Sssssssssssssssssmokin'!

Yeah baby, I smoke...in the kitchen I am on fire! Just kidding. While I like to cook, I am not a chef. What I cook is edible but not always man food. Last night I left work but instead of going straight home, I gave the Swede (his BMW is in the shop...again) a lift to his apartment. I got home about 15 minutes later than normal but since my wife was not home yet, I was OK. I let the dogs out, grabbed the the mail and put water on to boil for pasta.

I check the fridge and my wife had the shrimp already thawed out so I grabbed that, the garlic, butter, parsley, basil and Parmesan cheese. It was pasta with shrimp tonight, courtesy of El Gee. As you can see it was not complicated at all but my wife was very happy with it. The only thing missing was a salad and crusty bread (we really do not need the bread, but the salad would have been nice) and wine if we drank it, but since we do not, cold cider was the drink du jour.

After I cooked, my wife said she would clean while I got ready for my gig. I had a job to do for a BiC (JK). JK is a nice guy and his PC (for his business) was not as in bad shape as I thought. His biggest problem was space. He had a ton of pics and music files on his small (20 gig) C:\ drive and tons of space on his D:\ drive. After a long process of making sure I was not covering up new files with old ones, I cleared about 6 gigs of space for him. I also turned off disk compression now that he had more space since that can slow read and writes to the HD. After that was done and a spyware check had been done, Crap Cleaner was ran to clean up any pesky temp and cache files. I cleared about 80 megs worth...not bad at all.

He asked me to look at his back-up issues with ACT, so I after a few minutes of poking around I made a sucessful back-up. He was beaming now and asked me to help him with his Blackberry sync. Again, a little research got that up and running. He was very happy.

After all that, I started a defrag. I checked his logs and he had never ran a defrag before (3 years). It was set in the scheduler, but his credentials were incorrect so it never kicked off. I left before it was even close to to finishing (it was still at 2% complete) but I am pretty sure the machine will be a lot faster than it was.

I was there just about three hours, but an hour of that was the machine running while he and I talked and watched a little TV, so I only charged him for two hours at the "church discount" and we were both happy. I also told him that I could answer calls if needed on an occasional basis.

There was only on thing I was not able to fix and that was why his PC fails on 3 certain MS Office patches. He said it was not important so I did not press the issue. To be honest, he would benefit from a re-roll, but I am not going to offer that. I am sure he will want to buy a new PC in a year or so and when that happens, I can help him if needed.
I got home and walked the dogs, checked my e-mail and went to sleep. I was tired then and I am still tired. My back and left hip are still sore (it has been a week and I have been taking Aleve, but not on a regular basis) so I am not in the best of shape. I hope today goes smooth.

Tonight we have care group and Saturday is Mickey's birthday party. I think we have a meeting with the trustees and the Christian school that is renting space from us. We are negotiating a lease with them and so far it has not been easy. What they get for what they pay us is pretty darn good and if they realize it then they are not letting on that they do. If they had to lease from an agent they would pay a lot more and get a lot less.