Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I slept in a little this morning and was a little later than usual going into the office.  I almost had to go straight to a lunch meeting (it was an early lunch.)

Lunch was at Mediterrano, one of the best restaurants in town.  The food was amazing.  Best meal that I have had in a long time.

Very little news for today.

The temperature dropped more than fifty degrees last night. It was fifty four yesterday and this morning when I checked it was just one degree! It was up to three degrees when I got into the Spark to head to the office. I had to let the car run for quite a while to make sure that it was warm enough to drive. Liesl was up super early so she came down and hung out while I was getting ready for work. She prefers to get up before I leave so that she can give me a hug and a kiss before I go to work.

Even though it was incredibly cold, the roads were thankfully clear. No ice had formed even after the full day of rain yesterday and there is no snow being this cold. The skies are completely clear and there is even bright sun today, all day.

Today ended up being a crazy long day for me in the office.  I had an offsite presentation to attend this evening, that was very interesting, that went until almost seven thirty.  Then, directly from there, I was pulled into a production issue meeting and was stuck, at a more distant location than usual, until nine thirty tonight.  After leaving, even with the light late evening traffic, it was nearly eleven before I was able to get back to the house.

Dominica let the girls stay up just long enough to get to see me before going to bed.  They were all ‘jammied up and ready for bed when I got there.  We got maybe twenty minutes together for them to wind down then I took them upstairs and tucked them in, reading the first two chapters of C.S. Lewis’ “Prince Caspian”, which I like better than “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”  Liesl fell asleep almost immediately as I started the second chapter.

Once the girls were in bed it was straight to bed for me.  I literally walked right from their room to ours and right into bed.  I did not even read any of my book tonight, just laid down and was asleep pretty quickly.