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Boosted

I got my COVID booster yesterday…and my yearly flu shot.

This one has knocked me on my ass much the same way dose #2 did. And I was praying for death at 3:30 this morning when the fever and chills kicked in, along with the muscle and joint pain. I called out sick today and went back to sleep after Ben had left for work, and slept until nearly 10 am. I ran out for coffee and to the mailbox and came back home and plopped myself in front of the computer. I lasted another hour or so and decided it was time to go back to sleep. Sammy was fine with that—at least until a delivery person came to the front door and that was the end of my nap.

In other news…

Oops! I did it again! (Hopefully the last time for many more years.)

This is not what the delivery person was dropping off today. I picked this up yesterday.

I can hear y’all now: “Are you insane? Didn’t you just buy a new MacBook a few months ago?”

Yes. Yes I did. But believe it or not, this purchase was all part of a long term plan both Ben and I had in put place earlier this year when we’d both reached the end of our patience with our respective butterfly keyboard MacBook Pros. We knew the more powerful M1 chips would be coming out before the end of 2021, but we each went ahead and replaced our old gear with the basic M1s—knowing full well we’d be able to trade them back into Apple for a significant amount of money to be shaved off the cost of the new machines. And that’s what we did.

As I wrote earlier, I ordered, then cancelled, the reordered again a new MacBook Pro the day they came available. Ben ordered the same day, and his laptop was due to arrive yesterday. Because I’d hesitated, my order was pushed out two weeks further.

Scrolling through my news feed yesterday, I ran across a post that basically said, “Don’t want to wait? You know you can pick up any of the standard configurations at your local Apple Store today, right?”

It was true. I verified that the model I wanted was indeed available, and canceled my previous order outright. I drove to Scottsdale and came home with a shiny new 14-inch MacBook Pro.

Everything went well until I got to the point in the initial setup where you’re offered the opportunity to transfer your data from a backup or from another Mac.

Begin rant…

I use CarbonCopyCloner to do a nightly backup of my data to an external USB SSD. Like I’d done in times past, I plugged it in and directed the Mac to use it to transfer my profile and settings.

It read the disk and started transferring my data. I was kind of surprised that it was taking so long; after all, these new machines are supposed to be speed demons.

It finally finished up and I logged into the machine. Because these machines always ship with a slightly out-of-date OS installed, so I went about starting the update. Almost immediately I get a warning that I was almost out of disk space.

WTF? The Mac had a 1TB drive, and the data I was transferring was at most 350GB. I verified that it was indeed a 1TB drive in the machine, and then started looking at what exactly was using up space.

As it turns out, CCC was set to create “snapshots” when doing the nightly backups. These snapshots contain the the older files that are different from the current backup. In my case, this was taking up nearly 500 GB and it had—for some reason—been transferred over with the rest of the profile. Okay, I thought, I’ll just go in and delete all this garbage.

And thus a typical Apple clusterfuck began.

All those snapshots were locked. And they refused to allow themselves to be unlocked en masse. Why would they? Why should they? “It just works!”

At this point I got to check out the new “Erase All Content and Settings” function in Mac OS Monterey…several times.

TLDR, after another 6 hours and several more abortive attempts to get my data transferred, it finally worked.

It shouldn’t be this hard.

 

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Monday

It’s three days in the office this week, and I have to take the newbie out to our remote offices to do a physical inventory because apparently this has become a priority with the micromanager from hell.

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Dear Theists…

Before you take it upon yourself to tell me that I have no morals and will burn in Hell for all eternity for not believing in whatever god you’ve selected, please do me a favor:

Go outside on a clear night, away from city lights, and look up at the heavens. Try to visualize the vastness of our solar system, which orbits a single star. Now picture that our sun is merely one of the 300 billion stars that form our galaxy, the Milky Way. Finally, consider that the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies that span the universe.

When you have done this, you will have come close to comprehending the enormity of the fuck I don’t give about your archaic, bigoted, and infantile opinions about creation and the way I choose to love my life.

Sincerely,

An Atheist

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DUNE…and Stuff

Let’s get to the “stuff” first.

DUNE has been my favorite book for my entire adult life. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before, every few years I used to go through it—and in fact the entire series of Herbert’s original six books—just to remind me why I love it so.

(Unfortunately I now have the attention span of a gnat and sitting down to read anything more than a dozen paragraphs causes me to fidget, so I’m long overdue for a re-read of the series.)

Reading aside, the more I learned of Villeneuve’s vision for the film, the more excited I became.

I was seriously hoping that this would be the spark that ignited the same sort of passion for the story in Ben that I had been carrying with me all these many years.

Unfortunately, I fear just the opposite has happened. And after last night I think DUNE is going to be one of those subjects that just isn’t discussed in this house.

Ben had no interest in seeing the film, yet he agreed to go with me on a date night nonetheless because I wanted him to see it with me. I verified that the time and place would work for him (keeping in mind his commute home from Casa Grande) and he said it was fine. This week he told me he had an IEP scheduled for 4:00 that afternoon but was fairly certain he could still make it back to Phoenix in time to make our 6:15 showtime.

And then life intervened.

Yesterday was a day from hell for my husband. Around 2:30 pm a kid threatened to self-harm, and during the interview it escalated, with him threatening to hurt his dad—and Ben. Crisis was called, and after waiting 20 minutes on hold, the team was dispatched. But because there’s apparently one crisis intervention crew for the entire county, Ben had no idea when they would show up.

I’ll spare you the details, but we didn’t make the 6:15 show. We ended up at the 9:45 pm show, didn’t get back home until after 1 am, and Ben had to get up five hours later to make it to a training class this morning that is located in Fountain Hills, affectionately referred to as halfway to New Mexico. We did have a nice, leisurely dinner before the movie, something we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise because I misread the website and thought the multiplex was “Dine-In IMAX,” when in reality it was “Dine-In and IMAX.”

Speaking of the multiplex, once upon a time the theaters at Desert Ridge were nice, but it was obvious they are long overdue for an upgrade. The “IMAX” theater wasn’t a true IMAX, but rather IMAX-Lite. It may have had the requisite sound system, but the screen was only marginally bigger than what you’d get in a regular theater, not the two story monster I remember from visits to IMAX theaters in San Francisco. The seats were incredibly uncomfortable. Ben was freezing. We were only two of a couple dozen patrons wearing masks. First time back in a theater in nearly two years and this was not a good first impression.

Add to that, technical difficulties prevented the movie starting at the scheduled time, so the trailers didn’t even start rolling until after 10 pm. And all I have to say about those coming attractions is, “Can Hollywood come up with nothing original?”

The movie finally started and by the time it finished, I answered that question with, yes…apparently they can if they want to.

What can I say? DUNE was everything I’d hoped for. While maybe not one-hundred percent chapter and verse faithful to the source material, it is my opinion that Villeneuve hit all the right notes and has given us as faithful a telling of the story as we’re likely to ever see.

The cinematography was gorgeous. The performances brought these characters to life. The set pieces—especially the personal shields and OMG the ornithopters—despite having already seen both in the trailers, blew me away. As other reviewers have commented, Villeneuve has hit it out of the park and is without a doubt his finest work to date. Denis has filmed the unfilmable and has made it generally—Ben did have questions—accessible to people who have not read the source material or have seen other adaptations.

My only complaint—and this can be laid squarely on my own shoulders—is that because so much had been revealed in the teasers and trailers that I eagerly devoured over the past year, there wasn’t a lot that I hadn’t already seen in one form or another. (The Hunter-Seeker was an exception, and I loved its depiction.)

The film ended at a good point in the story, but OMG I want more. Ben liked it, but it failed to ignite the spark I was hoping for.

It’s going to be a long two years (or however long it turns out to be) before we see Part 2.

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