January 26, 2008: Who Gets a Weekend?

I actually woke up and was ready for the day nice and early. I was awake around seven thirty but Oreo was being super snuggly and I don’t get many chances to really snuggle with him without having to get up and go to work so I stayed in bed until a quarter after eight. I got up and came out to the office and worked for an hour or two then showered and walked over to Food for Life and got a late breakfast to bring home to Dominica. I went to get it before eleven thirty but didn’t get back until just after noon.

Dominica finally pulled herself (and therefore Oreo as well) out of bed until four minutes past noon. Thirteen hours of sleep for the two of them. She was happy to wake up to fresh, warm Food for Life. We haven’t managed to get ourselves breakfast from there in a very long time. It was a special treat.

I didn’t have much time before I had to do a one o’clock conference call for the office which took about an hour. That ate up quite a chunk of the afternoon. I only got a little bit of time to relax before Dominica and I got to work taking care of all of the things that just have to be dealt with today. For both of us that is a bit of homework. Me for my Project Management class and her for her GPS and the New Geography class. She is getting anxious to get her Associates degree out of the way. It is crappy that she has so much that she has to do that it is going to end up taking her almost two years to get an Associates degree when she already has a Bachelors from the same university (State University of New York – just two different colleges) but there is just so much work between where she is and another Bachelors that it is worth getting the AS along the way. It will be at least another year or two after that before she could get her second BSc. degree. If it is even worth it after having an AS and a BSc.

I lost a lot of the afternoon as Oreo was having one of his “needy” days. We aren’t sure if this happens just because he really needs a lot of attention or if it is because he is feeling sick or if he really just needs a lot of different things all on the same day. But it meant a couple hours or more of just feeding, walking, playing, scratching, holding him and trying to figure out if something was wrong or if he just felt alone. But he was right with both of us all day so I doubt that.

I have several servers that I need to build for the office this weekend which is keeping me extra busy as well. My day just flew by as I attempted to get everything done that needed to be done. In between everything I did some big updates to my own servers moving all of the Red Hat 4 series machines up to version 4.6. I also did a lot of work, continuing from yesterday, of getting SSH keys distributed and automounted home directories from my Solaris NFS file server and stuff like that. Mostly background work but a lot of it. I may be swamped but I am also quite productive.

Andy and I spent about an hour or more on the phone this evening. We haven’t had a chance to really talk in probably a month. The whole mid-December to mid-January craziness really takes its toll. It is impossible to “stay on target”. If only we had one of those little targeting computers that did that work for us. “Luke, what are you doing with your eyes closed?” “I’m using the force.” “Open your eyes, use the targeting computer. That’s what it is for – for hitting small objects at great distance.”

Ramona called around eight and came over around nine or a little later with ice cream and the makings of major sundays. I had too much work to do to be able to hang out with her and Dominica so they settled in to watch “girl movies” while I worked. They started with High School Musical 2. Which is probably cute and entertaining but I do not exactly have any urge to watch it which is strange as it is normally more my kind of movie that most peoples’ but something about the massive popularity of it doesn’t do it for me. I have lost all interest in “mainstream” life.

My work ended up going pretty late.  I was still working after midnight when Ramona headed back to the Ironbound to go home.  I took Oreo for a walk so that he would be ready for bed.  Dominica went to the living room to keep reading in the Drizzt Cycle.  (Ramona returned the Icewind Dale Trilogy that she borrowed a few days ago so I might be back on track with reading those soon myself.)

Work went until well after one in the morning.  No rest for the weary I guess.  Slow day planned tomorrow.  Work, of course, plus a meeting with Pam’s brother who might be interested in dungeon mastering a game in which I could actually get to play (Dungeons and Dragons that is) and then dinner with Prashant and Kriti down in Iselin, New Jersey tomorrow evening.

Bed didn’t come until long after one in the morning.  But I wasn’t really getting tired until then either and Dominica was quite content to keep reading.

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