Sheep Guarding Llama

Today dad and Dominica are working on painting the stairway and upstairs hallway.  With this round of painting the entire non-basement portion of the house will have been painted since we moved in ten months ago with the exception of the kitchen which was the only recently painted portion when we bought it.  It really looks like a very new place compared to when we moved here.  A drastic improvement, if I do say so myself.  The hallway upstairs and going down the stairs was in pretty rough shape so this painting will really make a big difference.  Hopefully all of this work will contribute to the saleability and the sale price of the house.  We need to get it onto the market right away.  If at all possible we really want to be in Texas in mid-December.

I have the day off today – what having a “day off” means. It is Columbus Day and it is a banking holiday so I am on call but am not required to be sitting at my workstation all day long taking care of things.  This is really important because I am on “Liesl Duty” today taking care of Liesl as much as possible so that dad and Dominica can work on the painting.

Dad set up and entire scaffolding system so that they can paint the upper part of the hallway above the stairs.  Quite an undertaking.  He built the scaffolding at home and shipped it down in his car.

In addition to watching Liesl today I also spent several hours on the live chat feature of HP’s support system talking to a tech about getting the motherboard in my desktop swapped out.  It is really a problem that I have not been able to use my laptop for the last several days and I don’t know what to do except to swap out the motherboard.  I cannot pinpoint any single thing being the problem other than the fact that there are an inordinate number of transmit errors coming from this machine.  I had to do a Vista install on the box as Windows 7 is not yet supported officially even though it has been released to partners and HP has the drivers available for it on their website.  So that took up a very large portion of my day.  Very important that we get this done, though, as having my desktop working is absolutely critical.  I’ve been quite crippled and I don’t have the spare time to operate without my desktop working properly.

The painting went well and they were able to finish up with just a single coat of paint which worked out really well since dad had mixed the paint himself using colours that we already had from painting other parts of the house so getting more of it was not an option.  It was really nice that we were able to use up paint that already existed and did not have to buy any extra just for this.  Saving money is really, really important these days.

With the new coat of paint the house really looks a lot better.  This is going to make it that much easier to sell.  The upstairs hallway and the stairway were really in rough shape before.  This is a big improvement.  It is crappy that we didn’t do this in time to be able to live in the house and enjoy the way that it looks but at least we will get it for the last month or two that we are here.  We don’t have any idea when we are moving to Texas yet so it might be a little while yet or it might be quite some time.

It is Sunday and I need to work today.  Today is dad’s big “hanging out with Liesl” day.  I have to work today, as usual, so not a lot of time off for me to hang out with everyone.

This evening we ordered in Chinese take-away and watched the second episode of Torchwood. We were very disappointed to learn that even though the show is on BluRay that there are only two episodes on the first disk.  So it will be several days before we have an opportunity to see any more of the show.

It is Saturday.  I worked until four this morning and so slept in very, very late today.  It is hard to sleep in with Liesl because her routine involves a lot of time spent playing in bed in the early morning.  Normally I just get up with her and play for an hour before starting work but when you want to sleep in getting up and playing for an hour doesn’t really work.  I slept until around noon, I think, but it was rather broken sleep.

Dad was on the road around nine this morning for what might possibly be his final trip to Peekskill.  I find it unlikely that it will actually be his last but it is definitely possible.  Our window of time for being here is closing very quickly.  It is hard to believe how little time we have before we need to be out of New York.  And our schedule is completely full between now and then.

We did what cleaning we could today.  Not a lot of time for it, especially with a baby on the loose.

Dad arrived around three thirty.  He had quite a heavy load of stuff with him on this trip.  Tons of CDs and other stuff that we are moving here to prepare for the move to Texas.

This evening we watched the first episode of Torchwood, which we got on BluRay from Netflix, with Dad.  He has not seen any of the “new” Dr. Who and did not like the old Dr. Who so we were not sure if he would like this or not but he did.  Torchwood definitely looks awesome seeing it on BluRay.

It’s Friday and a long, busy work day for me.  We got some heavy rain this morning.  Tomorrow Dad is coming down from Upstate New York to visit for the weekend and to help with painting the upstairs hallway.  We really want to get that done before attempting to sell the house.  It will make a big difference, we are sure.

This evening Dominica and Liesl went out to do some shopping to get ready before dad comes to visit.  Our stores are pretty bare here and we really can’t cook at home or anything do to a lack of food in the house.  Dominica also did some computer shopping for me and picked me up a new Logitech Laser mouse to use with my Mac Mini.

I ended up having such a busy evening that I was on a conference call until seven thirty and only then go the chance to start my usual Friday night scheduled work.  Not what I needed tonight.  I ended up working  all night.  I mean ALL night until around four in the morning!

I had a lot of updates to do for the office so those took many hours.  While I was working on those I did some work learning how to set up Postini with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.  That was a huge pain but ended up going well.

I had my laptop set up next to me all evening and I managed to watch all of the keynotes from the first day of the Microsoft Partners Conference this year which was pretty interesting.  They definitely had a lot of good, new technology to show.

Boy was I ever exhausted when I finally got off to bed!

The temperature here in the lower Hudson Valley dropped dramatically last night.  Our bedroom window, the one above Dominica’s side of the bed, got jarred from the major windstorm that we had last night and was unable to be closed.  So our bedroom was cold, cold, cold this morning.  We will need to figure out what is wrong with that window quickly or this is going to turn into a problem.

Today was a really long and busy work day.  I was exhausted and stressed out by late afternoon so I broke out the rum and Pepsi.  Our BluRay of Red Dwarf: Back to Earth arrived today too which is good timing as I need it today.

This afternoon Dominica took the Brainbench Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 exam and passed with flying colours.  She has been nervous about the exam as you never know what material is going to covered on a Brainbench exam and they are very difficult as a rule.  She got a very good score and is currently ranked number nine in New York State on her very first attempt!  Very impressive.  When we move to Texas and she moves her records from NY to Texas she will move up to number five in that state.  I am hoping that she retakes the test, though, as  think that she is well prepared to pull off a master’s certification and move up the rankings into a national spot.

After work was done we sat down and watched the three episodes of Red Dwarf: Back to Earth. It was pretty good.  A relatively appropriate ending to the long running show.  Definitely strange seeing the actors working together again after so long and very weird seeing that show that used to be done with such a low budget on BluRay now.  It looks very different now.