February 19, 2009: Email Server Arrives in Canada

The cold weather has returned to downstate New York.  No doubt about that.  This morning wasn’t quite that bad but it was not warm by any stretch.

I got a chance to take Oreo on a nice, long walk today.  There was a break in the weather when the wind was still and the rain stopped and the snow had not started yet when we were able to sneak out and do some walking.  So we walked all the way up the hill to the top of Chapel Hill then down, almost to the main entrance where we took the Nature Trail that we have here in the complex through the Hillside and then down to the back exit and back to the house from the other side.  Oreo had such a good time.  It is the longest walk that we have taken together here, I think, and we covered a bit of territory where I do not believe that he has ever been before.  He was a very happy dog all day after that.  It did not hurt me any to get that extra exercise in either.

We have been doing Weight Watchers here and I am happy to report that I am currently down twenty-five pounds!  I am feeling much better too.  The Weight Watchers diet is not too hard to do and is pretty easy to stick to even after doing it for a while.  The combination of the program and the Nintendo Wii to keep track of my progress really works well for me.

My new Genesee and Wyoming Alco RS-1 N Scale locomotive from Atlas arrived today.  It is part of their less expensive “classic” series which cannot be updated to work with DCC (Digital Command Control or Digital Cab Control) but it is built just as well as their normal line and this particular model really looks great.

I managed to finally get a group of Liesl pictures posted on the Flickr site today.  I have more that should be coming tomorrow as well.  The ones that went up today came from my Nikon D50 SLR and the next batch will be pictures that Dominica took with her Kodak digicam.  I think that I might have some more on my Kodak digicam as well.

The new server arrived in Toronto, Ontario today.  They did not get a chance to rack it and test it out but at least it was signed for and they confirmed over the phone that it had arrived and that they would get to it in the morning.  It would be nice to have it tonight, but it is not like I don’t have plenty of other projects to be working on anyway.

There was no opportunity to do any model railroading at all tonight.  Liesl did not nap a wink all day long today.  That made the day really tough.  She spent most of the evening fussing and complaining.  We really were not able to get anything done.  The most that we were able to do was to spend an hour or more working really hard to keep her entertained so that Dominica would be able to complete one of the chapters / sections in her online course from the O’Reilly School.  This particular piece was a challenging one and it was very difficult for her to get through it with Liesl complaining the whole time.  Very distracting.

We spent the evening sort of watching Murder She Wrote.  We really did not get to watch very much.  We had it on pause most of the evening because we could not hear it over Liesl.

We found out today that I did not get a week’s pay this month.  One of the four weeks for this month apparently got missed no my payroll so we are short twenty-five percent of our income for the month.  February is the shortest month so it is naturally the worst month to have less opportunity to make any money and this month we also got hit with that $1,400 tax mistake from the bank that caused us to have to produce all of that cash without any warning and we also paid, up front, for all of Dominica’s classes so, altogether, we had about $3,000 of surprise expenses this month and lost a quarter of our income for the month.  Paying the bills next week is going to be really painful.  I spoke to work and they were unable to figure out what happened to my pay so, for the moment, we just have to wonder what will happen.  I do know that with their payment process there is no way for them to get me another check until March at the earliest.

Tomorrow our project is to move all of the furniture out of the one half of the living room so that we can shampoo that half of the room in the hopes that sometime on Saturday we can do the same thing to the other half of the room.

Saturday is going to be incredibly busy for me.  I have to be up early, as I often do, to do deployments first thing in the morning.  Then I have my system patching that I do most Saturdays.  Then we have a continuity of business (a.k.a. disaster recovery) test on Saturday afternoon that I am covering for several people because test was scheduled at the same time as a site shutdown for the site where most everyone with whom I work works.  So my day will be crazy.  Then on Sunday we have house guests.  We hope to be able to get the house cleaned, to some degree, before they arrive.  I doubt that we will get anywhere near as much done as we want to get done.

Today Dominica set up our “old” coffee maker – the awesome one that we got as a wedding present in 2003 (it seems new to me but I guess that it is over five years old now) that grinds and brews and filters all in one step.  It’s great.  It makes the best coffee ever.  It got packed away in 2007 when we moved out of the house in Geneseo and we have been using the Keurig one cup at a time machine ever since.  Dad recently brought the good coffee maker to our house in the latest load that he delivered and now we can start using it again.  I prefer the high quality coffee that it brews, but Dominica prefers the one cup flavored coffee that she can do with the Keurig K-cups.

We made it to bed around midnight tonight.  Hopefully tomorrow we will have good news about the email.  I am told that we should expect the new machine to be online and running before lunch.