Any of you monkeys want a banana?

Rachel called a few days ago and told me how unhappy she was. It seems there's more to being a nanny than watching children. That's no surprise to me...there has to be some housekeeping, food prep, laundry, etc. I'm sure it was no surprise to Rachel either. For the woman Rachel worked for, however, it was carried to an extreme. Rachel told me she was made to iron "nightshirts". Iron pajamas, for Chrissakes?!?! When I dropped her off, I had an uncomfortable feeling about this family, and it was little surprise that it ended the way it did. Oh, I didn't mention that? Allow me to digress.....

It seems Rachel had been trying to talk to the mother for at least a couple days to let her know it wasn't working out. She was planning to let them know that she wasn't the right person for them, that she was too close to the children's age to be an effective supervisor, especially since there didn't seem to be a lot of control from the parents. I even saw that in the short time I was there, the evening we dropped her off. There was this little thing with a cd player that showed me the parents didn't have good control of the boy (the youngest). According to Rachel, it's the kids that run the house. After being avoided for a couple days, Rachel finally cornered the mother, and told her they had something important to discuss. Again, according to Rachel, at that point, she was told "No we don't, because you're fired". Rachel called her friend, packed her stuff, and got the hell out of there. She understands now why there have been 16 or so nannys in the last nine years (according to the mother).

It's disappointing that things didn't work out. I want to see her succeed at something. It's pretty common these days for young people to drift from one thing to another, not having a clue what they should be working toward, and I can see Rachel is part of that group. She wants to give this Nanny thing another try, but in a situation she is better able to handle. I wish her luck.....

I'm in the middle of an upgrade to my main system right now. I found this ASUS motherboard, the A7N8X-E that seemed to be all that, and then some. It was $95 bucks from M-Wave, where I usually buy components. I bought a AMD 2400+ processor as an upgrade last year but was unable to use it since the system became unstable after replacing just the processor. The ASUS motherboard will handle up to a 3200+, so I can wait until the price of those come down and pop one in eventually. The motherboard seems to be a solid piece of work. It's got everything but a coffeemaker interface...SATA, IEEE1394 (firewire), 5.1 surround sound, AGP8X, dual lan ports (gigabit), and what appears to be a full suite of media creation tools (WinDVD).

The only problems I've had so far were ones that I created, mainly because I was trying to upgrade without redoing the boot disk. My video capture card (ATI Radeon) seems to be fairly picky about how the software is installed and then upgraded. There are 8 or so entries in device manager for the components on the card, and unless it's done correctly, all 8 will turn into unknown devices after upgrading the control panel software. That's my only complaint about the card, other than the 800X600 resolution limit if you want to use the TV out. It does a nice job of capturing, though, which is the reason I bought the thing to begin with. If the upgrade gives me enough horsepower, I plan to start capturing in a compressed format, instead of uncompressed AVI. Them files are SOOOOO BIG. 2 hours of uncompressed video will fill up the 230GB disk array with a little to spare.

well, I gotta go check on my disk format (60 GB takes a while to format no matter what you have it connected to)....