65 Days to Baby Day! (30 Weeks and Five Days Pregnant)
Dominica was really exhausted when she dragged herself from bed this morning. She barely got any sleep. Five hours at the very best and likely only a tiny fraction of that. Oreo and I had the luxury of sleeping in quite a bit. Now that I have my office BlackBerry working again I am able to check my email from bed which means I can often get an hour or two of additional rest! Just one more reason why having a BlackBerry does not necessitate additional work but can actually reduce it.
The weather was really great today. I opened up the windows first thing this morning and got some fresh air into the house. It was bright and sunny so Oreo headed right out to his favourite spot in the living room. We are really hoping that the new house has good sun spots in which he will be able to sleep.
Today was quite a busy work day. The plan was to do some work from home and then to head in to the office but I was so busy that I never got an opportunity to leave the apartment. I just ended up working all day. In fact, it was well after three when I finally had a chance to get some lunch but it was so late that I figured that it would interfere with dinner. So I skipped lunch and just worked through it.
I did manage to do some cleaning today and to take care of the dishes which have been backing up. It wasn’t much but it made a big improvement in the house. We are shipping out the DL385 G5 that has been sitting in the living room for several weeks this weekend and that will allow us to take down the table upon which it sits which will give us our living room back finally.
I had a real ordeal ordering drive trays for the DL385 G5 today. Who would have guessed that HP does not sell the Proliant 2.5″ hot swap trays separately from their hard drives so there is really no simple was to be able to use third party hard drives in a unit like the DL385. I think that I found a solution but it took quite a bit of time on instant messenger and on the phone with HP to figure it out. Once we had figured out what part was needed – and that required tech support, not sales support – then I was able to find the part from eBay even though HP themselves do not sell it.
This is a long weekend for Dominica and I as we are heading up to dad’s house on Friday night and staying until Tuesday night. This will be our longest stretch in Upstate New York since March, 2006, I believe. We are pretty sure that we are able to leave on Friday night because of the freeze on the environment at work making it so that teams are unable to do deployments so my night will likely end early.
I have been doing a bit of shopping on Amazon for their MP3 downloads recently. I’ve found several artists recently that I really like that I just have not been listening to previously. I really like Michael Buble, Azam Ali and Cheryl Bentyne neither of whom I was truly aware before auditioning them on Amazon. I’m finding great new music from artists that I used to listen to regularly but with which I have “lost contact” over the years giving me a wealth of great music to discover. Artists like Enya, Loreena McKennitt as well as Leonard Bernstein conduction Gustav Mahler’s Symphony Number 2 in C Minor, “Resurrection”.
Andy and I were talking about home theatre options for the new house in Peekskill this evening. Dominica and I had talked about putting a large LCD monitor down in the den in the basement but had kicked around the idea of getting a new projector as well. Optoma has a really nice sounding 1080p projector that we could ceiling mount in the den that might work out wonderfully.
Projectors have come a long way since we first installed the InFocus X1 into the basement theatre on Hawthorn Circle. That old projector was not widescreen and had a resolution of 800 by 600 and only output 650 or 700 lumens. We had it stretched out to a fourteen foot screen size which was really tough to do with that little light output.
In the new house we will have quite a bit less screen area; it will be close to six or seven feet which is just over one quarter the total screen area as we had in Geneseo. The Optoma has 1300 lumens. That means that this would be many times brights and higher resolution. The price is not far off from a nice 47″ LCD so it might be a good option for us, especially as the den area of the basement will be either partially or completely isolated from outside light.
On her way home from work Dominica swung into On the Border and picked up dinner which, as always, means chipotle fish tacos for me. Today Dominica opted for a salad. Last night we ate so late that she was not able to get to sleep and that made her really exhausted so we decided that we needed to eat as early as possible tonight so that she could get to bed really early.
I had Frasier all set up and ready to go when Dominica walked in the door with dinner. We watched three episodes or so while eating dinner. Then Andy called and we talked for a while. Dominica went to sleep around eight thrity or so. She will be feeling much better tomorrow.
The stock market really took a beating today. Our drop today was far worse than even Monday. This is really something. It will be interesting to watch over the next several days to see what happens.
I discovered that there is a bit of Silver Spoons on Hulu today. I don’t think that I have seen that show since it was new. I am really unsure if I have ever even seen it in early reruns. I definitely remember it but only so well.
I was not all that tired this evening. After having my hours shifted so much the last few days my schedule is off by a bit. So I attempted to do some work while I was up. I am a bit behind on a number of things so there is no end to the work that I need to do. That is especially true as we are traveling this weekend and it would be really nice if I could have my homework done before going to dad’s house as it will take a large chunk of time to work on that while we are there.
I worked until just after one in the morning. I did not really want to be up so late but it gave me a chance to do some really important catching up on the BrainBench work that I have been doing.
I also logged in to my class to make sure that I was keeping up and not missing anything important. I put in some comments and responded to people and got some stuff set up so that I can work on my week’s homework assignment tomorrow. So far, this class is only a tiny fraction of the work that I have had to do in other classes at RIT. That means that I am starting to be concerned that I am missing something that I am supposed to be doing. That happens to be a lot.
I looked carefully tonight before going to bed and I do have something rather large due in my class by Friday of next week so I do need to get looking into that right away. Can’t sit around on these things. I can’t wait until my degree is done.
Tomorrow I will be home with Oreo all day. Hopefully getting a chance to do some homework. My reading assignments at the very least.