Last month I had 4 external hard drives and my husband convinced me to buy a new hard drive to replace my two oldest drives. So I did what most people do and I went to Amazon and bought a Seagate Expansion 22TB hard drive. It arrived in the retail box on my front porch, which was kind of weird, and I'm glad I was home because it required zero effort to figure out what was delivered.

My concern then became is this a safe way to transport external hard drives? So I started down the internet research rabbit hole to figure out if this was a safe way to transport these types of drives and how to verify that the hard drive wasn't physically damaged in transport.

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Here is the lowdown, this year for Thanksgiving I traveled from Alaska to Texas. That part went well.

The part that annoys me is my mom just told me one of my aunts and uncles plan to attend Thanksgiving and they plan to watch football in the living room. My mom's house has an open floor plan so the dinning area, the kitchen, and living room are all in the same space. They are planning on at least 12 people attending this party.

The biggest problem beyond my own irritation at that level of rudeness is that I can't hear well when there are too many competing noises and I've noticed over the years I don't do well with crowds or too much noise.

I'm like why the fuck are you even visiting people if you plan to watch TV? They could stay home and do that, or show up for an hour two, then leave to go home and watch TV. There is no visiting and catching up if someone's attention is focused on a TV show. Also why does "football" get a pass on family holidays in terms of what is played on TV but not other shows?

I was sort of looking forward to catching up with aunts, uncles, and cousins, but not sure that's going to happen. It's hard enough talking when there are a lot of people around and there is just conversation happening, but add in TV noise and it's just unbearable. I'll probably eat and bail. Too much noise stresses me out. I already told mom when I get overwhelmed I'm leaving the party to go hide out away from the noise.

Which is what I did a lot of when I was growing up, parties with large groups of people make me miserable. Small gatherings are fine but I think after 10 people it's just too much.