We are all run down and totally exhausted here in Peekskill. Between our normal busy schedules, work, sickness and both recent and upcoming travel we are just run down. Completely zonked. And that does not even include the stress of needing to sell or rent our house here in Peekskill which we need to do as soon as possible. I did sit down and look at the finances today and I am leaning towards renting the house more than I was before. Obviously getting a good offer on the house and selling it outright, right away would be ideal but considering that we got it at such an amazing deal when we did and that there hasn’t been enough market churn to produce any legitimate comparables (comps) in the last year it seems like our best bet will be to rent the house out, possibly partially furnished which actually makes our lives a little bit easier, and then look into selling it in a year or five when the market has returned and we are able to get a good price for the house again. That will give us a chance to gain real equity in the house over that time and have it as a tax shelter, in theory, although I don’t really know how that works when you are renting it. One for the accountant I guess. I have never had income property before so that would be interesting. A good learning experience if nothing else.
I slept in longer than usual this morning and did not start work until eight. I had been up at five thirty and thought about getting up and starting work then just because I was awake but I was able to fall back asleep so I did. Often these days I have been so busy that if I wake up early I find that I just have to get up and start working or else I just lay in bed thinking about the work that I should be doing so I get neither sleep or work accomplished. I am glad that rest won out today. I desperately need it.
Liesl appears to be feeling much better today. It is impossible to really know as she is unable to tell us directly, obviously, but she is smiling and talking more and wanting to eat more than she has been. She is still nothing like her normal self, but she is not as bad as she has been for the past nine days Nine days! That is a really, really long time to be sick. Liesl has not thrown up since Monday night so this is the longest stretch that she has managed to go while keeping her food down in over a week. This is what we have been waiting for – a chance for her body to actually absorb some nutrients and start healing. She has been so run down from dehydration and starvation that that has probably been making her that much more sick. It is very obvious that she figured out on her own the relationship between drinking from her bottle and throwing up almost immediately afterward which has caused her to avoid her bottle which, of course, makes her dehydrated. It is a vicious cycle.
My morning at the office was very, very busy. It has been a really busy week at work. I have been on the phone a tremendous amount and have just had a huge backlog of work needing my attention. Job security, I guess. But this is a rough week for it. I have been needing time to catch up on sleep and time to spend with Liesl. It is rough having a sick baby and not being able to spend time with her.
Dominica is scheduled for a job interview, for Dallas not New York, this Friday. So today she spent three hours, yes three hours, getting the job application paperwork filled out. We could not believe how much paperwork was involved and how completely ridiculous it was. They demand that she report every start and end date for every job that she has worked since before leaving college! Who knows this information? There is no legal requirement for people to maintain this type of information about themselves let alone maintain phone numbers, addresses, managers’ names, etc. from every job that they have ever worked. Only a few, rare corporate type employees have any hope of being able to produce those types of records. Them and recent college grads who have no job experience. The job application process is clearly designed to eliminate anyone whom HR would deem “too much effort” to hire. It thins the field dramatically before the technical people ever find out that good people were applying but were either turned away because they couldn’t produce worthless data about their own lives or just decided that no job was worth three hours of hard work just to find out if they even wanted to work there or not!
Liesl slept all afternoon which was critical as I had a lot of work to do and Dominica had that job prep stuff to do. What a busy day.
Liesl’s first birthday present arrived today. Several weeks early but we are going to be out of the state on her birthday itself so any large present cannot be given to her at that time. The Tocco grandparents sent Liesl her very own chair! It is pink and “Liesl sized” and has Liesl’s name embroidered on the back of the head rest. Liesl was not quite sure if she wanted to sit in the chair or not today but she had fun playing with it and likes her name embroidered on it.
I talked to Andy on the phone this evening. Today was the first time in a month, probably, that we really have had a chance to speak. We didn’t even get to talk for very long. Maybe an hour at most. Normally we talk for several hours per week. It really shows how busy both of us have been. He had to move suddenly when a new neighbour moved in and started smoking like crazy and filled his apartment with smoke. His apartment complex refused to do anything about the fact that they were not providing him with a livable environment so he just rented another apartment and moved. Any move, though, takes a huge amount of effort and he has been in the new place for several weeks but is still living out of boxes.
Dominica made veggie choriza and eggs for dinner. We watched the first episode of the Donna Reed Show from 1958. Neither of us has ever seen the show before but it is an iconic piece of Americana so we were checking it out. We didn’t get to watch the whole way through the episode, though, as there was just so much going on and telephone calls and stuff.
Liesl visibly perked up after her long afternoon nap. That must have been her big, healing nap. She is far from normal but far from how bad she was too. She is starting to play a little again and is smiling and talking a lot more now. She has been the “so sad baby” all week long.
By early evening Liesl starting eating… and eating… and eating. Okay, now she has to be feeling better. She has never eaten like this before. She went crazy on mango peach puffs and ate nearly the entire container! She just devoured everything. Cheerios too. And she drank a bit of her bottle which is a mix of soy formula and pedialyte. She easily took in two days’ worth of food tonight. She is just starving after nine days of being sick. You would be starving too. It is so great to see her wanting to eat again. She must be on the road to recovery at this point.
When Liesl started getting ready to fall asleep Dominica logged into a Red Hat web server and we spent half an hour or so reviewing systems administration tasks. She has been so preoccupied for the last several weeks that she has had no time whatsoever to work on her college work or her Security+ certification or the prep that she has been wanting to do for the interview that she has coming up in just two days. So we are doing what we can to squeeze in a little time now.
Two days ago Dominica did take the time to update several servers from RHEL 5.3 to 5.4, the latest release which just came out three or four days ago. We try to stay on top of these thing around here.
I’ve been going crazy trying to get DVDs moved over and ready for the move to Texas. We want to get as much done before we leave for Texas as we can as any that we do not get converted prior to the move are going to be a massive pain to deal with remotely. I am doing really well and probably only need one more good day and everything that is currently down here in Peekskill will be ready to go into long term storage. I am amazed as I go through all of these with all of the movies that I am discovering that I do not remember at all. Many that I have not seen, many that no one has ever seen and some that I have simply seen but forgotten.
Dominica was really tired and she and Oreo went to bed around midnight. I had so much work to do, including some insane catchup needed for SGL, that I decided to stay up and work like crazy. I got tons of work done which was awesome. So much easier to sleep when there isn’t lots of work hanging over your head. I wanted to get my email backlog down to almost nothing before turning in for the night.