Bye Bye Butterfly

Another long work week has come to an end. We once again managed to do the impossible and finished our project on time. Hopefully things will slow down for at least a little while so I can catch my breath. Maybe I will even find some time to go to the gym, get a haircut and get my car fixed. I haven't taken my car to the shop in such a long time. I know it is going to cost me, but I want to bring it in and have a bunch of things done to it including: an oil change, replacing my seat warmers due to a recall, replace the center console inside that was ruined by a scented pine tree thing, get some new brake pads and new shocks. I figure while I am dumping money into I should have them fix my car alarm so it will actually beep when I lock the car. It needs a lot of work and I want to get it down before winter sets in.

Yesterday when I woke up the chrysalis we have had since returning from Vermont was clear and you could see the newly formed butterfly inside. I had decided to spend my morning at home and a couple hours later I looked inside the tupperware container to find a butterfly dangling upside down drying its wings. It was amazing how quickly the change occurred. Unfortunately I had to go to work and wasn't able to let him out. When I came home Jennifer was out on the back porch and had just put the butterfly onto a vase of flowers. He wouldn't fly away though and stayed on the same flower overnight through the rainstorm. We woke up this morning and checked on him to find him still clinging to the same flower. Jennifer went online and looked up some information about butterflies and learned they can go over a day without finding a food, so we weren't too concerned. In the afternoon we went out to look at him again and he was still sitting on the same flower, so Jennifer had him climb on her finger. He was shaking and started flapping his wings a little bit. About 30 seconds later he took off and flew up into a tree next to the house. It was amazing seeing him fly for the first time. It was also sad to him go. As of about an hour ago he was still sitting in the same tree, he must be getting pysched up for his long trip to Mexico.

One other thing I spent a majority of my down time doing over the last couple days was getting my iPod to load correctly. Ever since we got Jennifer's iPod Shuffle working I have only been able to update my songs once. It has been extremely frustrating and after spending two hours trying to figure it out last night, I drove to my mom's and picked up her iPod to test my set up. So this morning I spent another six hours erasing, charging, restarting, plugging, unplugging and testing all sorts of combinations. Finally after about twenty restarts I was able to update my iPod's software. However I was still getting a big fat error when I tried to copy songs. I was about to give up when I switched firewire cards and was finally able to upload my music. I recently bought a USB2.0/Firewire PCMCIA card so the iPod Shuffle would load in a reasonable amount of time. Unfortunately it only had one Firewire port so when I hooked my iPod up I used the port on the back of my external hard drive instead. I guess by using that port I ended up overloading the firewire port on the card and confused the external drive. Once I switched back to my old Firewire PCMCIA card everything worked. In the end it seems that the problem started because I had bad software on my iPod and then was compounded by the new PCMCIA card. I still need to test my iPod cable, because I think it played a role in this whole mess. Thankfully I didn't lose my music and I don't have to buy a new iPod.

Tomorrow will be a day of hiking up in NH. If anybody is interested let me know.

Keeg