Let the Panic Begin!
Greetings!
I wrote the first draft of this on Thursday evening because Friday is going to be crazier than usual.
I had expected to spend Thursday continuing to work on getting ready for the renovation, but an unexpected problem popped up. The website that I maintain for the local community association started acting weird that morning when I tried to update a page. After some serious digging I figured out that we were using all the files we were allowed, all 600,000 of them!
Many hours of research and talking with someone I work with on this lead to the conclusion that something was creating cache files at the rate of about 1000 per hour. This is WordPress, a horrific agglutination of code that powers nearly half of the Internet. I disabled every one of our plugins (bits of code that extend WordPress functionality) and nothing changed. I found some weirdness with the built in tool called wp-cron and corrected that, but the cache file creation continued with no change.
Thankfully I deleted the entire cache directory at one point which released about 550,000 files, and bought us a bit of time. It seems this issue started nearly a month ago, maybe, and only became obvious this morning when we hit the quota.
Anyway, that blew a big hole in my day, and promises to keep me weirded out for some time.
UPDATE: As of Friday morning the cache file creation bonanza appears to have stopped. No one is quite sure why, and follow-up research is needed. But we learned several things on Thursday, and with luck we will be able to avoid this issue in the future.
On the house, we continue to pack and prepare. We’re to the point of cleaning the rugs we’re going to save so we don’t have to do that on the newly installed floor later.
We’ve also moved all of Anne’s plants upstairs and she’s been packing up more of the remaining kitchen items. The house is very quickly emptying out.
The contractors are here on Friday morning to build a ramp up to our second floor balcony. Anne and I will live upstairs through all of this insanity and we need a way in and out. The contractors will also return on Tuesday to do some preparation and demolition work before the hazmat abatement people start on Wednesday.
We’re hoping that Tinkerbelle will use the new ramp, but that remains to be seen.
And speaking of Tinkerbelle, we now have yet another issue: incontinence. This last week has been barrels of fun. We have to get her off the prednisone, and that requires a good response to the cyclosporine. We’ll get answers to that this afternoon, after this post has gone out.
If the cyclosporine has helped her hematocrit, we will start to ramp down the prednisone as rapidly as possible, I hope. And if we see no changes as a result of the cyclosporine, then things get dicey. Her quality of life is dropping thanks to the prednisone and its many side effects, and we may be forced to make an awful decision much sooner than we’d like if there’s not a marked improvement. So it’s fingers crossed that we get good news from the vet.
Anyway, when you read this, spare us a good thought or two. We’ll be dealing with contractors, the dog, the packing, the planning, the weather, and a recalcitrant website too. It’s going to be a long day.