September 21, 2008: Getting Ready for CCA Tomorrow

61 Days to Baby Day! (31 Weeks and Two Days Pregnant)

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain

Dominica and I slept in this morning.  I love long weekend with no schedules.  It was around nine thirty when we dragged ourselves out of bed.

We had thought about camping out in the yard last night.  Dominica’s parents had brought up our tent and camping equipment that we had been keeping at their house so that we could camp, but because of my high blood pressure yesterday we decided that it would be best if I was not trying to set up a tent and Dominica can’t really help at all being as pregnant as she is.  So we decided to just sleep in the house.

We drove over to Geneseo for brunch at the Omega Grill.  It is nice and cool today so Oreo was quite comfy waiting for us in the car.  No sunlight today.  Very overcast with just a hint of drizzle.  Probably best that we did not attempt to campt last night as the tent and all of the supplies would be getting pretty soggy today and I do not think that we would be all that thrilled.

After brunch we went through the car wash.  Dad has been washing the car a bit recently as he drove through a pile of manure that was sloshed onto the road earlier this week and it sprayed the underside of his car.  It is not very bad, though, and Dominica and I really can’t smell anything unless the car is warm and in the garage.

Before I was born there was a “manure on the road” incident with a new car in the early seventies.  The speed was higher and the amount of manure was “higher” and the resulting spray was pretty significant and was never able to be completely removed from the car!  Dad has had a fear of having a car coated with manure ever since.

After brunch we returned to dad’s house and I spent most of the afternoon working on my homework for RIT.  The homework really is not bad, so far, with this particular class.  However we have not yet received any feedback from our work so it is impossible to tell how the process is going.  I could be doing very poorly and just thinking that the class is relatively easy.  I have my first large project due on Friday so I am going to be pretty busy this week working towards that.

Once I was finished with my homework it was time to dinner.  Dominica didn’t feel like pizza – tomato sauce is giving her heartburn these days – so we decided to go back over to Geneseo to go to Denny’s.  We had dinner and then came back home.

My evening was spent building the HP Proliant DL380 G2 that will be heading down to Castile Christian Academy tomorrow morning.  I installed OpenSUSE 11.0 on it and got it mostly working.  There is a lot of work to do yet but at least it is at a point where I can actually install it – I hope.

Dad spent the evening getting the full size server cabinet, also heading to CCA, mounted onto the truck of his car.  That thing is huge and heavy.  What a pain that was.  At first we tried to lift it up to put it onto the car but that was not going to work.  So then he brought it up on an hoist and the car was backed under it and the rack lowered onto the trunk of the car.  It seems like it is going to work.

Dominica watched some Keeping Up Appearances while we were working.  Once we were all able to converge on the den in the basement we put on Jhoom Barabar Jhoom and watched that.  This is only the second time that Dominica and I have watched it and it was dad’s first time.  He has been experimenting with Indian and almost-Indian films this week.  Earlier in the week, before we came up, he watched the English language Indian film Bride and Prejudice which is a Bollywood take on Jane Austin’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

Tomorrow is going to be a long day down in Castile, New York.  We are driving down in the morning delivering the rack and the server along with some spare equipment and whatever we can fit into the car.  There is a lot of stuff that needs to be taken down there and a ton of work to be done at the school.  Dominica is planning on going down with us too and will probably spend the day running errands, taking care of Oreo and, if we have enough parts and equipment, putting female RJ45 jacks onto the ends of CAT5e cabling.

The school has been without any computers at all for a few weeks now as the server that handles their NIS system – logins, as well as their remote home directories died and they are unable to do anything at this point.  It is pretty awful.  The timing was horrible in that we were in the process of trying to get new equipment in to replace the old and have just been waiting for the wiring to be in place so that we could install it.  In the end we had already scheduled this trip for this weekend and the server died just before we could go down.  So tomorrow morning we will also be discovering if there is any way that the server can be salvaged, but that seems to be rather unlikely.

We all headed off to bed a little after midnight.  Hopefully we will be able to get up early tomorrow and get moving.  There is just so much work to be done and such a small window in which to do it.  We only have Monday and Tuesday to work at the school and it will be unlikely that we will be able to return to the school again this year or early next year because of the baby.  Then Tuesday evening we have to run to Ithaca on our way back to Newark to drop off something.

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