Sheep Guarding Llama

Week 2, Day 2 in Schenectady. The IT team that we are working with here is falling way behind us and is actually making it so that we are going to be working out here much longer than we originally intended. Normally, I am able to install 3-4 computers per day. Today, I installed only 1! Loopy and John each managed to get two done. So, we will be doing this installation for a while. We found out that the other site is barely ahead of us and they will be losing one of their techs in the middle of next week. So that is good news too. We ended up getting finished before they had any more computers for us to work on today so we headed out early (after taking an extra long lunch to kill some time) and went to CompUSA to do some shopping.

After a little shopping, we all got back to the hotel around 6:00 and I think that we all pretty much decided that it was going to be an early night. I was in my pajamas by 7:30 and had already napped a little. Loopy slept for a couple of hours as usual (I don’t think that he has missed a day yet.) I wish that there was more news to write about but as we are out of town, not much is happening that is worth telling about.

Min is still stuck in bed for at least another day. She has to get a bone scan tomorrow so hopefully she has found someone that will be able to take her to the two appointments for it. My mom is getting a bone scan tomorrow as well. I will be home tomorrow night to take care of Min for two days before we head back to Schenectady for a regular length week. It was nice only having to work for three days. It hardly felt like we were out here at all.

I am still trying to schedule a phone interview that I have been trying to have since late last week. It is for a position that I am really interested in out in the Cleveland area. Loopy talked to the people about the interview that he had on Saturday in Rochester that took like four hours and it turns out that funding for the project has been dropped but they hope to secure some soon.

Loopy, John and I got up super early this morning and headed out to Rotterdam to start another week of work out there. But, because of the holiday and the snow yesterday, it will be a really short week of work. We managed to time the drive perfectly and were only about five minutes early arriving at the site. It turns out that the facility where we start the day had had a water main break over the weekend and it had damaged the elevator. Normally, this wouldn’t be such a big deal but we have to move a large number of computers up and down that elevator for two hours every morning. So we REALLY got our excercise today. We are really hoping that they get that elevator fixed ASAP because it is really rough moving computers this way. But, we can’t really complain too much because it is so much warmer than it was last week. That was the worst. The weather was beautiful today.

My parents went to Ithaca today to take care of Min. She was feeling pretty decent today but thought that it would be best if someone was there to make sure that she was okay.

After working at Schenectady International all day, we came back to the Days Inn where we have been staying and I took a shower before heading off to help out with a computer for a small business over in Rotterdam Junction. They are paying us in huge amounts of free food. It is working out really well. I put in 4.5 hours of extra work this evening and will probably do some more work next week but we are really enjoying the free food. It really helps with keeping the cost of doing a project like this down.

Leanne has been chosen to direct the Perry High School musical this spring on May 9th and 10th. They don’t know what the show is going to be yet. She just told me tonight so I thought that I would pass allow the schedule to you so that you could all put it on your calendars. I will try to keep you up to date as to what the show is going to be.

It has already been a really long first day here in Schenectady so I am going to turn in.

Today is my extra day, meaning I was supposed to be working in Rotterdam today but I got a reprieve because of the blizzard. I have to go to bed early, though, because we are going to Rotterdam first thing in the morning tomorrow and I am already really tired. I stayed up late last night trying to make myself be tired so that I would go to bed early tonight. I did some additional work on the terminal server today trying to tweak it some more. I really like this project, it is a lot of fun.

Dominica is feeling quite a bit better today. She is still off of her feet most of the time but she is a bit more independant then she has been and she seems to be in much better spirits. She did have to make a trip to her doctor’s, though, and the car ride was quite rough for her. She isn’t able to get into or out of the car easily and traveling is the worst. So she probably would have been even better had she not had to go out there. She did get prescriptions for some new medicines to try.

Happy President’s Day. Today we were hit with a terrible blizzard that has already buried Maryland in snow. Viriginia reported as much as 40″ in places. We got it pretty bad here too but nearly as bad as south of here. Loopy, John and I called in to work and told them that we couldn’t make it out for work tomorrow because the snow was just too bad to drive that far in. We are lucky that the team from New York City also decided that the weather was too bad to go to work so we didn’t loose any work by not going in. So, that definitely worked out in our favor.

I spent the day working on finally getting that Linux terminal server up and running. It is running now and it works really well. It is really neat to be able to go to any computer in the house and just pop in a floppy disk, restart the computer and suddenly be sitting at the screen of my computer from my room. It works great. I can’t wait to get around to implementing this at the office in DC. I think that this will really make managing that site a lot easier.

An uneventful day. Min’s back is still really bad. She spent the entire day in bed. She has gotten off of the narcotic painkiller that she was using and is just on Alleve because the narcotics where making her push her back too hard and even start to hallucinate. So she decided that they were a bad idea. Her back is marginally better today than yesterday.

I spent most of the day continuing to tackle my Linux terminal server project that I have been working on for DC and taking care of Min. Very slow day.