Sheep Guarding Llama

I overslept quite a bit this morning and it was almost time to be in the office by the time that I woke up.  Oops. So I was out of bed and out the door pretty quickly.

I worked through lunch today, that’s pretty normal these days.  I didn’t have to stay late tonight much at all which is pretty nice for a Friday evening.  I was able to head for home around six.  Not bad at all.

Did pretty much nothing this evening.  Thought about going out but decided to just stay in.

Ciana’s new thing is demanding that I play guitar for her in the evenings.  It is pretty funny, she says “Gee!  Gee!” and wants me to sit on the living room floor and play her music while she watches me.  It is so adorable.

The second season of Sherlock is now out on Amazon’s video service so we watched that.  We absolutely love that show.  We only managed to get through one episode (which is the length of a movie at 81 minutes) because Watson came over for a while to have a few beers instead of going out tonight.  We are all being cheap and lazy.  Today was his last day at the job that he has had for the last five years.  He is very excited.  He starts his new adventure on Monday.

I was up until about three in the morning working last night but I finally went Double Pure Capsacian on Spiceworks.  That is, roughly, seven years of continuous posting to make that happen.

Today is my day at home with the girls.  Luciana got up at seven thirty and climbed into bed with me for about an hour.  Liesl was up before nine which I found pretty surprising considering how late she went to bed last night.  That is not very much sleep for her and it was a bit of a short night for Ciana too.

The girls were pretty rambunctious this morning so it was pretty hard to work.  We had fun together though.  Luciana decided that she wanted to take a shower this morning pretty early on.  This is her new thing.  He loves getting into a warm shower and playing with her ducks (and one small dinosaur, one Dora the Explorer figurine, one camel and a bucket.)  I put the water on really warm but turn the volume down really low so it is like a light, warm rain.  She just loves it and because the tub doesn’t fill up she is very safe compared to a bath.  She’s decided that this is one of her favourite things ever in the last two weeks.  Now every day she runs to me and yells “Duck! Duck! Duck!” to take a shower.  She normally pulls hard at her shirt too trying to get herself undressed so that she can get in more quickly.

Sometimes, like this morning, Liesl gets excited and gets into the shower with Luciana.  This always makes Luciana decide to get out pretty quickly, though.  Luciana likes to sit under the faucet with the shower shooting over her head and just getting the mist and sitting in the “river” and playing.  Liesl has moved to loving just standing in the shower itself and just standing there with it falling on her – a long way from the Liesl of a year ago who was still scared of the shower.

The Roomba picked up a lot of stuff just from the hard surface portions of the house last night.  Really excited to try it out on the carpets.  Maybe tomorrow we can do that.

Dominica worked her five hour day and was able to come right home so we actually got family time together today a little.  Mostly she spent the afternoon running interference for me with the kids who were determined to be all over me today.

It was a busy day but I am happy because my cluster was completed and works.  That has been hanging over my head for so long that it was really beating me down.

This evening we mostly hung out in the play room.  Just the normal family evening.  Luciana had an accident during her nap (diaper leakage) and took a really long shower and bath.  I had had a long day so I just sat in the bathroom outside of the tub beside her and rested.  She would occasionally poke me and laugh but was happy to play on her own.  She loves having a bucket.  At one point I put a towel over my head and she would sometimes pull it off to play peekaboo.  So cute.

This new year is flying by with reckless abandon!  I cannot believe that we are already at the end of the first month.  I fell like it just began.  And now my birthday is only a month away.  Dad comes down from New York to visit in under two weeks!

Dominica woke me up this morning, as you can imagine, after working until four in the morning and having insomnia till almost five I wasn’t out of bed until a quarter till nine.  I quickly showered and weighed in, the diet is going really well this week now that we are really back onto it, and before I could get out the door I got a phone call that I needed to join a class for the office to complete some requirements.  So I ran into the office in the house and signed on and took the class from there.

Liesl spent the morning sitting on my lap at my desk as I worked.  She loves just hanging out with me.  She wanted to play on the iPad 2 (she mostly plays Temple Run and Subway Surfer) so I got her a chair just inches from me so that she could play without having the iPad between me and the keyboard.  She is so good at those games, it is completely ridiculous.

Today Liesl started wanted to talk about the scores that she was getting on the games.  This worked perfectly for me to introduce her to reading large numbers.  She made crazy progress today just playing her games for a few minutes and then asking me, each time, to help her read the score.  She was reading numbers into the tens of thousands with me!  It was her first time seeing thousand and hundreds in use, so she was struggling.  But she loved it and had a lot of fun learning.

Luciana slept in very late and got up just before I left to head for home.  She came into the office and had me read to her for just a little bit before I went to work.

This morning ended up being insanely busy for the office.  I got stuck working at home for two hours before I could jump in the car and drive in.  So it was a little after eleven when I finally got into the office.  My whole day was just super busy.  I could not believe how busy it was.  I couldn’t get anything done.  Very frustrating.

This afternoon Dominica and Liesl went to Toy `R` Us to go bicycle shopping.  Dominica had ordered Liesl a bike that she really wanted from Walmart but they contacted us this morning to say that that was a computer glitch and that they were not getting that bike and there were none in stock.  They gave us $10 for the inconvenience though, so that was nice.  So that is why they went to buy one today.

Liesl was so excited.  Dominica set her up so that she could ride the bike in the atrium.  I got home and she had to tell me all about it and had me help her to ride in circles for quite a while even as it was getting dark out.  She loves her new bike and is so proud of it.  She can steer pretty well already but is having really problems with generating locomotion – partially because the bike is a little large for her yet (it is only a 14″) and partially because the atrium is uneven rubber tiles so there is always a little climbing to do no matter what direction she goes and that makes it extra hard beyond the rubber being soft and absorbing a lot of the energy.

Most of the evening was spent in the play room all together. We found a new Reba show called “Malibu Country” on Hulu and have been watching that tonight.

Our new Roomba came today and that was plugged in charging until after Luciana went to bed.  Then, when it was charged, and just before Liesl turned in for the night we cleaned up the house and got everything off of the floor and turned it loose.  It took a while but it covered the entire play room, living room and kitchen pretty well.  Liesl had a lot of fun running around the house as it drove all over.

We had fretted a bit over which Roomba to get but finally decided on the $350 via Amazon Roomba 630 which is a new unit from them.  We could have gone cheaper and gotten an earlier generation but the benefits of this outweighed the cost savings.  It looks like this is going to work really well.  I can’t wait to try it out on the carpeted part of the house too.  Maybe we can do that this weekend.  We need some time when we have picked up all of the toys and can leave the girls’ rooms open.

Off to bed as early as possible tonight, which really was not that early, because Dominica has to work tomorrow.  It was so late that it was actually half past midnight when Liesl got put to bed!  We had no idea that so much time had passed by.

I had one of my moments this morning where I was still asleep and kept my eyes close and pictured myself picking up the iPhone and looking at the clock.  I pictured the time as 7:37am.  Then I opened my eyes, grabbed the phone and checked the time for real – 7:38am.  For all I know it clicked over in the ten seconds between imagining the time and actually checking it.  It is amazing how often this happens and I can tell when it will.  Sometimes I wake up and say “I wonder what time it is” but am usually decently close.  And then other times I say “it is exactly….” and I am almost always spot on.  Very weird.

Today is my “Monday” since yesterday was a holiday for the bank. So in to the office today.  Things were a bit busy but not too bad.  I am exhausted after a long weekend of doing cluster work.

We are busy researching preschools for Liesl.  We are trying to find a place for her to go one day a week.  She loves social interaction and doesn’t get enough of it at the house with us.  She needs someplace to wear her out a little.

Got home this evening and ended up having to work a ton on getting  a final clustering script together but that went well.  Took several hours but it went well and the final system is really sweet.  I’m going to write up some documentation on that at some point.  That should make for some popular articles for sure.

I did have a talk today with a company looking to sponsor some of my writing.  That would be amazing as it would mean regular income from some of my writing.  Not big money, but something to help justify the effort that I put into that process.  Nice to get recognized.

Got to bed very late again tonight.  I’m really not getting any sleep this week.

 

It is Monday and that means that Dominica is off to work early and I am home with the girls all day.  Dominica had another long day.  Not sure how much she worked today but it was quite a bit.  She did come home at lunch, though, which was good because the girls were really wearing me out today.  Today is a holiday, though, so I didn’t need to work as much as usual.  I did have to work because some markets were open but it was extremely light, barely more than a weekend day.

This past weekend, and much of today, was spent working like crazy on a Linux cluster that I’ve been trying to get built.  I learned the hard way that Ubuntu does not support clustering anymore.  This explains whey their documentation is incomplete in 12.04 and missing entirely in 12.10.  I thought at first that they were just being lazy and had never gotten around to finishing it before the next edition came out but after working at it with for days and going through their incomplete docs, the DRBD docs, the Pacemaker docs, random doc, How Tos and even Suse’s docs I discovered that it is pretty clear that the system is incomplete in some way and does not work.  That explains the documentation from Ubuntu – they started from an old documentation set so had a “work in progress” on 12.04.  They worked on it for a while and gave up, leaving the half finished documents in place.  When 12.10 came out they had already given up so they didn’t even try again.

So the last three days have been exceptionally brutal dealing with that.  But boy was in informative.  Very educational.  Not sure that I would have chosen all of that education in quite that way but I got it nonetheless.  Had to work late into the night tonight as I did all weekend.  There is just no way to be productive during the daytime so I am stuck doing tons of work late at night and I have just been getting more and more tired.  And behind on SGL too.  Argh.