A view of the small town below, during a night hike as I was camping this last weekend

Just how many ladders did I walk under in a past life???

Adminisk8or

06/19/2024

How do you describe a week in which some of the most unlucky, awful things happened to you and made you wish you were dead instead of having to deal with the aftermath, but also you got to get away, go camping, kayaking and in spite of the sheer insanity of bad luck, great things were accomplished? ...I don't think you really can. But I'll try, anyway.

I can't list off every single item of bad luck on here, lest this would become Pity Party - The Musical. Aside from rather preposterous luck in traffic this week, there were a few behemoths that stood in my way. The first was backups. Through means I can't exactly describe without making a lot of educated guesses, my main database crashed and almost became unrecoverable- but thankfully, after a hard power drain on my server, it came back online. It was truly ironic that earlier that day, I remembered that my backups hadn't run in a while, and thought "oh gee, I ought to fix that soon...". Knowing I had limited time, I moved everything off the array of drives onto several smaller external drives. That went fine (took quite some time, of course) and I decommissioned those old drives and put in other ones. I created my new array and started moving data back on. Three of those external drives worked just fine... and then the one that had virtually ALL of my personal files decided to suddenly give up the ghost and get a bad head. How on earth am I this unlucky? If you can figure it out, let me know- I've been wondering for years.

In perhaps a twist of very good fortune or perhaps blissful ignorance, I thought through all the files I would've had, looked at my last backups, and realized I could think of nothing vital that was missing. Thank goodness for that much. So then comes Friday. I have had a ridiculous number of engine troubles since... honestly about a year ago, and I finally got my car back, thinking they had finally fixed it. I was also in a hurry to pack for camp, so I quickly backed into my driveway, trusting entirely to my somewhat fisheye backup camera- and yep, I ran right into the wooden post in my carport. The good news is the post held up like solid steel! The bad news is that the post held up like solid steel- which is much more than I can say for the rear bow of my poor car, now dented and paint chipped. I cannot recite the string of words and audible conjurings that took place, because they would both be unkind on any ears, and would probably worry a fair amount of people. Nevertheless, I was pretty pissed at myself, if it wasn't obvious. Oh, and the check engine light came back on.

And to add even more insanity to my back, after getting my main database normalized again, I set to the task of fixing my backups. I also happen to run my mail server on the same device as my backups, and I had to swap out the entire RAID array of disks I had. I managed to successfully move everything onto a spare drive while I got those main disks swapped out for higher capacity ones. I got everything rebuilding and getting in a row to give me the space I needed. And then, tonight, just as I was going to write in this blog, I happened to notice my mail server was showing an error. I tried automatically repairing the issue, and to my alarm and great fear, it appeared as though it had completely formatted my whole mail server. Just like that.

Thankfully, the emails themselves were kept in tact- but my settings, including authentication, aliases and security were all reset to defaults. I had to go back through and reconfigure everything to the right way- and it took me quite a while to recall how it was all configured. But I did it.

The two good things I can say that happened were that I got fiber internet (HUGE awesomeness!) and I setup my OpenSprinkler system, which is a super awesome thing if you haven't ever heard of it.

But at the end of this week, I sit here asking myself, why on earth did this have to be the week that not one but three big catastrophes hit me? And I'd like to say I bore with it patiently, but if I'm being honest, I was one sour grape through each of these trials. I pressed on and had the utmost determination to move forward in spite of the mountains set before me, but I learned along the way that, to quote our good friends from Toto, I'm "frightened of this thing that I've become". I know things could've been worse, but I'm looking back now and I'm reflecting on the fact that I'm a good deal more prideful and angry than I thought.

I suppose these moments must needs come, and as nicely as I can pretend to put it in words, I can't deny that it's hard to reflect and face the facts when I know I should be better than I was but I failed. And how silly it can make me feel when I suddenly realize that failure not only happens, but is natural. I'm only human, and I should be grateful that I had the patience and clear thought to consider who I am, where I've been, and where I want to be. And I'm certainly grateful that I have the opportunity to change and try to be more patient, next time.

Sorry, I didn't know that last paragraph was going to turn into a moment of self-therapy for me, honestly. Frankly speaking, I kind of just write these posts off as they come to my head- I do very little editing in terms of going back and refining everything before posting these. I hope that helps these posts come across as truly more sincere and less cheesy or phony. And I hope those who read have opportunities to reflect on recent trials and even blessings in their lives in the past week or weeks. It's easy to forget it's needed, sometimes. Until next time, see ya!