August 18, 2008: Buying Lots of Stuff

95 Days to Baby Day! (26 Weeks, Three Days Pregnant)

3 Days to Dominica’s 30th Birthday.  (Thursday!)

Boy was I tired this morning.  Oreo was starving having skipped his dinner last night.  He made me getup and let him explore the house looking for food.

I’ve been having dreams that I remember a lot more recently.  In the not too distant past, I went for several years without having any dreams – probably a product of the sleep apnia.  Since being on the CPAP the last few years my sleep patterns have changed and from time to time I will dream a bit.  The past few weeks have been one of those times.

Last night I had a strange dream in which I was something akin to a superhero sidekick.  I didn’t have any super powers but I seemed to work for someone like superman.  In the dream the super hero’s arch nemesis had devised some devious and underhanded means of destroying our hero and we had to come up with a plan to stop him.

I don’t remember any details – now I wish that I had written it down as soon as I woke up – but I know that at one point I had to descend into a crypt or prison deep underground and squeeze through a doorway made of stone that didn’t even seem large enough to squeeze through physically, even with a push.  The underground area was well lit and pretty clean.  Very strange.  It seemed as though just being in such a place should invoke panic, but it did not.

The arch nemisis / bad guy had come up with some way to make one of his henchmen temporarily into a super anti-hero so that he could come and destroy the real super hero.  Through some ingenious plan that I concocted, though, we were able to fool the super anti-hero into destroying the bad guy instead.

Sorry, that was a pretty awful retelling of the dream.

I did some shopping today.  Quite a bit, in fact.  I bought two Seagate 750GB SATA drives for the HP DL145 G3 as well as an additional 8GB of memory for it.  That will take it to a total of 9GB of memory (it ships with 1GB.)  The two hard drives will be in a RAID 1 configuration for redundancy so only .75TB of usable storage.

I also bought a brand new HP DL385 G5 with two quad core AMD Opteron 2.1GHz processors, 4GB of memory (plus an additional 16GB to add to it for a total of 20GB), SmartArray P400 RAID controller with 256MB of drive cache, two Seagate Savvio 15K RPM 73GB hard drives and two Seagate Savvio 10K RPM 146GB hard drives.  This is going to be one monstrous server.  This will, in the near future, be the server hosting SGL, too.

I picked up a few miscellaneous items as well including an HP USB DVD Burner and an APC Back UPS battery system for dad’s desktop as he has serious power issues at his house and it really causes problems with his computer equipment.  This was one major shopping day!

This evening, I tried to buy an Acer Aspire One in coral pink for Dominica for her birthday (which is on Thursday.)  To our dismay we discovered that Acer has not started shipping the pink or brown Aspire One models yet and only the blue and white are currently available.  We had worked very hard to come up with a good birthday idea and now we have nothing.  We might just wait for the pink One to release rather than going for something else sooner.

I worked until seven thirty then we ordered in dinner from Nino’s.  Dominica just got a salad and sandwich.  I decided to try something different and got rigattoni in a vodka cream sause which turned out to be amazing.  I will be getting that more often now.  Very, very tasty and healthier than my usual alfredo sauce.

We watched some of The Love Boat and then it was off to bed.  Pretty relaxing night for us except that Dominica needed to cook Oreo’s food for the week.  He was just about out of food and we just realized it this morning.

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