Sheep Guarding Llama

It’s Monday.  Mostly I have to say that so that I can figure out what day it is myself.  I tend to lose track of the day these days.  It is still wet today so even though it is pretty cool outside we are running the air conditioning after last night’s centipede incident.  Not taking any chances here.

I did get a chance to get some decent sleep last night so I am doing okay.

Today was very busy again.  I am feeling like the telephone has been permanently attached to my head.  For the last week or maybe two I have been on for just hours and hours a day.  Maybe more than eight hours.  We have three rechargeable handsets for our main house phone system and I cycle through almost all of them every day taking them from fully charged to completely dead all in a single day.  I have to be very careful to always keep two of them charging while a third is in use or we risk having no phones with any charge by later in the day.

Today I finished reading “The Digital Photography Book Volume 3”.  I have recently completed the first two volumes, all by Scott Kelby.

The entire evening tonight was taken up with Andy and I working on some web site design and strategies.  We spent quite a bit of time looking at stock photos and trying to make creative decisions.

After all of the tons of work that I have been doing I tried very hard to set today aside as time to spend with Liesl.  We have really been missing each other a lot this week.

We slept in a bit this morning – the only real chance to get real sleep all week.  That felt great.

The day was spent pretty much just relaxing.  We camped out in the living room and visited as a family.  The weather is nice and we have the air conditioning turned off and are enjoying fresh air for a change.

It was a cool, bright day during the day and then the rain came in the evening.  It was really nice to get some time to relax and do nothing.

Liesl’s forehead bruise is much improved today.  There is no missing it though.  It is several days old now and still quite bad but improving day by day.  It definitely does not bother her at all.  But it makes her look so sad.

We had a minor adventure this evening when Dominica discovered that a centipede had entered the house and climbed up on to her while she was sitting in the love seat in the living room!  Right in the middle of the only populated room in the entire house this centipede decided to not just hang out but to actually aggressively go after Dominica!  People who have not dealt extensively with centipedes really do not understand just how aggressive they are and how much they will actually go after people if they are not moving quickly enough.

Dominica freaked out, of course, and got the centipede, luckily a small one, onto a bright spot of fabric where we were able to see it.  We moved the love seat, shook the centipede onto a hard surface and were able to kill it without further incident.  Not happy about that though.  We did not want to deal with any more centipedes after living in North Brunswick.  Shudders.

Nothing really to report today.  Just a nice day spending time with the family.  We had Domino’s for dinner.  We tried their hot sandwiches which were really good.

I was seriously exhausted this morning when the phone rang around nine thirty.  Just four hours of sleep.  It has been like this much of the week.  I need a nice, relaxing night where I do nothing all evening and get to sleep in really late the next morning.

John, the surfing IT wizard, and I got right to work first thing this morning.  He started at eight and I joined him online a little later.  We have a very busy project day today and no time to waste.

The final piece of my new camera rig arrived today – the 72mm Tiffen UV filter that I need in order to protect my new lens.  Now I can really start using everything.  I am very excited.

I got pretty much no time at all to see Dominica or Liesl all day.  I was locked away in the basement attempting to be productive.  I did get just a tiny chance to run up and take a few pictures with the camera today.  I’m going to be lucky if I have any time to test this camera and equipment out before I need to take it to Europe!  That trip is coming up fast and I need to start getting ready.  Not this weekend though.  Just way too busy.

After dinner this evening Liesl was so tired that she actually fell asleep right in her high chair in the dining room!  She has never done that before.  Dominica came running to get me to help her with the new camera so that we could get a picture of her.  Liesl slept right through me taking three pictures of her, two of them with the flash on.

The weather broke and we got some serious rain today.  I did not have a chance to enjoy it but it was there.  It is much cooler out than it has been recently.  We get tired of the heat pretty quickly.

John and I ended up working all day.  The entire day.  It was exhausting.  I knew that we were going to have a lot to do today but was not really expecting it to be this much.  I am always surprised by how much work there is to do on the weekend.

It was around midnight when I was finally able to wrap up.  The entire day was spent in the basement.  And I had thought that maybe I would have some time to relax today. Ha.

People argue the most adamently when they are most convinced that they are wrong.

Another crazily busy day.  No spare time whatsoever.

The hot streak finally broke today.  It was raining from before I woke up this morning and on all day. It was great.  We finally got a chance to shut off the air conditioning and open up all of the windows and get some fresh air into the house for a change.  It is the quietest that the house has been in months with the A/C and blower off and the servers all moved into the utility room.

Today most all of my new camera gear arrived.  The camera itself, the Nikon D90, arrived yesterday.  Today the new 18-200mm lens arrived along with the 16GB SHDC memory card and the Nikon GPS unit that attaches right on to the camera itself.  The only thing that I need before I really start using this thing is the 72mm Tiffen UV filter which should be here soon.  I am very excited to be able to get started testing out this new camera.  Not today, though, there just is not enough time to do that.

It was a very busy day and, once again, Liesl and I got almost no time at all to see each other.  We are both very sad.  I am very hopeful that I will get a lot of time with her this weekend because I was able to get so much work done today.

I decided to hit the office work for tomorrow this evening.  So I ended up working extremely late for the office but eliminated almost everything that I would normally have to do tomorrow.

Liesl ended up going to bed before I was able to find my way up from the basement.  I decided that since I did not get a chance to spend the evening with her that I would just end up working instead.  Liesl went to bed around nine thirty.  Dominica and Oreo turned in at about eleven thirty.  It turned out to be closer to five thirty in the morning when I finally got a chance to head off to bed.  I did get quite a bit accomplished, though, both work-related as well as a massive number of CDs converted.  The entire stack of CDs that dad shipped down the last time that he came is just about done.

Today is a very big day for Liesl Lee Miller. She is nine months old.  This morning she has a very large black and blue bruise right in the middle of her forehead.  It is extremely prominent.  Poor little thing.  It does not seem to bother her at all.  She acts as though nothing happened.  She is quite our little trooper.

Because tonight is the second meeting of SpiceCorps New York’s Manhattan Branch (the third overall meeting of SCNY) I had an extra busy day as I attempted to get everything done before I had to leave at four thirty to head down to the city.  If it wasn’t for SpiceCorps I might never make it down to New York at all.

Nothing really big happened today.  Just a lot of work.  I have been so busy this week with all of the stuff that has been going on that I have barely gotten any time to spend with Liesl which is really crappy.  Even being home all day I almost never get to see her.

This afternoon my new Nikon D90 digital SLR arrived from Amazon.  I am very excited.  The D90 is often considered to be the best DX format digital camera on the market today at any price.  Ken Rockwell, THE reviewer of all things DSLR said that the D300 was the best DX format camera ever in early 2008 and by October said that the D90 had replacedit as the best at less than half the price.  He says, “If you’re considering a D300, forget it. Get the D90 instead.”  The D90 not only has some better features than the D300 but actually has better image quality.  This is one amazing DX camera.  And it has ISO 100-6400.  That’s a full stop faster and slower than my former workhorse the D50.

No chance to play with my new toy today.  I got it and opened the box just to see it but that was it.  Did not get time to try out a single picture.  The new camera is, of course, compatible with all of my old lenses so no problems there.  I currently have an entry level Nikon 18-70 and 70-200 that are “pre-VR” kit lenses (but very sharp) and then I have two amazing prime lenses that are ultra-fast: an f1.8 35mm and an f1.4 50mm.  I have a new lens coming to replace the two kit lenses though.

The guys from the forthcoming SpiceCorps Upper Hudson (Albany) group stopped by at half past four to pick me up.  It is great to have a ride into the city.  That saves me a minimum of a half an hour plus about $14.  Awesome.

The ride in went pretty quickly and traffic really was not bad for Manhattan rush hour on Thursday.  It was nice to get a chance to chat in the car with some IT pros before the meeting.  Got us into the IT collaboration mode.

The SpiceCorps meeting went really well.  Katie was there along with several other folks that I now know.  We had a total count of twenty one to twenty five people at the meeting which is an amazing turn out.  At a minimum we matched the number from the Houston group and may have surpassed them.  We had so many that when only about half of the people had arrived we had to move out of the conference room that we were using and into the big open space of the main office.  We also ran out of chairs and had some people standing and some on desks.

I did a presentation on the “SAM Storage Device” today – the HP Proliant DL185 G5 with third party drives running OpenFiler.  It went pretty well.  I did not have nearly enough handouts, though.  I had thought that bringing a dozen or so would be plenty as that gave us a bit of buffer for the number of people that we had expected for the group tonight – which was around ten.  But more than twenty was definitely a pleasant surprise.  We need to get the group website done and have a way for people to post presentation materials on there prior to the SpiceCorps meetings so that anyone who wants them can have instant access to PDFs, PowerPoints, etc.

After the meeting was over, Katie, the guys from Albany and I went to the Heartland Brewery on Union Square for dinner.  It was probably close to ten o’clock when we got over there.  Katie and I both opted for the “seasonal beer voyages” which were seven five ounce tasters of the seasonal microbrews that the brewery had on tap.  It was some seriously good beer.  Very impressive.  Brewed in Brooklyn.  I went for the open face fish tacos.  They were quite good although not the style that I usually prefer.  Very difficult to eat.  They were swordfish which Dominica would not like and I did not like as much as salmon – too heavy, I think.  But quite good overall.

Katie caught the midnigth train back up the Hudson.  The Albany guys drove me home which was very convenient.  They also bought us dinner!  That was seventy ounces of beer on that tab too!!  The ride home was pretty quiet as everyone was starting to fall asleep.

It was well after one when I got back home.  I was very tired as I collapsed into bed.  It was quite a long day.  A good one, though.  Barely got to see Liesl at all today which was very crappy.  She and I need to make some serious time this weekend.