The Lost Day

Posted Sun Dec 6, 2009 in

I don’t know why, but I lost a day yesterday. My suspicion is that I just burned out after a few hard weeks. Thursday and Friday were particularly intense because I was “killing cockroaches,” an aphorism I use whenever I have a bunch of short/small duties that just need to be done, take little time, but number enough that they collectively require a significant amount of time.

The meeting with my boss (the principal) Friday afternoon went well, I thought. I came away encouraged that there are still things for me to do here, even if there isn’t a lot of new project work. It’s up to me to develop new project work and that will require establishing my reputation as an authority in this area. I can do that.

For some unknown reason, iTunes exhibited some strange behavior over the last couple of weeks. When minimized to the mini-player, the player was jumping to the center of the screen. On returning to normal size, it was jumping back to the center of the screen, no matter how set.

Hmm… I did some research last weekend to try to figure it out, but no joy. I tried again this morning and found a thread that suggested repairing disk permissions and another entry that suggested restarting iTunes.

Well, it was time to back-up my system anyway, so a repair of disk permissions was on-deck. I started up SuperDuper (my regular back-up utility and highly recommended), which does a repair permissions before copying the files to the back-up drive (bootable). In the meantime, I restarted iTunes and the problem went away.

This wasn’t a huge deal, but one of those nagging things that bugs me. When stuff isn’t quite “right,” I find it mildly irritating, even if I won’t spend the time required to fix the problem.

So, although Saturday was lost, maybe that isn’t all bad. I rested the bulk of the day, doing nothing but watching Storm Chasers and that was interesting. That is so uncharacteristic of me — to sit and watch television for any period of time. That’s why I think I finally burned out.

I’m really looking forward to taking some time off. I think it’s time to do something different for a few days. Maybe if the weather is good I’ll drive over to the Pacific coast and look at the ocean. I think watching a Pacific sunset might be what the doctor ordered.

  1. You are very hard working. Beneficial use of time is important to you. I’d like to be like you.

    — Bahareh    6 December 2009, 13:46    #