Going the Wrong Direction

Yesterday afternoon after dealing with work -- since I've been working mostly with the East coast offices, I've been mostly working 7 AM - 3:30 PM or so -- Lisa and I had errands to run. First we stopped at a VW salvage yard near Salem where she was able to find a replacement for the broken windshield-wiper switch for the Vanagon. Then we drove to Beaverton -- through awful commute-hour traffic, yuck -- to collect an IBM T30 laptop she'd put in for repair (not economically repairable, they say, but we can keep it as a parts source for those pieces that do work) and another refurbished T30 that she'd ordered pre-emptively on the assumption that the dead machine couldn't be fixed. Heading back, we stopped at Fry's to buy a pair of 512 MB memory chips for the T30 so we could upgrade it to the maximum 1 GB (it came installed with 2 x 256, it said on the box).

When we got home, we found that -- after experimentation -- the refurbished box wasn't actually recognizing one of the two memory slots. So instead of me heading south this morning, we have to first go back to Beaverton and talk to the computer shop about getting Lisa a box with two working memory slots. Then we go back to Fry's and return the two memory chips, because it looks like we should be able to use the chips from the junked T30 instead.

Alas, all of these errands are precisely the opposite direction of where I should be driving today, so I had to be up early again rather than sleeping in.

We'll find out tonight whether the internet access at the Holiday Inn Express Weed works or not.

Of Broken Computers, Cars, and Travel Trailers

We drove up to the computer-repair shop in Beaverton, which claimed that the memory slot was bad because we broke it by opening the memory slot door without removing the battery first.

( Of Broken Computers )

( Of Broken Cars )

( Of Broken Travel Trailer Doors )

I made pretty good time by my standards (about 330 miles in about seven hours including several short and a couple long stops), so while I'd ended up leaving Mehama around an hour later than I'd originally planned, I got to Weed by 8:30 and settled in to the hotel.

The Holiday Inn Express Weed is small, only two stories, and probably for that reason has no elevator, but I can lug my bags up a single flight of stairs. It has much better internet connection than Ashland did last weekend. I had time to eat dinner and go for a short soak in the hot tub before turning in. What with losing an hour tonight, I wanted to get to bed relatively early, but that was not to be. Fortunately I do have all day tomorrow to make it the remaining 300 or so miles home, after having driven (including the trip to Beaverton) driven close to 500 miles today.

Edit, 11 March 21:30: Travel report on today's trip: Left Mehama at 13:25, arrived Weed 20:25, having traveled 331 miles in 7 hours for a 47 MPH average, including six stops.