Well, *that* was interesting

A junkyard (auto wrecker) caught fire Monday morning. It was a mile or so away. Went to 5 alarms.

Lots of *nasty* black smoke from tires and car interiors (all those lovely plastics)

I didn't find out about it until I turned on the news at 4pm. Turns out we were a few blocks inside the "shelter in place" area.

There was an area much nearer to the fire that was evacuated.

I went to the store anyway (hey, I *literally* live next door to it).

Later around 9:30, while Fay and I were having our usual Monday TV night, Fay's roomie called her. Seems they'd expanded the evacuation area. she was going to head to the shelter and wanted us to go too.

I checked online and we were actually outside the evacuation area. Predictably the roomie didn't care. She called and texted several more times.

I just closed the windows and endured the temp in the apartment going up to 80.

When I got up today, I saw that it was raining. Air was much better./ and the news tonight said that the air quality was back to normal. Evac order dropped.

Computer update

Well, I should be getting the new-to-me drives for the main box on Friday. I decided that since I was going to have to open the box anyway, I order a RAM upgrade for it to bring it up to 8 gig (max the motherboard can handle).

Got the RAM today. Unhooked the box (which has been sitting idle since my last post about it) and moved it to the kitchen table to work on it.

RAM went in ok. Powered up and it even sort of booted into windows.

Shut it down and pulled the power on one of the 2 300 gig drives. Powered up again and system said it couldn't find a boot device. Great, I'd gotten the right drive on the first try.

Shut it down and took out the failing drive.

Now when I get the replacement drive, I can put it in, do some drive swapping so I can clone the failing drive onto it) and then boot up and restore from backups.

I also took the opportunity to blow out dust and disconnect a noisy fan in one of the mobile rack sockets.

Now I just gotta wait for Friday.