Delayed on account of …well, more than rain

Well, I got a sharp reminder Friday evening from Mother Nature about what part of the country I live in. I was mentioning not too long ago about having only 40 days to complete PDF Level 2, and that’s accurate…but I may have to revise the number downward. We’re headed into March, the beginning of Some Kind Of Severe Weather Every Other Day season. “In like a lion” is an apt description of March in Arkansas.

Now, I have my Avid and all of its related equipment on a pair of pretty stout surge protectors, but I’ll put it this way: while this Avid came to me insanely cheaply, call it fate, call it the hand of God or whatever you like, I treat it as though the entire lot of equipment would cost me several thousand to replace. Because…well…it would. This is one gift that I do not play the odds with. In the event of bad weather moving in, the Avid gets shut down; if the aforementioned bad weather is a lightning-maker, it gets unplugged, period. My living rests with this machine right now, so I don’t screw around to put it lightly.

I got caught with my pants down on Friday evening though; I wasn’t watching the radar or paying any attention to the sky getting darker, mainly because I was a bit stressed out after an epic bout of baby barfage. I cleaned up the boy and let him take a nap while I cleaned up the mess, and then sat down at the Avid to try to get some work done, and… ZAP. The power went out.

This Avid has to be powered up and down in a very particular sequence; either procedure takes about 3-4 minutes. The outboard SCSI drives’ self-check sequence accounts for the lengthy power-up; the computer’s closedown sequence is why it seems to take forever to power down. Powering down the Avid stack is best done some time before the bad weather arrives because it just can’t be done quickly. And it’s just not supposed to be done by just shutting everything off simultaneously – that’s how you lose a lot of work.

Fortunately, everything checked out – though the SCSI drives, having not had a chance to park their heads, took twice as long to self-check (which had me holding my breath a bit) – but as soon as that was done everything was shut down once more. The lightning seemed like it was right on top of the house, so I may have lucked out.

Just a little reminder from Mother Nature to not get too cozy…and that my “40 days” may end up being something on the order of 30-35 days due to storm-induced downtime. That’s just great. 😛 I know we live in a world where folks have vital systems on a UPS – but that’s just something I don’t have handy at the moment. So the equipment to which I owe nearly every cent that I bring in gets treated with kid gloves. Kinda like the kid does, come to think of it.

Here’s to a less stormy, more productive and hopefully less barfy weekend.