Rain was predicted for Friday, and rain it did.  We had planned for an “errand” day.  First, a trip to the Group Health Cooperative clinic nearby (GHC of Southern Wisconsin, not part of our GHC HMO in Washington/Oregon/Idaho) for some lab work.  Bearing a prescription from home, we had to go through the ordeal of registration and lots of paperwork, so it took much longer than the 10 minutes it takes at home.

Then, off to Costco for a few items, including a backup disk for the laptop, since we are on the road for a couple of months and not connected to the network backup system at home.  Another stop at Best Buy for a portable scanner in anticipation of having photos to scan during our visits and reunions.

Of course, “some assembly required” prevails when  setting up backups on a device meant for Windows and Mac: first, reformat the hard drive to the Linux ext4 file system from ntfs, then install and configure rsnapshot to back up the data directories.  The backup on a fresh disk took several hours for over 300GB of data.  Setting up the scanner will wait for another day–the xsane Unix utility should detect and manage it…

A late evening out for dinner:  Despite temperatures predicted dropping to 12 C overnight, Wisconsinites dine outside in short sleeves and shorts whenever there is no snow on the ground.  We Pacific Northwesterners, however, more used to layering, fetched jackets from the car as the sun dropped below the horizon.