April 18, 2009: Long Walk in the Warm Spring Sun

It is Saturday and, as usual, that means that I am up at seven thirty so that I can be logged in and sitting at my desk by eight when my work day begins.

The weather is absolutely gorgeous today.  Sping is totally here and winter does not appear to be even considering making a comeback of any sort.  The sun is bright and the temperatuers are soaring.  It almost hit eighty degrees in the lower Hudson Valley today!  I wish that we had some sort of spare time at all we might have taken the BMW convertible out for a final, long drive, but I had to work and there was no point of the day when I could really get away.

We did, at least, open all of the windows in the house and get fresh air into all of the nooks and crannies.  The house got up to seventy five degrees or so.  Pretty warm for us.  We are really noticing that problems caused by our lack of screens.  The screens that we had in the kitchen windows were shot and so we pulled them out because they block some of the light in the winter but now that we would like additional airflow we are missing them.  We would really love to have a screen door at the front door as well but have no idea how we would go about doing that.  We have very limited opportunities to get air to move through the house and don’t want to miss taking advantage of any of them.

This morning I finished converting all of the CDs that came in the last load from dad’s house.  That was a ton of stuff.  It had to be over one hundred CDs.  Dominica couldn’t believe that they were all done already.

Dad left this morning to drive out to Alliance, Ohio to visit the family for the weekend.  He is planning on driving back home on Monday.

I ended up working a full day today.  I wasn’t able to leave the desk until around four this afternoon.  A rather long day for a Saturday.  That seems to be becoming the norm.  Starting an hour early and only working for eight hours makes it feel like a rather short day, though, considering my normal days start around nine and go for eleven or twelve hours.  Getting done at four leaves a lot of time to do other things.

Dominica, Liesl, Oreo and I took a nice, long walk as soon as I was able to get away from the office.  We walked through parts of the Chapel Hill complex that we have never been to previously.  We went all of the way up the hill past the condos and the Lifestyle Center through the housing area at the top of the hill all of the way to the Wood III complex that we touch up there.  We verified that you cannot drive through with a car but that walking or bicycling through is no problem at all.

I measured our walk with Google Maps and am putting the distance at just under two miles on foot.  It is hard to measure exactly because a lot of the trip is on the Nature Trails in the complex and Google won’t measure that for you.  Or if it can I don’t know how to do that.  Two miles means that for the same amount of walking we could have made it downtown, all the way to Main Street, had coffee and walked a third of the way back.  Not too shabby.  The walk was roughly the same distance necessary to make it to the Peekskill Train Station down on the river.  Even closer than walking downtown, I think, is walking to the Beach Shopping Center.  Now that the weather is getting nice there are a number of places to consider walking.  That is something that I really miss from Geneseo – being able to walk to the all night Walmart, Wegmans, Tim Horton’s and Denny’s.  Nothing like that here except for Stop and Shop, as far as I know.

SGL had two outages today.  We have yet to determine what happened.  It appears to have been a power issue but we are not really sure.  The first one happened around a quarter after seven this morning while I was still asleep.  In that case everything came back on on its own and things were fine.  The second happened this evening, after we returned from our walk, around four thirty or so.

I ended up having to spend a bit of time on the phone with the datacenter looking into what was going on and trying to figure out how to fix it and how to prevent it.  We were offline for almost three hours while we worked on getting the machine back online.  Just what I needed tonight.  So much for relaxing.

After the server came back up and everything checked out I went up to the living room and spent a few hours playing with Liesl while Dominica watched The Gilmore Girls.  Liesl went to bed around ten.  I went to bed at midnight.  Dominica and Oreo came to bed around one or two in the morning.  I’m not sure when because I was already asleep.

Tomorrow I am working all day.  I am covering for the team tomorrow so I will be at my desk for much of the day.

Sorry for all of the short SGL updates recently.  Easter really messed with my writing schedule and put me way behind.  I was doing well catching up on them today but then lost three hours because the server was down.  Hopefully by tomorrow I will be back to writing stuff “as it happens” rather than playing catchup and trying to remember what was going on when.

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