(This post is way overdue - I thought I'd get everything upgraded soon and so put off posting, but no. Here is my tale of woe.)
Yeah, well, I'm back, but didn't accomplish quite as much as I thought. The plan was, for the weekend, for me and the girls to move out of the house completely, leaving Bob to finish painting the kitchen undisturbed, since up to this point the daily disturbances were not letting him get a great deal done, and we desperately wanted to get this over with. My parents-in-law, out of town for the time, generously offered their house for our escape, and we agreed. So Friday night, we moved two girls and all their stuff, food, clothes, four computers, and (finally getting them out of the house) all the Archie comics we could find, up to their place. There are bunk beds in the Pateys' house for this express purpose (although it's not usually local grandchildren sleeping in them) so the requisite war was waged over the top bunk and the girls eventually settled down. I went to make coffee, and... the drip-stop on the coffeemaker was broken in an inobvious way such that I blithely turned it on and left it, and came back to a filter and counter full of grounds. Lovely. I managed to make a pot using the permanent filter from the coffeemaker and a stovetop carafe, but I didn't have the patience to do that more than once. A weekend like this requires a steady intake of coffee, and the lack of it did not improve matters one bit. Timmy's provided whenever I went out or Bob came in, but it's not the same. Not a good sign.
I then proceeded to set up my new and old servers on the dining room table with a monitor between them. Hm, no way to get internet on the main floor; the study is downstairs and there is absolutely not a square inch in there to put another machine, let alone two. So I hauled up the DSL modem and router, put phone filters where they needed to go, and strung cable from the kitchen into the dining room to get internet to the computers I had in there. The computers talked to each other, but not the internet. Neither would the computer that lives there. I remembered having set up their router for them such that the PPPOE username and password would be taken care of by the router rather than them having to use the login program every time they wanted on, but I didn't know the PPPOE info. The router setup, it seemed, was also passworded, but I didn't know that password either. Wireless? Password. Just to eliminate all possibilities, by Sunday morning I called Aliant to make sure that neither the line nor the DSL modem was malfunctioning. No, ma'am, that's all fine, but you need the PPPOE user info, and I won't give it to you since you're not the account holder. (Glad to hear that, actually, but not helpful at the moment.) I reasoned that to call Dr. P on the mainland would have been no good as he probably knew neither the passwords nor even when the last time his computer accessed the internet.
So I gave up on that for the time being and concentrated on moving stuff between computers, which took most of the weekend. I was caught unawares regarding how much random stuff we had saved on the original machine in various places, so sorting it by owner, setting permissions on the shared directories, and removing duplicates was a monumental task. I also had to get the laptops talking to the proper directories on the main machine, fun for a 2000/XP melded network. I had hoped to move everything off the old machine, install Linux, get Apache working with referrer filters, and re-install the blog, but that clearly was not going to happen. I was starting to get twitchy from lack of internet, so John and Vicky who invited us over for John's birthday supper also invited my computers, so I brought them and hauled out a bunch of cords in Vicky's study to get them hooked up (thanks so much!) and suck down upgrades to the software I needed and the make sure nothing had gone pear-shaped in the world outside. (Not that I could have done much about it if it had.)
I resigned myself to being an inattentive mother for this particular endeavour, since the kids wouldn't be terribly interested in doing anything with me due to the sudden availability of the television, thousands of Archie comics, and a lack of their usual toys. I was pretty much right except that some kind of stomach bug manifested itself in Eleanor's guts that kept me hopping with flushable wipes and more about five times as much laundry as I had counted on. What fun. They weren't too bad, though, except that they kept wanting to switch bunks and refused to make up their own beds after stripping them. The light-on-light-off debate raged, as is common about kids who suddenly have to share a room. But we managed to get at least some violin practice and some homework done, and the trip to church was uneventful. We had to cut short a mini-golf trip with friends due to said stomach bug, but at least we got out of the house for a while.
In contrast with the less-than-ideal circumstances that I found myself in, Bob got a stunning amount of work done. He cleaned pretty much everything out of the kitchen into the living room and bedrooms, moved the appliances into the centre, took shelves down, stripped the walls of old wallpaper and paint, repainted in white then ragged them over with light blue, stripped the stone mantel, and painted cupboard doors and frames, the pantry doors and room doors, the radiator, baseboards, and shelves. He slept and ate breakfast at his folks, but spent the other eighteen hours a day hard at it. It ended up that we had to spend Monday night off-site as well, and didn't get moved back into the house until Tuesday evening. We were quite glad to have the chance to move out for the weekend - none of my trials had anything to do with the benefactors - and by the time of this writing, two weeks later, the kitchen is almost completely finished. All that remains is to build the dishwasher in under the counter and paint said counter cupboards (not much point in doing so beforehand) and odds and ends, and I'm very happy to be shut of the whole procedure. Just wish we could have managed to get it done in August.