Liesl got Dominica up early this morning around seven but fell back asleep a little after seven thirty. So, as we had run out of baby formula last night and it will be a pretty serious emergency if we do not have any today, Dominica ran to Stop & Shop at a quarter till eight this morning and left me to look after Liesl and Oreo while she was gone. Liesl actually stayed almost completely asleep the whole time. Oreo got up pretty much immediately as he hates being in bed after anyone has gotten up.
Last night I topped 2,000 Tweets on Twitter. That is a lot of microblogging. Originally I didn’t think that Twitter and microblogging in general would be all that interesting but I have found it to be quite cool.
Through Twitter I have come across the new blog, Trains and Bricks, which is written by Linda Smith and is chronicling her adventures in starting in the model railroading hobby. Linda, like Dominica and I, is into N Scale model railroads (they are the coolest, as you know.) Linda received a Kato starter set on Valentine’s Day from her husband and seems quite excited. She must as she has a blog about it. Linda is also very much into Legos! It is neat to have Linda getting into N Scale model railroading at almost exactly the same time that Dominica and I are getting into the hobby as well.
The hobby is not new for me and not quite new for Dominica but, as of yet, Dominica has never had a running train but has done a bit of actual modeling that is extremely advanced for a beginner (foam benchwork, plaster-cloth on newspaper terrain, ballasted flextrack on cork, weathered buildings, etc.)
The weather turned very cold today and there is a solid dusting of snow on the ground that is determined to not be going anywhere. Oreo took only the shortest of walks today to minimize the time spent outside.
I was not really all that busy today at the office, not for a Friday, but somehow I ended up being quite busy around lunch time and missed taking a break for lunch at all.
The new server got hooked up early this afternoon in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We are all extremely excited about this. We have had so many problems with the network stability and power stability of the datacenter in Scranton that we are really looking forward to seeing what we get out of Toronto. I am saving a bit of money by going this way as well.
There was a little bit of configuration work that needed to be done to get the email system actually online and working but it took very little and things started working like a charm almost immediately. Many of the issues that we had seen earlier this week were, as we had guessed, caused by the temporary hosting on a consumer network and vanished as soon as we were on the commercial backbone network.
Dominica did get a chance to do another segment of her class today. This second course in her four course series has several fewer objectives or segments than the last one did (this one has ten compared to nineteen, I believe) but each one is much more involved and difficult so instead of doing two or three at a time she is pushing had to be able to finish one in the tiny amount of time that she is able to get without Liesl causing too much of an interruption. Any progress is good progress though.
Not long after lunch Liesl actually fell asleep and Dominica, being exhausted from yesterday, fell asleep as well in the recliner in the living room. They both managed to get really good, several hour long naps in and did not get up until around seven in the evening when I was wrapping up my work for the office.
For dinner Dominica cooked a “Mama Mia Casserole” which is a baked spaghetti dish. We watched some Murder She Wrote during which I had to make constant trips to the basement to check in on the office. I had some amount of work that continued until about half past midnight. Nothing major but I had to stay in contact. No rest on a Friday night for me.
I decided tonight, because they were both sitting in just the right place to make this easy, to pop in the two dead DVDs that we have just to be absolutely sure that they were unusable. The one DVD, which we bought many years ago used from Hollywood Video, was Magnolia. The DVD never once played, to any degree, in any device that we owned. We’ve kept it more out of principle than anything else. We bought it so we figured that we should keep it. So tonight, when I popped it into the HP external DVD drive that I have on my Windows workstation and it read the entire disc without an error I was completely taken by surprise. We now have a three hour long movie that we did not have yesterday. Very cool.
I then took the Build Design Dream DVD that Model Railroader sent to us in the mail as an advertisement – that showed up as being blank on every DVD player that I put it into – into the DVD drive on Dominica’s laptop and it too was able to be read without a single error. It’s completely crazy.
So now we have two more things to watch that we already owned without spending a dime. Nice.
We did get some time to relax until Liesl dropped off and was happily asleep around ten or so. Then the real work began – shampooing the living room carpet. We moved all of the furniture from the south side of the living room (by the deck doors) to the dining room area so that we had roughly half of the room completely clear.
I did a hard-core vacuuming job with the new Kirby and got all of the loose stuff up and off of the carpet. This will be our first time doing a full shampoo. We (I) bought the Kirby because of its shampoo capacity but it is such an undertaking, especially with a baby and a dog, to relocate all of the furniture and to have the carpets be wet that we have not done it yet.
It took two full loads of Kirby shampoo liquid to do that portion of the living room. It took us a while to figure out how to do the shampooing since it was our first time. We had to spend some time with the manual and only I ever saw someone use it in this way before so it was all new to us.
Overall, I think, the shampooing went pretty smoothly. It was a little bit of a learning curve but not too bad. It was almost one in the morning when we wrapped up.
Tomorrow I start work at seven in the morning (less than six hours from when I managed to go to bed) so I am going to be a bit tired. I have deployments starting and seven and disaster recovery testing starting at eight.
I also need to get up tomorrow and vacuum the carpet that we shampooed tonight after it is completely dry. Then, once that is done, all of the furniture that is in the dining room area has to be squeezed into the living room area on the south side so that we can shampoo that portion of the carpeting. Most of that section was not touched during the Kirby demonstration and is still loaded with stains from the previous owners of the house.