologized to me afterward for asking me to watch it, but he was laughing a lot during it, so I can tell he enjoyed it at least some. I didn't laugh once. We tried to find other entertainment online at Atom Films but we tried 3 comedies and they were all pretty bad—never again. We wanted to see Madonna on last night's MTV Music Video Awards but although there were some clips none had Madonna in them so we gave up on that.