May 29, 2010: Productive Saturday

I managed to sleep in just a little this morning – that was nice.  I’m loving the thought of three days “off”, more or less, in a row.  It has been a while and I really need a break from the normal.  We have very little planned for today.  Today is a major “catchup” day for me.  I’m going to do my best to knock off as many little tasks as possible.  I’ve got a rather significant backlog of tasks that need my attention so I am very hopeful that today will allow me to eliminate a lot of those.

This morning Liesl was singing Ring Around the Rosie to herself.  She sings it while spinning in a circle and then she calls down at the end!  We couldn’t believe that she knew it because she only knows that song from Madeline teaching it to her.  She is learning so quickly.

My first task for the day is starting on the catch up process for SGL which has been horribly behind again.  I made good progress throughout the day on that and hope to be completely caught up by tomorrow.

Liesl did the cutest thing today.  I found her in her bedroom – she doesn’t actually sleep in there, it is just “her room” – climbing on her rocking horse trying to break in to her pack and play!  She had thrown Cheer Bear (her teddy bear) into the pack and play and wanted to get in herself.  She hasn’t slept in the pack and play for months.  We just store it in the other room.  So I picked her up and put her in thinking that she would be upset and want out in seconds.  But she just sat down.

So I sat down in the middle of her room and waited for her to decide what she wanted to do.  But she just continued to sit.  I tried picking her up and she said “no no”.  So I put her down and she just laid down.  So I grabbed her her blanket and she was asleep in minutes!  How weird.  I would never have guessed that she would ever have done that.  She will voluntarily take naps but she always wants to sleep on our bed for nap time.  Maybe she just missed her pack and play.  Maybe it was nostalgia?

We made a run to the storage unit this afternoon.  We took several boxes back to storage while picking up three more to bring back to the apartment and go through so that we can figure out what we should keep, what we can repack, what we are getting rid of, etc.  Three boxes at a time is a rather manageable amount.  Our plan is to keep doing three boxes at a time until we manage to go through everything.  Already we have managed to eliminate at least one entire box and we have moved lots of empty, storage boxes back to the storage unit so the apartment is cleaning up quickly as is the storage unit.

My big achievement for the day was learning how to use Microsoft Expression Encoder 3 to screencapture a tutorial that I wrote, record it, edit it and encode it into WMV.  That went really well and then I learned how to make it into a streaming file to stream via Silverlight which ended up working really well.  I am quite excited with the possibilities presented by Expression Encoder and Silverlight.  I am very much looking forward to experimenting further with them.

This evening Andy and I ported an application from Toronto to Rackspace in San Antonio.  That was a few hours of work but it was well worth it.  The whole process went well and now it is all done.  One fewer major task on the big, ol’ task list.  So far, everything is working really well.  Now to wait for DNS to propagate.

There was a bit of playing Dragon Age: Origin playing today although Dominica got to play quite a bit more than I did.  I played a bit after Liesl went to sleep but once Dominica turned in for the night I switched to doing some website design and development on Joomla.  I ended up getting a lot done but was up until four thirty in the morning working on it!

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