Sheep Guarding Llama

Our money that was stolen from us from some malicious person via PayPal was returned to us today.  PayPal definitely did a great job with this whole thing from detecting the fraud in the first place to contacting us promptly, stopping the transaction and getting our money back to us right away.  It was all pretty painless.

Most of the day was pretty slow and I managed to sneak away and play a bit of Oblivion now and then throughout the day.  Awesome.  I needed some downtime.  We are coming up on a really busy schedule and doing a little relaxing is important.

Lots of work this evening, as expected.  But not much to do tomorrow.

I got a chance to do a little playing around with my “new” Mac OSX 10.4 build.  Funny that that is new to me.  I am holding out on buying a new Mac until the quad-core, or better, Mac Minis release and we have no idea when that will be.  I don’t want to invest in any old, dual-core technology at this point.  I just need more horsepower than that for the type of stuff that I do every day and I have some ideas about how I want to use my next Mac and I don’t want to be underpowered right out of the gate.

I was quite busy this morning with work and missed getting lunch.  I worked until almost one in the afternoon and then, at twelve fifty, Dominica ran downstairs to tell me that Liesl had a doctor’s appointment in just ten minutes!  Aaaahhh!

So we rushed as quickly as we could.  I was on the phone with dad at the time and had to hang up quick.  We were out the door in about five minutes and fortunately the doctor’s office was right around the corner.  It was supposed to be a quick, in and out vaccine visit, but as we are flying in a week Dominica wanted to get a quick “ear and sinus” inspection just to make sure that she was in good shape to fly.

Waiting for the quick checkup ended up taking about an hour, but everything checked out and Liesl is in very good shape to fly and healthy overall.

Played some Oblivion tonight.  We are both really into this game now.  And even thought the game is really old at this point (many years old) I know at least two people, Kevin and Mary, who are currently playing it as well as me!  It is amazing how it has kept up its popularity.

I got up early and did the early shift this morning.  I was working for about three hours before someone informed me that today was Veteran’s Day and, obviously, a bank holiday!  I love these kinds of surprises.

So I only worked about six hours today.  That is a really, really short day for me.  And considering how early I started work it was great.  I was able to spend most of the day with Liesl and Dominica.  There was a lot of Oblivion playing today and we made significant progress on the Knights of the Nine quest along with some other, smaller quests that we needed to complete before doing the KotN due to a bug in the game.

It was great to really get some serious time to relax today.  Very much needed.

After work, Dominica, Liesl and I went down to the Peekskill train station and picked Katie up and went to the Westchester Diner to get dinner.  We haven’t seen Katie in weeks.

After dinner we drove Katie back over to Nyack.  Katie found me a Mac OSX 10.4 “Tiger” update DVD that I have been needing for my G4 based Mac Mini that has been running OSX 10.3 “Panther” for the last several years.  OSX 10.3 is just old enough as to be useless.  It wasn’t all that bad when we first bought the machine but now almost no software that I need will run on it.  LogMeIn and NoMachine’s NX Client being prime examples.  OSX 10.4 is hardly new but it is a major leap forward for me.

We got back to the house and I did my Mac Mini update tonight before going to bed.  I have been really anxious to get this done for a long time.

I am on the early shift at work today so I was up around six this morning so that I could be logged in and working at six thirty.  Ugh.  I’ve been fighting hard to get enough sleep for weeks and it just doesn’t seem like that is going to be happening .  I just can’t seem to get a chance to get enough sleep.

Starting last night, Andy and I noticed some serious problems coming from DynDNS.  Resolution of DNS domains has been all messed up.  That is causing rather a problem for us.

Yesterday I updated by Vonage telephone account and now have unlimited global calling to just about everywhere.  So to test it out I gave a call to Ramona in China.  We talked for about an hour this morning.

Work wasn’t too busy today.  It got decently slow this afternoon.  I was able to play a little Oblivion today.  I am really enjoy it.  Far more now than I was before.  I like really long games that give you plenty of time to become attached to the game.  You get to know your way around and to get to know the characters and the plot pretty well.  It is more fun when you have time to form at attachment.   I have now played Oblivion about as long as it took me to beat Dragon Quest VIII.  It is probably the single most played game that I have ever played except, of course, for Age of Empires II, but that is a very different animal.

Liesl is all back to normal these days.  She is over being sick and has gotten her energy back and is driving us crazy again never giving us a chance to rest.  She definitely lost a lot of ground being really sick for eight days.  She should have been walking by now.  But she is getting back to her old self quickly and will make up the time soon.

I am on the early shift again tomorrow so off to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.

My schedule is a little weird this week.  Today I am on a normal work schedule but for the next two days I am working the early shift, covering for someone at the office, so I am jumping back and forth.  We can’t believe that we are only a week away from leaving for our big trip.  Just nine days until we leave for dad’s house in upstate New York.

Today was really busy at work.  I didn’t get any time to relax all day.

This evening, Oreo managed to get his paws on a Hallowe’en candy bar, a 100 Grand.  Chocolate is, of course, poisonous to dogs.  We were not too worried as the candy bar was not solid but just to be safe we called into the vet who had us call poison control.  Poison control did the calculations based on the chocolate, size and data on Oreo.  They said that we had nothing to worry about but, of course, had us keep an eye on him.