Sheep Guarding Llama

Back to work today.  It’s Monday.  This is a full week but next week is a four day week as Monday is a holiday.  So this week we have to get ready for Dominica to be traveling.  She is leaving New York very early on Saturday morning and not returning until quite late on Monday night.  She is flying down to Texas, meeting up with her sister and niece, and packing up the remainder of the Carrollton house to get it ready for shipping to New York in a couple of weeks.  We are very excited to have our stuff coming back to us finally.  It has been a long season without it.  By the time that it finally arrives we will have been four months without basics like chairs, tables, dishes, toys, books… pretty much everything.  So it is going to be a daddy / daughter weekend with just me and the girls being home together for three days.

Normal day today, into the office and back home at the end of the day.  Had a good day at work.  Not a great day, but an overall positive one.  A move in the right direction, I would say.

Got home on the late side this evening and we did pretty little.  Just came home, watched some Doctor Who and went to bed.  This is a relatively busy week for us, partially because of the preparations for the upcoming weekend so not too much going on in the evenings.

We all slept in today. I was up first, then Liesl and eventually Ciana and Dominica. Liesl convinced Dominica to play some board games with her for a while and then we all decided to go out to “breakfast”, which ended up being slightly after noon. We went down to the Westchester Diner which we have not been back to since we returned to New York. We had a nice lunch and then went to Home Depot to do some shopping.

We have been needing some stuff, like a garbage can for the kitchen, so we got that, more firewood, lightbulbs and other basics. Nothing exciting. Just home basics. The girls spent some time, while we were waiting on Dominica to research some paint, hiding in a dark recess caused by us taking one of the huge garbage cans so they would hide off of one of the main corridors for about half an hour. This kept the girl semi-occupied for a while.

We had thought about going out and going looking at apartments but it took so long to do Home Depot and the girls were getting so restless that we gave up on the plan. Instead we just returned to the house and I made a fire in the fireplace. Then we played one of the girls’ new Christmas board games, “Cinderella’s Royal Ball” for a while. We played it several times. This is a board game that Luciana can actually play and really enjoys. It is really cute.

We had cut video game time so short last night that I took the girls downstairs around three and we set up “Night of the Rabbit” and played for quite a while in the middle of the day. This made both girls, but especially Liesl, very happy.

Liesl just gets better and better at playing the games. She knows how to save her game all on her own, how to exit out of it, how to load up a new game once the system is running (she cannot start it on her own because Steam has some issues and requires that the administrator be involved every time that the game restart.) In the game today there was a new card game introduced that was a lot like playing Go Fish. Liesl picked it up and understood how to play on the very first try. I was really amazed.

“Night of the Rabbit” is definitely the best game that Liesl and I have played together yet. The graphics and music are amazing and the characters are really cute and enjoyable. Liesl and Luciana are both so into the story and the world. They love it. The puzzles are generally not so obtuse as most of the games that Liesl and I have been trying and the overall game just seems so much more solid and well built. This feels like a big budget game whereas most of what we have played felt pretty cheaply made, the Ankh games especially.

We played the game for a few hours. Liesl sits at the desk and I sit on the couch with the second monitor turned around so that I can watch her play and use the iPad to look up anything that we need online. Luciana tried playing with Liesl for a bit, they share the chair and Luciana tries to help, but soon she left the desk and came to the couch and snuggled in my lap. It was so sweet.

Luciana slept on my lap for a while. When Dominica came downstairs with dinner, a Quorn stew over biscuits, she helped me to carry Luciana upstairs and put her to bed. It was only six o’clock, maybe earlier, but if she is tired, then she needs her sleep.

Dominica, Liesl and I ate dinner and watched two episodes of Melissa & Joey. When we finished that Dominica went back upstairs and Liesl and I played “Night of the Rabbit” a while longer. This was her chance to play without Luciana being there.

Liesl did not play her game all that long, maybe an hour. She decided that she was more interested in snuggling than playing her game. So Dominica came back downstairs and we all finished watching the third season of Melissa & Joey.

After that I took Liesl upstairs and got her ready for bed. While I was reading her her nightly bedtime stories from the Chronicles of Narnia, Luciana woke up (after four to five hours of napping) and came in to join us. She listened to the bedtime stories and then I put Liesl to bed and took Luciana downstairs to hang out with us for a little bit before putting her back to bed. She needed to get up for a little bit – she kept saying that it was morning!

We watching one show and before we could get Luciana back to bed Liesl came downstairs rather upset that she had been waiting for Luciana to come back to bed but she never came.

We finally got them both into bed again after eleven. This time they both went to sleep.

Tonight they are sleeping with changing colour LED lights in their room. They were a present that I bought for them while we were waiting on Home Depot. They are regular light bulbs that are very dim and can be changed in color at the press of a button. Liesl voted for red lights tonight. So they are sleeping in a room lit so that it looks like a 1980s dark room for developing film. Something our girls will never know first hand, it having died out long ago.

The weekend is here. I felt like I really needed it this week.

Dominica went grocery shopping this morning and then came home and made breakfast. I spent the morning mostly down in the basement. I have a few projects that I am working on today.

My first project of the day was decomming an old instant messaging server. Not a big project, but needed to be done and there is no time to do side stuff anymore. I was feeling the need for proactively, though.

Second project was building a Splunk server. I built a Splunk server once, it feels like a decade ago (but probably was not) but one way or another it has been nearly forever since I have worked with Splunk. So to get some exposure to it again, I decided to install the free version and start playing with it. That took a little time but I managed to get it up and running and two systems sending data to it, one Linux and one Windows. I will be playing with that more over the next week. It is a really large and complicated product so takes quite a bit of time to actually learn to use in any meaningful way.

I have not used the Amazon Cloud before. I have been using cloud products for years but not Amazon’s AWS. So since they give out a free year of micro-instances, I decided to get one and to give it a try. It took most of the day for Amazon to get around to provisioning my instance so I did not get to actually log in and do any work with it until late tonight. Once it was actually working I got a base install of Nagios onto it but did not set it up yet. My plan is to use the instance for monitoring as it is external to everything else that I have. Will be a good use case for the platform.

My big project for the day was figuring out how to query the Spiceworks Community using cURL and then programmatically automating that with BASH on Linux to pull a report of activity for the day. That took a few hours and was a lot of fun. I got something really useful out of it too. And something that, as far as I know, no one else has.

While at work I followed up on our house refinancing situation just to discover that we were pushed to do something clearly foolish and all of the public data that we collected isn’t useful and the bank’s opinion is that the house is worth far less than anything we could look up (all private data that they keep to themselves so that they can collect fees while they privately determine if they want to do this or not) so there is no value in us attempting to refinance our house. We would have to put tons of money into the refinancing process – more than makes sense at all. So we are screwed after all of the work and money that we put into that already.

I got home and we spent the evening discussing the house. We are extremely displeased with the bank which we feel really pushed us to make a quick buck and mislead us unethically into considering something we had never even thought about previously when they should have had a pretty good idea that this was insane and would never work. The degree to which their figures are different than the public ones are on the house is so dramatic that it is difficult to consider that there is an honest process going on. We certainly did our diligence to make sure that the risk on this process was very low.

So we discussed it and the decision is that we need to unload the house. We just aren’t happy with it and if we can’t refinance it it probably does not make sense. We might try to rent it out in the relatively near future or just try to sell it, we are not sure. But staying in the house long term seems like a bad idea. The house costs too much, especially with the home owners association fees, and is way too far from the office for me and is in NY which we love but with the desire to home school is just way too much of a pain. If we move to Connecticut I can be near the office, get tons more time at home, save money on the commute and homeschooling is super easy. It just makes more sense given our current situation. We only moved into the house in order to refinance it.

Liesl was not happy with that conversation. She loves the house and wants to stay there. Much moreso than she wanted to stay when we lived in Texas, which we found very surprising. She is like me and becomes emotionally attached to places that she lives. That is going to be tough for her.

Had a bit of a rougher day at work today.  The new job is a lot more of an emotional one than normal jobs.   A lot more stress and expectation.  What is interesting is that at the moment, the key issues that I am concerned about are the lack of things that most people would find stressful rather than the stress normal people would feel.  So it is odd that I am feeling stressed and, in reality, I probably should not.  Maybe stressed is the wrong term, I am stressed, but maybe that is purely from the move, not being settled in yet, not having a good feel for the plan for the next few years, etc.

Came home from work and Dominica and I spent the whole evening on the white couch in the living room discussing the work situations and how I was feeling about it.  I was able to work through a lot of what I have been thinking and was able to synthesize it a lot better, I feel, after that.

I have a meeting scheduled for tomorrow at work to discuss some of my concerns as well.  I’m working through this stuff, but it takes time.  And a lot of this is expected so, that makes it easier that it is not a surprise.