When you have a new baby in the house, every morning is a challenge to get out of bed. Even when we manage to get to sleep at a reasonable time the night’s sleep does not seem to be very relaxing. I can only imagine how bad it is for Dominica. She gets so much less sleep than I do. I am getting about five to six hours of sleep each night, I think. Although I do have to get up in the morning and she stays in bed quite some time after I get up. As much as two or three hours some days.
I was working at eight thirty this morning. Oreo came down to the basement with me but after just twenty minutes or so he decided that he was not interested in the cold basement and snuck up to the living room to stake his claim on the recliner while Dominica and Liesl were still asleep.
Today work finally picked back up to a normal pace and I was pretty much busy all day. I worked all morning and then, at twelve thirty, I switched to being in the living room and kept watch via my BlackBerry Curve and watched Liesl for two hours while Dominica went to the grocery store. Luckily I get a really slow lunchtime period or else that would not be possible at all. I did work during that window but the requests were light and intermittant.
When Dominica got back from the grocery store she managed to catch the mail carrier and got all of our mail from the mail box. That was extremely important as we do not have the key right now. That was more than a week’s worth of mail that she brought in today. Almost all junk mail but still. There was some important stuff in there and one package of really inexpensive HDMI cables that I had delivered from Amazon.
Liesl was very hungry by the time that Dominica got back and I needed to get back down to the basement so that I could get back to work. So I handed Liesl off to Dominica and went back to the dungeon. I attempted to play a little Fable over my lunch time but only barely got to play one small section of the game and failed in my quest and had to start over anyway so it was all a waste.
For the first time since we moved from Newark I have our 1TB SAN system back online and running today. Now we have access to our large collection of converted movies and such via iTunes and the AppleTV that we have been doing without thus far. The SAN is in the network closet along with all of the other networking gear which is far nicer than having it sitting on my desk which is where it has been most of the time.
I remembered to take out the cardboard for recycling this afternoon. Tomorrow morning is the cardboard pickup that only comes once per month and we had a dining room full of stacked boxes that needed to be taken out. We look forward to cardboard pickup around here as if it were Christmas. We constantly amass so much cardboard that only having a pickup once per month is rather problematic. We definitely miss having the recycling room right down the hall with nightly pickup like we had at Eleven80. We got spoiled. Now we are trying to figure out where in the house we can stage that much cardboard each month.
Dominica made dinner on the early side and we ate around six. That is amazingly early for us. Normally we are struggling to eat around ten at night!
I did some basement cleaning tonight while Dominica watched movies on Netflix. We are slowly taking back that space and getting it nice. It is the one area of the house where we really have a hope of keeping up with any mess and having it stay neat. If we fall behind down here then the war against the mess will certainly be lost.
I ended up working very late tonight. It was eight thirty when I finally wrapped up at the office. Quite a long day but not unexpected for early January. Exhausting though. Once it is eight thirty at night it is hard to decide what to do to enjoy the rest of the day before it is time to go to bed. Almost anything you do is likely to either be stressful, exhausting or make you feel like you just threw the time away.
I did manage to kick off some additional h.264 Handbrake conversions. We do not have very much left around the house to convert but what little is here I am tracking down and moving to the AppleTV. I pointed the iTunes that is feeding the AppleTV to the SAN for the first time today. This will be our first test to see how well this works. The SAN is extremely slow compared to other disk access methods that we currently have available in the house so there is a lot of potential for failure but I think that it will probably work for now. It is really just a temporary solution until we get the long term server-based storage solution sorted out. That will take a sizable investment and is not something that I really want to do right this moment if it can be helped at all although as we run out of storage more and more quickly it is becoming a rapidly approaching necessity.
The third season of Dr. Who is now available on Netflix OnDemand so Dominica and I watched a few episodes of that while Liesl slept. Liesl did not wake up for her evening bottle until around one or one thirty in the morning! Normally we try to give her that bottle around ten.
Before going to bed tonight I noticed that the freezing rain has begun to come down. Everything is coated in ice but not badly like often happens back home. Ice storms seem to be a very regular occurrance back where dad lives. They must get them every year now. I don’t remember it being like that when I was a kid. Oreo was not happy about having to walk out onto the ice.