Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is Friday so it is my super busy day. My boss was out today so I was extra busy as well.  Fortunately today is the start of the long weekend so the market closes early today giving us a chance to get out at a reasonable time today so that we can enjoy the weekend, more or less.  Of course, I am scheduled to work quite a bit tomorrow morning so that does not really count for me.  I won’t really get much time off tomorrow.  I do actually get Monday off, however, so that is great.

Dominica and I have been looking forward to getting to camp while at dad’s house.  All of our camping gear is here and we are not planning on shipping any of it to Texas as we have no intention of camping where it is so hot and where there are so many dangerous things about in the wild (scorpions, big spiders, coyotes, etc.)  Camping in New York is crazy safe and convenient.  Camping in Texas is stressful at best.  We figure that any time that we are going to want to camp that we are already going to be in the New York area so getting the tent from dad’s is as convenient as anywhere.

So this afternoon, Dominica and I carried the tent out to the back yard and while I worked on the afternoon deployments she worked on setting up the tent which she is very good at doing.  We cannot camp very far from the house, unless we go to a campground, because of my need for a CPAP.  We are limited to the distance that we can stretch an extension cord from the house.

While Dominica was working on the tent the Ralstons stopped by to pick up a computer that I had promised them.  They need a computer to use as their home media server.  Originally I had thought that we must have a D325 or D530 sitting around that was not in use but that turned out not to be the case.  Dad and I looked high and low to see what we could find before I remember this custom-built, Athlon64 unit that has been in his office for a few years now.  It is a 3U black Antec rackmount chassis with heaven only knows what in it.  It was a computer that we had built and had used in Geneseo just before we moved out of there.  There were two like this, this one and a 4U unit with loads of 250GB SATA hot swap drives.  Antoni took that other unit almost a year ago but this one has been looking for a home for a very long time.  In theory it will be perfect for them.  More power than they actually need and lots of room to hold several 3.5″ hard drives.  Dad is, I’m sure, ecstatic to have it finally out of his office.  This is one of those very large items that we had not figured out what to do with.  Problem solved.

While they were over, Art assisted in putting up the tent.  So now we are all ready to camp out in the yard tonight.  We also found out that the Ralstons bought a car today.  That means that they are not going to be needing the Mazda for very long like we had originally thought.  So instead of me flying to Washington, DC in a week I can potentially just take the car and drive down instead and then drive it on home to Texas.  That is a pretty major change of plans but one that will work out really well for us.

We had been attempting to go out for lunch today but I ended up being so busy that we just skipped lunch altogether.  We made plans with Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo to do a Friday Night Fish Fry from the Capa Lounge and to watch a movie tonight.  So around six thirty they brought up take out from the Capa and we all ate out in the back yard as it was really nice out this evening.

After dinner we watched Dear John which dad had downloaded to the AppleTV a few days ago but it had taken so long to download that we had been unable to watch it on the day that we had intended.  So we watched it for the Friday night movie night instead.

Dear John was pretty sad.  I found it surprisingly depressing.  There story wasn’t bad and the actors were good, for the most part, but I’d have to say that overall I did not enjoy it.  The story was pretty weak and mostly was just a commentary on how crappy life can be.  Something that I would rather do without.  In theory the ending was somewhat uplifting but it was also incredibly vague and melancholy.  Not that there is not a place for a good melancholy film from time to time but this one was just too sad and not deep enough to pull it off, in my opinion.  I would not necessarily avoid the film but I would not seek it out either.  Nothing special and easily forgotten.

After the movie, the Richardsons went home and dad headed off to bed.  Dominica and I took Liesl and Oreo out to the tent.  Liesl thought this was great fun.  She had been out in the tent much of the afternoon playing – especially while we were eating our fish fry out there.  She thought that having a fresh air room in the middle of the yard was pretty cool.  Liesl has been loving being outside in general so we were hoping that she would really like camping.

Liesl fell asleep pretty quickly as did Oreo.  Liesl has an air mattress in the back of the tent.  Dominica and I have the queen sized futon mattress in the middle of the tent and Oreo slept on his pillow right next to my head.  Dominica brought out an ottoman as well on which we placed her laptop.  I had been archiving movies all day on it and it was all set up with about a dozen films that we could choose from.  Remember that we have power in the tent for my CPAP so having power for the laptop is pretty easy.  Even cooler is that dad’s wireless reaches out into the yard without any problem so we could be online and check email or whatever as well.  Now this is camping.

We looked through the available movies and decided to watch Johnny English with Rowan Akinson.  Neither of us had seen that in a while and we both enjoyed it when we had.  Dominica maybe made it a third of the way through the movie before falling asleep.  I made it a little longer but was tired and decided to just turn it off and call it a night.

It is a great night for camping.  The air is cool but not cold and it was relatively dry.  It was cool enough that we could cover up with blankets which makes sleeping much more comfortable.  No need for any of our fans either.

Somehow it has become July, the second half of 2010.  I can’t believe that we have been living in Texas for over half of a year already.  That seems absolutely unbelievable.

Dad went out for breakfast with is breakfast crew this morning.  I got up and got right to work.  Being in New York and getting up based on my Texan schedule means that I am up very, very early in the morning and online long before anyone else.

Around lunch time today my migraine from yesterday returned.  No fun.  It is not quite as bad as it was yesterday but still pretty annoying.  Today, however, I figured out what was causing it.  It is the DVD drive in the old HP laptop that I have been using in dad’s office.  When the DVD drive is spinning, which it is constantly doing as I am doing DVD archiving, it makes an almost inaudible, high-pitched whine that is causing my head to swim.

So I packed up the old laptop and moved it out to the kitchen counter and went and got Dominica’s decently new laptop and brought it into the office instead.  My head immediately began to improve and there was no doubt where the problem was coming from.  I can’t believe that I have been putting up with that other machine all of this time not realizing that it was making me not feel well.

This evening, once work calmed down, we drove over to Denny’s in Geneseo for dinner.  Liesl put on her usual performance being the center of attention for the restaurant.  Everyone has to watch her while she eats and, when we left, she had to say “bye bye” to each and every table that we walked past.  She has still not had any of the traditional toddler shyness set in and we are pretty confident that it never will.  She is our little social butterfly.

Liesl has been doing tons and tons of development this week while we have been in New York.  Much of it is, of course, me seeing new things that she picked up from all of her time with Dominica’s family but since coming out to dad’s farm she has been playing with tons of new toys and reading all new books and hanging out with her grandpa all of the time and she has surely learned lots of new words and concepts.  Every day she demands that she go “outside” many times for walks.  Her favourite things including going out to see the big “rocks” that dad has out in the yard (for his Boulder Golf Course) and to walk about the tiny, Liesl-sized sidewalk that is the remains of the old, in-ground swimming pool that dad filled in with dirt a few years ago.

I heard a rumor that Apple is finally planning to release the AppleTV 2.  It is about time.  The original AppleTV is getting quite venerable and there are some really critical features missing – most notably, 1080p support.  I am very hopeful that the new version will also include support for DLNA so that we can stream movies to it off of the network like we do to all of our other devices.  I have not heard that that is going to be supported which is really too bad.  That is a major lack of functionality that puts the AppleTV into a category of being far less useful than our existing PS3 and other solutions.  If the rumored price on the new units turns out to be true – just $99 – the AppleTV is just a few, basic features away from being a total win if Apple doesn’t screw it up somehow.  The AppleTV 2 is to be based on the iTouch and the iPhone rather than on the Mac computer which makes way more sense.  So, in theory, from a manufacturing standpoint, the new machines will be far less costly to make and should be much more energy efficient for end users to operate which is a win all around.  We are looking forward to learning more about them.

How Legal Immigration Works in America As someone with a lot of friends who have gone through or are going through this process I am very aware of this process.  But most Americans don’t know much about how America interfaces to the rest of the world and getting a look at this process is a good practice.

This morning, after getting to bed very late last night after being at the drive in watching the opening night of Eclipse, Dominica had to get up because she, Liesl and dad headed up to Rochester to do some banking and to take Liesl to the Seneca Park Zoo.  This is Liesl second time going to the zoo in two weeks.  I still have not had a chance to go to the zoo with her yet which is very sad.  I had really wanted to have been able to take her to the zoo for the first time.  She really likes going to the zoo.  I am hoping, at least, that I will be able to take her to the Fort Worth Zoo sometime soon, which is supposed to be the best zoo in north Texas.

They were gone all morning giving me some time to be productive at home.  It worked out pretty well.  However, while they were gone, I developed an intense migraine.  One of the worst that I can ever remember having.  It was awful.

I tried to work for as long as I could but by around noon I was completely worthless and could not handle sitting at the computer any longer.  I had tried taking a shower to see if that would help with the pain but it did not.  So I went down to the basement and curled up in bed to take a nap.  Oreo, the ever empathic puppy, knew that I was not feeling well and came down with me, crawled under the covers and snuggled up as close as he could.

The family got home not too long after I laid down for my nap.  I slept for two hours or maybe a little longer.  That helped a lot and I was feeling mostly better by the time that I got back up and returned to work.

Dad got a great deal from his Kodak retiree discount on their new, pocket, solid-state 1080p video camera.  Dominica and I decided that we would get it.  We love taking videos of Liesl but the cameras that we have require too much effort to carry around for casual video taking.  Even our pocket camera from Kodak has to go through such an ordeal to start up and get ready to take a video that you can never catch the little things.  We are hopeful that having a dedicated, pocket video camera will make that much easier.  It was just $110 after tax and shipping so we can hardly go wrong there!  And 1080p HD!  That’s awesome.  That is double the video resolution of our current Kodak pocket camera.  I let Dominica pick the colour so she chose raspberry, although it is unlikely that she will ever use the camera herself.  Our Zi8 video camera is due to arrive on Tuesday.

The DVD archiving process continues full force.  The two laptops are working pretty much around the clock attempting to keep up with the workload.  This is no small project that I have underway.  The progress has really been good.  I’m impressed with how quickly it is going.

This evening dad, Dominica, Liesl and I watching The Tooth Fairy which is dad’s first movie to come via mail from Netflix.  He just signed up yesterday and has not even tried out his on-demand viewing yet.

The Tooth Fairy was pretty cute.  Pretty much what we had expected up front.  Nothing too heavy and nothing ground breaking but a number of good people with some funny bits and some touching bits.  Very much “family movie fodder” but on the better side and quite enjoyable.  Good for the whole family.

For the first time since driving from Texas to New York I am completely caught up with SGL and I am writing down events “as they happen.”  Once I do something like the cross country death march drive I lose two days during the drive and then one day of sleeping in.  The combination means that I am starting out three days behind without any real chance of keeping up on the site.  Then it is all just downhill from there.

I got up around seven this morning (we are on Eastern time for those who haven’t thought about how often we change time zones) and got to work.  My computer at the office was turned off, again, and so working remotely became a huge pain.  I have no idea how a company so large can be so bad at the most basic points of IT infrastructure.  Just doing your job is a continuous challenge.

Liesl got up not too long after I did.  I brought her upstairs and fed her breakfast.  She is loving peaches and bananas.  She does the cutest thing shouting “Nana!  Nana!” when she gets excited about bananas.

This morning proved to be insanely busy.  I barely got a chance to do anything.  It was very exhausting.

For lunch we had plans to meet up with Mary at the Omega in Geneseo.  So over across the valley we drove.  We had a nice, but short lunch.  I was cursed with non-stop email requests coming in while we ate and I barely got any chance to hang out at all.  Definitely “one of those days.”

So we had to leave lunch early to race back to the house so that I could get back to work as soon as possible.  The entire afternoon turned out to be crazy busy.

My cousin Sara came over for the afternoon to visit and hang out with Liesl. Liesl, of course, fell asleep on the ride home and slept for several hours so they did not get very much time to hang out.  Our going out to lunch in the middle of the day has really been wreaking havoc with Liesl’s nap schedule.

Dominica’s plan for this evening is to see Eclipse at the Silver Lake Drive In.  Originally Jeremy was going to go with her but he ended up canceling.

Amanda decided to make it a girls’ night out with Dominica so they went to the drive in around seven and I drove over to Livonia with Liesl to hang out with Eric and the kids.  We grabbed some pizza and beer – Canandaigua Lake Ale – and hung out with the kids.  Liesl had a great time playing with the kids.  She loves having other kids (and toys) with which to play.

It worked out well as Eric and I had a conference call at nine which we were able to just jump on together since we were in the same place.  It was also my chance to check out Eric’s new Snom 300 office phone which I have not even seen yet.  It is very nice.

Once the kids headed off to bed Eric and I popped on Netflix and watched The Fifty World Movies of All Times – a documentary.  It was pretty funny.  It was amazing how many of the movies are ones that I had seen.  Especially Santa Claus Versus the Martians.  John and I watched that one from his horrible sci-fi movie collection many years ago.

Liesl and I headed home.  I put her to bed and did some work for a while finally turning in with Oreo around two.  I was not asleep quite when Dominica made it home from the drive in.  She is going to have a rough day tomorrow.  They had a good time at the movies, though.  The first movie was Letters to Juliet which I had never heard before.  Eclipse opened at midnight so they had to wait to start it until then which is why it ran so late.

Dominica convinced dad today that with all of the movies that he rents on the AppleTV that he could get Netflix, get tons more content, and save money.  The AppleTV is just so expensive to use if you use it on a regular basis.  It is perfect for the occasional need-something-new-right-now stuff but it is not good at all for regular movie rentals and purchases.  The costs is just astronomic.  She figured out that for the cost of about half of what he rents monthly from the AppleTV he could have Netflix.  And that way, even if the Netflix only cut out half of his movie rentals from the AppleTV it would be a break even and anything more would be a win since Netflix is a fixed cost.  And since Netflix has the unlimited on-demand movies and television shows he is likely to get many, many times the value from it since he can sit down and watch anything that they have, anytime, for free.  So he signed up and his first movie, The Tooth Fairy, is do to arrive tomorrow.

Back to work this morning.

For lunch today everyone wanted to do something different so we drove down to Perry to have lunch at the Charcoal Corral with Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo and Jeremy came along as well.  Jeremy is on summer break from SUNY Fredonia and has been at home.  Sara is the only one who did not join us but she is coming down tomorrow afternoon to hang out at dad’s house so that she can see Liesl.

Lunch was good at the Corral.  It was quite busy there.  The “restaurant” section was completely full and we had to sit in the pizza parlour to have a seat at which to eat our lunches even though we were not having pizza.  The pizza business appears to be pretty slow at lunch and picks up for the movie crowd in the evenings.  We also got ice cream while we were there.  They have Perry’s ice cream and they have the banana cream pie that I love so much!  They also have the new midnight orange flavour that Dominica has been wanting to try.  Apparently Perry’s is doing some amazing things with their ice cream line up.

Liesl got a kiddie soft vanilla cone and was in heaven.  She is an ice cream lover like her parents.  She ate pretty much the whole thing – at least the parts that she did not get all over her.

On the drive back home the Ralstons managed to call us.  They both have new mobile phones now so the are reachable again.  So we made plans to get together this evening since Dominica is going to the Silver Lake Drive In tomorrow night to see Eclipse at midnight when it opens.  She tried to get me to go but there is no way I am going to watch that stuff.  Jeremy is going to go with her which is pretty funny because Sara and I won’t watch it.

We worked all afternoon.  I am making amazing progress on the DVD archiving.  I have one laptop running around the clock in dad’s office and one set up on the kitchen counter as well.  So I am constantly running back and forth and going downstairs for another stack of DVDs.  As they get archived they are going straight into boxes for storage.

At six the Ralstons came up.  They have been down the road at their house most of the time getting it ready so that they can move back in.  They are hoping to be moved in in another week or so.  For the moment, until the house is ready, they are living at Art’s mom’s house in Mt. Morris.

Liesl had a great time playing with Art and Danielle.  She really missed them, I can tell.  She was SO little the last time that she got to see them – when they were down at our house staging to leave for the Congo, down in Peekskill.  Liesl would only have been just six months old at the time.

Liesl has really started playing a lot with my 1980 Hot Wheels Sto n Go City set.  I loved that set when I was a kid.   It has pop-up buildings, a scale, a police chase hideout, an automotive lift, hidden garages and more.  It was a ton of fun when I was little and liked to play with cars.  There were two other sets, the Service Center from 1979 that can attach to this set so that a car can travel from the top of the Service Center all the way down through the city.  I’m not sure how well that would actually work in practice but in theory it is pretty cool.  I never had that set even though I wanted it as a kid.  I checked on eBay and they are pretty cheap, maybe ~$25 after shipping.  So maybe I will splurge and get it for Liesl.  I also found the third of the set, the construction area, that attached at the bottom of the city (the Service Center attaches above) and we are talking about maybe buying that on eBay so that Liesl can have it to play with when we are at home in Texas.  Apparently she is really into Hot Wheel and Matchbox cars.

At almost nine we piled into dad’s car and drove over to Geneseo to get dinner at Tim Horton’s.  We got sandwiches, coffee, smoothies and donuts.  A good trip.  Liesl did pretty well considering how late it was.  Her bed time is as early as eight thirty, normally.  We were out well past ten.  By the end she had had enough and was definitely needing to go to bed.

We managed to get a hold of Mary but she was just getting off of work at Walmart as we were climbing into the car to take the Ralstons home and Liesl was not going to put up with being awake much longer so we were not able to get together.  So we made plans to get together for lunch at the Omega tomorrow instead.

We got home and got Liesl to bed.  I worked for a little bit longer and then we went to bed ourselves around midnight.

We found out today that Art and Danielle just bought a car so they are not going to be needing the Mazda for very long.  We had been intending to have bought my plane tickets for me to fly to Washington, DC and then on to Texas tonight so this completely changes our plans.  So the current plan is that I can grab the Mazda just before heading south and I can drive it all the way to Texas.  That means no car rental in DC either.  This will save a lot of effort.  It also means that I can drop it back off for Jen at some point as well so that she can drive it again.

We are quite excited that I am going to be able to take a rather full load of stuff down to Texas now.  Originally we had no spare space whatsoever.  Now we have lots of room.  Now the challenge will be figuring out what we want to take with us and how tightly to pack the car.