Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

As we cleaned up the garage yesterday now we have these plastic bins into which we can sort the kids’ toys. So Dominica spent a lot of time today working on sorting through all of the girls’ toys and putting into each bin a collection of just one kind of toys.  Like one of blocks, one of dinosaurs, one of ducks, etc.  Then we are going to store them in the garage and bring them out in themes so that they will have all of one thing at once, just how Liesl enjoys them, but not so much all at once that they are overwhelmed by the whole thing.

The house still feels like it is a huge mess but we can tell that the mess is part of a process to make it clean, someday.

With the girls going to bed so late last night we did manage to sleep in just slightly this morning but only slightly.  Luciana is on a natural schedule and never sleeps in all that much.  It just means that we are in for a grumpy day.

Today’s big project was to go out into the garage and really get down to cleaning.  We brought probably ten big plastic bins of stuff into the house and sorted through them.  That’s a major job considering how much we have gone through previously in a similar fashion and that a lot of this stuff was filtered through before it ever left New York.  The project went really well, though, and we have a large pile of stuff ready to go to Goodwill and we have many bins freed up to put toys into which are going to return to the garage to be stored there instead of cluttering up the house which is what is happening now as there are so many that the girls cannot do anything with them due to the sheer volume of toys to wade through.

We made massive progress today and are thrilled with the garage now being almost entirely accessible.  There are still many bins to go through but we have overall control of the situation now and can maneuver in the garage and really do things.  Tomorrow starts the cleaning up of the toys now that there is space made in the garage.