Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I wanted to get a lot done today but I have a bad sinus headache. Min is still hurting pretty bad and taking a lot of medicine to keep the pain under control. Today ended up being mostly just a resting day. I really didn’t feel that I could handle thinking about very much so I didn’t. Loopy actually got up at a normal time today and worked during the day instead of at night. How weird. I spent most of the day online trying to be productive but mostly failing at it. I did get some work done so don’t think that I was totally slacking off but not a whole lot was done. At least I got the updates for the site posted for my loyal readers who notice whenever I fall behind. I kept calling people today but couldn’t find anyone that I needed to do work so that help give me a pretty good excuse.

Loopy spent the day working on LoopyOS, his new operating system. It is really coming along. I can’t believe how much he has managed to get done on it. You can’t play Quake or run the Apache web server yet but he is getting there. One step at a time. It is a big undertaking trying to make an operating system so give him some time.

I noticed today that my Brainbench subscription got renewed automatically so I am wondering where that money came from because I wasn’t aware of it happening? Hmmm… Blink and your money is gone.

I am trying Mozilla 1.3b and so far it seems to be pretty crash happy. I have been online a bit this evening but it has crashed on me two or three times tonight alone. So I am not too impressed so far. It isn’t a final release so I can’t be too critical.

Late tonight Min decided to give up on the narcotic based pain killer that the hospital gave her because it is making her really not feel well and she switched to Alleve (or the generic equivalent.) Hopefully she will start feeling better once she manages to get that stuff out of her system.

I am wearing my new $12 jeans from Walmart and they are pretty nice. Loopy likes his too. I can’t believe how nice they are for how cheap they were. Well worth the money, I think. I was really happy with the polo shirts that I got from there cheap too. I really need to shop at Walmart more often. It is amazing how much money you can save that you just didn’t realize you could. I could easily save $100 a year on clothes alone there.

Well, it has been an uneventful day and there just isn’t much to say about it so I will call it a night. Have a good weekend. Don’t forget that Monday is President’s Day and you might not have to go to work.

Happy Valentine’s Day and Happy Birthday Madeline! Francesca’s (our September Llama of the Month’s) daughter Madeline turns a big 3 in Webster, Texas today. We would have called to wish her a happy birthday but Min was a little preoccupied with the events of the day. I wrote the update yesterday but somehow I didn’t remember to post it so for all of you who have been following along and think that I forgot to do it, it isn’t true. I just forgot to post it. Well, today started off good but didn’t end up being so good in the long run. Actually, maybe it was all bad. The day started off with the alarm not going off, apparently it had gotten turned off at some point. So instead of jumping out of bed at 5:15, we started moving at 6:45. So we were in a pretty major rush from the moment go. We have to be out the door by 7:40 to make it to work on time. And there are three of us to get ready in one bathroom. And on top of that, we had to pack and check out of the hotel and then load the car. So it was a bit much for first thing in the morning. Then, the car was out of windshield wiper fluid and we had to get some before we could go anywhere because I couldn’t see. And we were out of gas. So a quick pit stop to refill both items had to be done and that takes a little while. But, since we were in such a hurry, I tried taking a short-cut that we had heard about and we ended up making it to work right on time. In fact, we pulled in in front of the other team. So it ended up being okay.

Our day went pretty smoothly after that. It was different from the rest of the week. Today was our first day in a shop instead of in offices. So the environment was much more casual. The day ended up going really fast. We took a late lunch and headed over to Anthony’s for a free lunch. It was awesome and today they had us go over to the full service dining room instead of the fast side. We had an amazing lunch. After lunch, we had very little to do and we just finished up and hit the road by 2:30. Pretty good deal for St. Valentine’s Day.

Since we were on the road so early and the weather was good, I got on the phone and managed to convince Turback’s in Ithaca to give me a reservation for 9:00 pm. I knew that Min wanted to go there and I was hoping that we could get in. I had been calling her since 11:00 am (because I knew that I was going to be getting out early by then) trying to make sure that she didn’t make any plans or anything because I would be home early enough to have dinner. But I was never able to track her down. I left messages at the house, at her office and on her cell. I finally talked to the receptionist at Advion and she told me that she had left for the day. We stopped in Herkimer on the way home to see if the Super Walmart there had any more copies of My Big Fat Greek Wedding because the one in Schenectady was sold out. They did have a few so I picked one up (Min wanted to watch that for Valentine’s Day.)

Right after we left Herkimer, Gibran called to say that Min had been taken from work to Cayuga Medical Center because her back had gone out on her at work and she had collapsed. She is the first person to ever have been taken out of Advion on a stretcher. However, Advion didn’t call me or anyone else to tell them that she had gone to the hospital and everyone with a local phone number was out of town. So she was stuck there and had no way to tell anyone where she was or anything. Luckily, Min was able to get a hold of Ingrid who was able to get a hold of Gibran who drove up to the hospital to take care of her and was able to call me to let me know what was going on. We were about ten minutes east of Syracuse when we found out where she was so we rushed straight back to the house to meet them there. Min and Gibran were able to convince the hospital to let her come home for the weekend to recover here.

They gave Min a lot of drugs at the hospital so she wasn’t in so much pain and she barely knew where she was. I went out and got McDonalds for dinner (Min didn’t get to eat all day because she went to the hospital before lunch time) and got her prescriptions filled because she will need more pain killers before the ones that are in her wear off because her back is really bad. She ended up sleeping most of the evening. At least she doesn’t feel her back too much. So that is Valentine’s Day here. Hope that everyone managed to have a good one.