The pre-six in the morning alarm was not a happy thing this morning. At least I have been up at six thirty every day this week so I am more or less into the early morning groove now. I got right up and got straight to work. Lots to be done. No time to dawdle.
Now that we have figured out that Liesl is teething really badly right now and are giving her Tylenol before she goes to sleep she has been sleeping through the night really well for most of the week. She slept in her own room last night with her grandparents on the floor on the air mattress and we didn’t hear a peep out of her. Maybe they did, but we didn’t. Even if she does not wake up she talks a lot in her sleep so it is hard to tell if she wakes up or not. Sometime after I got up this morning, probably around seven thirty when I heard people stirring, she moved in to sleep with Dominica and Oreo.
While I was working this morning I did get an opportunity to do a bit of writing which was really good. I have an almost four thousand word article that I hope to be able to submit yet this weekend.
Since the printer is up and running again this morning I actually did some printing – I find it easier to proofread my articles when they are printed rather than on the computer, call me old school – and tested out the automatic double-sided printing option of our new HP Photosmart Premium C309a. What a great feature that is. I’m thinking that that feature is going to be well worth the cost of admission. It definitely made the printer a little more expensive but cutting our paper consumption in half, at least for all of the kinds of things that I print, is awesome. Quite often it is not just about reducing paper but that I actually want things printed on both sides of the paper anyway. So it is a nice feature as far as the finished product goes in addition to cutting down total paper consumption. Very cool. So far we are loving this printer. We are seriously considering getting a second, smaller laserjet that we will use for our monochromatic printing and save this one for scanning, colour and photo printing. Now that the printer is up and running Dominica might try some photo printing today. She has several pictures that she wants to get printed so that we can hang some pictures on the walls in the living room.
There ended up being even more work today than I had imagined that there would be. I figured that starting at six in the morning would allow me to wrap up and be done by noon at the latest. Nope. Not at all. I ended up working for more than twelve hours today! Twelve hours. After fifteen and a half hours yesterday. My two day total is approximately twenty-eight hours. That is pretty crazy.
I did get a lot of really important writing done today. That is a big load off of my shoulders. I have been really behind on that. I wrote almost eight thousand words today of publishable material (not including stuff like SGL.) That might be a record for me.
After work was finally done (or so I thought) I went upstairs to enjoy my dinner. I was so busy today that I had skipped breakfast and lunch completely. Two cups of coffee and two cookies were my nourishment for the day. I had been racing to have been able to have wrapped up work in time to be able to at least go out to dinner with the family since Dominica’s parents were here visiting with us but after having them hold off on dinner for a couple of hours waiting for me and then finding out that they figured that it would be at least an hour before the application deployment from six this morning was going to be finished I told everyone to just go get dinner without me instead of potentially giving up the entire evening just to wait for me. It was a good thing that I did since I did not manage to wrap up with work until ten minutes or so after they had returned from dinner!
The family had gone to Grandma’s in Yorktown Heights for dinner and they had enjoyed it. Liesl tried her first taste of mashed potatoes and was not generally impressed. Dominica picked me up an order of Grandma’s coconut shrimp for dinner along with a salad, bread and a piece of pie – banana split pie. Dominica discovered that Grandma’s has an amazingly affordable early bird special that runs for four until six in the afternoon. Very cheap and a ton of food.
I ate my dinner but was surprisingly not hungry for having skipped all of my meals today. I ate and then, shortly thereafter, Liesl went to bed and Dominica and I went out to do some shopping and errands while her parents took care of Liesl and the dogs.
We went out to Walmart and did some quick shopping there. Liesl supplies including a huge load of new toys that Dominica decided that Liesl needed. We also picked up some ink for the printer that is working again but has run out of the “starter” colour ink selection that it comes with. We grabbed Princess Protection Agency on DVD too. Our nieces are going to be so jealous. We have the DVD that comes with the
We hit Home Depot. We decided to pick up some wire building equipment as we are having such a hard time getting the wires in the house to work. We got nice wire strippers and cutters as what we have cannot cut the wires for anything. We got a really basic wire tester and we got some CAT5e RJ45 male connectors to try instead of the awful CAT6 RJ45 connectors we have been trying to use. We are getting desperate at this point. So much work with such bad results thus far.
We then drove way out to Mahopac in Putnam County to check on a hotel that my grandparents, aunt and father were considering using for their trip out next weekend. It turned out to be about twenty five minutes east of our home even though it was just over eleven miles. Driving anywhere in Westchester takes forever. The place did not look like the kind of place that we would want to stay in. They did not even have a brochure or anything to give to my family. Just a business card and some rates. Dominica asked if they had availability for next weekend and the kid working at the desk was definitely surprised as if anyone thought that they might end up being full!
We got back to the house around nine or so. I hung out with Liesl for a little bit and Dominica set to work putting together some of Liesl’s new toys. Liesl was very excited to have new things with which to play. A little before ten I went down to the basement to check in on work and to do some basic video conversion maintenance and discovered that we had a production server down at work. So I spent an addition hour and a half working on that! So my two day work load is now up to approximately thirty hours. I am just not going to get a break. Tomorrow had better be really, really light! Although with all of the system updates that we did today there is very little chance of tomorrow being easy at all. At least I get to sleep in a little bit which is really important since I have not gotten enough time to sleep between “shifts” otherwise!
Dominica’s parents have been in Peekskill for twenty-seven hours now and I have probably seen then for less than two hours of that time. Perhaps even less than one hour.
Well, with that I am calling it a night. Doing some last minute, late night file transfers over to the MediaTomb server, kicking off a few final conversion jobs and then it is off to bed. Today’s SGL post is over fourteen hundred words. Far from a record but add that to two nearly four thousand word articles and I am not that far off from having put in a ten thousand word day. I have written many emails and done a lot of forum contributions on SpiceWorks additionally. Easily several thousand more words. Who says that this generation doesn’t know how to write!