August 23, 2008: Weekend in Frankfort

90 Days to Baby Day! (27 Weeks and One Day Pregnant)

Dominica and I arrived in Frankfort, New York at approximately a quarter past one this morning. We were pretty tired, but the drive wasn’t all that bad. I spent the last two hours of the drive listening to “Attila” on my iPod while Dominica slept. This has become the norm for us.

We grabbed dinner at the Burger King on the Garden State Parkway just before leaving New Jersey. We were both pretty hungry. The total trip was just under five hours. It is amazing how long it takes to go such a short distance.

The new tires really make a difference on the BMW. It is quiet again rather than loud. It handles much better and it rolls more easily. Those old tires really were worn out. I can’t believe that we managed to get thirty four thousand miles out of them! We definitely got our money’s worth from those tires. The Lord was really watching over us to have them go flat yesterday in front of the apartment, though, and not while we were driving for five hours tonight!

I was extremely groggy when I pulled myself out of bed at five minutes before eight this morning. That was definitely not enough sleep for me. No time to spare, however, and I had to be logged onto the office’s remote access system as quickly as possible so that I could get started for the day. There is not a tremendous amount of work to be done today but there is a bit of “sitting around and watching” things that I have to do.

I worked solidly from eight in the morning until almost ten without any break at all. I really “hit the ground running” this morning.

I am up to two hundred and fifty five Twitter posts already. I have not noticed an increase in traffic to SGL since having started using Twitter but I suspect that people are not used to it yet and have not gotten into the habit of hitting SGL more often to see the latest updates. Most people watching my Twitter feed subscribe directly through Twitter and don’t use SGL.

I managed to get lots of reading done in “Presentation Zen” this morning. Plenty of time while waiting for remote machines to re-sync with my desktop.

I completely finished my office work by two in the afternoon. Altogether, I put in five hours of work for the office today. It’s been a busy weekend already.

Dominica and her mother went out to get pedicures this afternoon while I worked. I got a lot done. It was a very productive day.

For dinner, the family went up to Rome to the Franklin Hotel. It was most of our first times eating there and we were really impressed. The food was great. We really loved it and will definitely be going back there.

After dinner we celebrated Joe and Dominica’s birthdays.  Their mother made birthday cake and we ate in the kitchen and then they opened presents.

Then I spent a few hours working on the computer while the rest of the family watched 21 with Kevin Spacey.  I heard most of the moving from the other room and am glad that I skipped it.  Nothing that I was very interested in.  I read the real history that the movie was portending to portray and it was both more interesting and very, very different.  The movie was extremely unrealistic and silly.  Not nearly as interesting as real life.

Around eleven this evening I got a “site down” notification and discovered that one of my servers in Scranton had died.  I logged into the remote management system and contacted the datacenter and worked on attempting to identify and fix the problem until around one thirty in the morning when it was clear that there was nothing that could be done tonight.  The datacenter is just too far away from Frankfort.

I went to bed at one thirty but didn’t fall asleep for a long time.  I sent Dominica to bed closer to midnight knowing that tomorrow is going to be busy.  The current plan is to drive to Scranton first thing in the morning, pick up the bad server, drive to Newark and attempt to repair and/or replace it there.  Then, if that can be accomplished, I will drive back to Scranton to have it replaced right away.

This is going to be awful.

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