November 15, 2008: Finally My Final Grades Are In

6 Days to Baby Day! (39 Weeks and One Day Pregnant)

Because I had no work scheduled for today we were all able to sleep in quite a bit this morning which was great.  With the baby coming so soon we are desperate to get any and all sleep that we can.

My grades for my class at RIT finally came in this morning.  I am relieved to report that I got an A and that I got a 100% on my forty one page final paper.  Well worth the effort that I put into it.  I am very glad that my class is done and out of the way so that I have some time to get things done around the house now.  Less than a week until the baby should be arriving.  We are really down to the wire.

We were up around nine thirty this morning and Dominica got started right away on laundry.  It has been raining here for days and this morning is the heaviest that we have seen yet.  I think that Oreo feels that this house has no sunlight.  He has been here for over two weeks and I believe that there has only been a single sunny day thus far.  Quite a major difference compared to apartment 16J at Eleven80 in Newark with the south and east views where the sun practically never set giving Oreo an all day sunspot in which to bath himself.

Dad and I went out to Home Depot and did some house-supply shopping today.  That seems to be the pattern.  Buy house supply stuff, have dad install new house supply stuff, return to Home Depot and repeat.  There is no end to the work to be done around a “new” house.  We find something new every day.  Most of it is pretty minor, so far.  Today’s big project is getting the LCD mounted in the upstairs living room (the sitting room) so that we don’t have to all crowd around the LCD sitting on the floor.  That does not work at all.

This morning, while trying to clean up stuff in the basement, I had a freak baby diaper clip accident that caused a plastic Velcro-like grib piece to punch deep into my right middle finger and tear it horribly for about half of an inch.  Wow did that hurt.  Who would have thought that an innocent piece of plastic for a baby’s diaper could be so dangerous?

Dad and I also made a run to the Beach Shopping Center and picked up dinner from the Italian place there – I have learned its name quite yet, and we did some grocery shopping for bread and wild grape Seagram’s while we were there.  While waiting for the food I ran into GameStop and picked up used copies of Gran Tourismo 5: Prologue and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, both for the PS3.  GT5 I have been dying to see as the graphics look to be truly amazing and CoD4 I needed to get because almost everyone that I know has that game for the PS3 and wants to be able to play online together.  Joe and Bennie have it as well so I have lots of people with whom to play against.  That and Mario Kart Wii are the only games that we have that the purpose behind them is really to play online with other people.

My project for today, in between house stuff, was to get a working Subversion server on Linux over HTTP using Apache.  I spent some time documenting that and getting it working nicely, which it now is.  Everyone should have a Subversion server.  Very handy.

Dad got the LCD mounted in the living room and we set the PS3 back up with it.  The current LCD, just 32″, is the smallest television that I have ever owned.  The first television that I ever bought was the Sony Trinitron 32″ CRT back around 1998 which went to the Richardsons and eventually just wore out.  The old 32″ 4:3 screens were slightly larger than widescreen 32″ LCDs.  So the Westinghouse that we have now is the smallest that I have ever had.  Putting it up on the wall above the fireplace really makes it stand out as being very small.  The plan is to get a much larger LCD for the living room as soon as we get our refund (which we hope that we get) from Eleven80.  In theory we should be getting that by the end of the month.

The next step in setting up the living room is to bring up our narrow Ikea bookshelf and place it to the left of the fireplace.  Instead of using it for books, we are planning to use it as an entertainment cabinet to hold the AppleTV, HDMI Switcher, Nintendo Wii and any other equipment that we decide to put into the living room.  We have not completely decided where everything is going to go yet.  We are trying to work out a scheme for the large bundle of cables that is going to have to run from the back of the television to the “entertainment cabinet”.  We have not even begun to think about what we are going to do for sound in the living room yet.  We might possibly mount the small Totem speakers on the walls beside the LCD.  I hate to wall mount our awesome Totems but if we don’t then there just isn’t any place to put them so using them poorly is better than not using them at all which is what we have been doing for years.

We watched some Hulu on the PS3 – Crusoe, Mary Tyler Moore and an episode of the new Knight Rider series.  Crusoe is pretty good.  I have never seen it before.  Dad has been watching it.  The new Knight Rider was really, really weak and doesn’t have The Hoff.  The original Knight Rider was really weak as well, but this new one is exceptionally bad.  Funny though.

I played a little bit of Gran Tourismo 5: Prologue just to check it out.  The graphics are amazing.  I don’t do racing games all that much but it is always nice to have one really good one for those times when you really just want to play something simple without too much thinking involved.

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