Sheep Guarding Llama

The pre-six in the morning alarm was not a happy thing this morning.  At least I have been up at six thirty every day this week so I am more or less into the early morning groove now.  I got right up and got straight to work.  Lots to be done.  No time to dawdle.

Now that we have figured out that Liesl is teething really badly right now and are giving her Tylenol before she goes to sleep she has been sleeping through the night really well for most of the week.  She slept in her own room last night with her grandparents on the floor on the air mattress and we didn’t hear a peep out of her.  Maybe they did, but we didn’t.  Even if she does not wake up she talks a lot in her sleep so it is hard to tell if she wakes up or not.  Sometime after I got up this morning, probably around seven thirty when I heard people stirring, she moved in to sleep with Dominica and Oreo.

While I was working this morning I did get an opportunity to do a bit of writing which was really good.  I have an almost four thousand word article that I hope to be able to submit yet this weekend.

Since the printer is up and running again this morning I actually did some printing – I find it easier to proofread my articles when they are printed rather than on the computer, call me old school – and tested out the automatic double-sided printing option of our new HP Photosmart Premium C309a.  What a great feature that is.  I’m thinking that that feature is going to be well worth the cost of admission.  It definitely made the printer a little more expensive but cutting our paper consumption in half, at least for all of the kinds of things that I print, is awesome.  Quite often it is not just about reducing paper but that I actually want things printed on both sides of the paper anyway.  So it is a nice feature as far as the finished product goes in addition to cutting down total paper consumption.  Very cool.  So far we are loving this printer.  We are seriously considering getting a second, smaller laserjet that we will use for our monochromatic printing and save this one for scanning, colour and photo printing.  Now that the printer is up and running Dominica might try some photo printing today.  She has several pictures that she wants to get printed so that we can hang some pictures on the walls in the living room.

There ended up being even more work today than I had imagined that there would be.  I figured that starting at six in the morning would allow me to wrap up and be done by noon at the latest.  Nope.  Not at all.  I ended up working for more than twelve hours today!  Twelve hours.  After fifteen and a half hours yesterday.  My two day total is approximately twenty-eight hours.  That is pretty crazy.

I did get a lot of really important writing done today.  That is a big load off of my shoulders.  I have been really behind on that.  I wrote almost eight thousand words today of publishable material (not including stuff like SGL.)  That might be a record for me.

After work was finally done (or so I thought) I went upstairs to enjoy my dinner.  I was so busy today that I had skipped breakfast and lunch completely.  Two cups of coffee and two cookies were my nourishment for the day.  I had been racing to have been able to have wrapped up work in time to be able to at least go out to dinner with the family since Dominica’s parents were here visiting with us but after having them hold off on dinner for a couple of hours waiting for me and then finding out that they figured that it would be at least an hour before the application deployment from six this morning was going to be finished I told everyone to just go get dinner without me instead of potentially giving up the entire evening just to wait for me.  It was a good thing that I did since I did not manage to wrap up with work until ten minutes or so after they had returned from dinner!

The family had gone to Grandma’s in Yorktown Heights for dinner and they had enjoyed it.  Liesl tried her first taste of mashed potatoes and was not generally impressed.  Dominica picked me up an order of Grandma’s coconut shrimp for dinner along with a salad, bread and a piece of pie – banana split pie.  Dominica discovered that Grandma’s has an amazingly affordable early bird special that runs for four until six in the afternoon.  Very cheap and a ton of food.

I ate my dinner but was surprisingly not hungry for having skipped all of my meals today.  I ate and then, shortly thereafter, Liesl went to bed and Dominica and I went out to do some shopping and errands while her parents took care of Liesl and the dogs.

We went out to Walmart and did some quick shopping there.  Liesl supplies including a huge load of new toys that Dominica decided that Liesl needed.  We also picked up some ink for the printer that is working again but has run out of the “starter” colour ink selection that it comes with.  We grabbed Princess Protection Agency on DVD too.  Our nieces are going to be so jealous.  We have the DVD that comes with the

We hit Home Depot.  We decided to pick up some wire building equipment as we are having such a hard time getting the wires in the house to work.  We got nice wire strippers and cutters as what we have cannot cut the wires for anything.  We got a really basic wire tester and we got some CAT5e RJ45 male connectors to try instead of the awful CAT6 RJ45 connectors we have been trying to use.  We are getting desperate at this point.  So much work with such bad results thus far.

We then drove way out to Mahopac in Putnam County to check on a hotel that my grandparents, aunt and father were considering using for their trip out next weekend.  It turned out to be about twenty five minutes east of our home even though it was just over eleven miles.  Driving anywhere in Westchester takes forever.  The place did not look like the kind of place that we would want to stay in.  They did not even have a brochure or anything to give to my family.  Just a business card and some rates.  Dominica asked if they had availability for next weekend and the kid working at the desk was definitely surprised as if anyone thought that they might end up being full!

We got back to the house around nine or so.  I hung out with Liesl for a little bit and Dominica set to work putting together some of Liesl’s new toys.  Liesl was very excited to have new things with which to play.  A little before ten I went down to the basement to check in on work and to do some basic video conversion maintenance and discovered that we had a production server down at work.  So I spent an addition hour and a half working on that!  So my two day work load is now up to approximately thirty hours.  I am just not going to get a break.  Tomorrow had better be really, really light!  Although with all of the system updates that we did today there is very little chance of tomorrow being easy at all.  At least I get to sleep in a little bit which is really important since I have not gotten enough time to sleep between “shifts” otherwise!

Dominica’s parents have been in Peekskill for twenty-seven hours now and I have probably seen then for less than two hours of that time.  Perhaps even less than one hour.

Well, with that I am calling it a night.  Doing some last minute, late night file transfers over to the MediaTomb server, kicking off a few final conversion jobs and then it is off to bed.  Today’s SGL post is over fourteen hundred words.  Far from a record but add that to two nearly four thousand word articles and I am not that far off from having put in a ten thousand word day.  I have written many emails and done a lot of forum contributions on SpiceWorks additionally.  Easily several thousand more words.  Who says that this generation doesn’t know how to write!

Started work at six thirty again this morning.  Today is going to be a really long day.  No way around that.  No chance to any time off at all today.

Work was pretty busy all day.  It is Friday so that is to be expected.

We really wanted to get the printer working in the basement today after the new cleanup and rearranging of everything with the new desks so Dominica spent quite a bit of time building a new CAT6 cable for the basement.  The CAT6 RJ45 connectors that we have are awful and getting them to work is nearly impossible.  After building the cable twice and not having it work her hands were hurting and so I gave it a try.  It probably took more than an hour of effort to finally get a cable that registered as good and strung through the room.  Then, once we finally hooked up the printer to it, we discovered that only about a quarter or less of the packets are making it through the wire.

I did some checking and it appears that none of the CAT6 cables in the house are working reliably.  Apparently we have to start over with our house cabling.  Now we don’t know if the problems are the ends or if the cables themselves are bad or if there is some interference in the house causing issues or what.  I tried using the wireless to use the printer and that didn’t work either.  Although I suspect that that is because we have the wireless unit sitting on a wire mesh shelving unit that is probably wreaking havoc with the wireless signals.

[On Saturday morning I moved the wireless unit from the wire mesh stand and placed it on the floor sitting on the tile that we bought from Home Depot the other day.  This removed the wire mesh obstacle from the signal path and also moved the wireless unit as much as three feet closer to the printer.  Once I did that and tried the printer again our connection was solid without any dropped packets at all (over wireless.)  So I am pretty certain that the wire mesh stand really is the issue.  It is only a temporary stand that we are using until we get our cabinet built for the living room.  Then it will become a storage shelf unit in the utility closet where no wireless is needed and there will already be a large baker’s rack blocking signals anyway.]

So our plan is to hit Home Depot this weekend and to pick up different RJ45 connectors and to give them a try to see if we start getting better results.  What a pain.  Making cables is not fun and takes forever.  We also don’t have a large amount of spare GigE equipment in the house that we can just spend time testing.

We were pretty frustrated after all of that work that we didn’t even have a working printer!  Both of us were really needing to use the printer today as well.

Dominica spent the day cleaning the house.  Originally we had been expecting her parents to be coming down tomorrow morning to visit but instead, they are coming down this evening after work.  So we are in a bit of a panic to clean the house today.  That pretty much leaves Dominica with the cleaning as I just have a ridiculous amount of work to do today.

One of the big jobs today was moving stuff up into the attic.  We have a lot of boxes and baby stuff that we no longer need that needs to be stored.  So we started taking stuff into the attic but the moment that we opened the attic door we saw some massive wasp or wasp-like thing flying around.  This is not the first time that we had a wasp exit the attic the instant that we began opening the attic door.  This is rather disconcerting.

I decided that it was rather dangerous for me to stand on the attic ladder, hanging over the stairway, if a wasp might fly down and scare the crap out of me because I could easily fall down the stairs.  Dominica agreed.  So we only put items into the attic that I could get up there by standing on the lower half of the ladder which was about half of the stuff.  All of the boxes were able to go up that way.

Back to work for me.  I ended up working until around ten this evening.  What a long day.   Fifteen and a half hours!  And the week is not nearly over yet.

The Toccos arrived in Peekskill around nine.  They had a really tough drive.  Dexter, their Boston Terrier who is a year or two older than Oreo and extremely nervous when traveling causing him to have to be drugged in order to be able to go in the car, had a really bad “accident” about halfway to our house and it was all over the car and all over him.  He didn’t even know that he had done it.  What a mess!  Poor little dog.  He had two baths immediately upon arriving at our place.  He was none too happy about that.

Dominica’s father discovered the evil wasp creature in the upstairs bathroom and was able to kill it.  I had my suspicions that it would leave the attic once it knew that we were around (and that there was air conditioning just a few feet away from the sauna in which it has been living.)  So at least the one creature about which we knew is no longer in the attic.

We decided to make another trip up.  Dominica’s dad handed me stuff and I placed it around the attic.  The big items going up tonight were Liesl’s two swings.  She has really grown and is no longer needing a swing in which to sleep.  It is kind of sad.  That was such a major part of her being a baby.  She was so cute sleeping in her swing in the living room.  Now those days are gone.  It is amazing how quickly you lose pieces of your kids’ childhoods.  They go through stages so quickly.

I did some attic cleaning while I was up there.  We often just toss things up intending to stack them or whatever later so this was a chance to put things into some kind of order.  It was like a sauna though and the sweat was just pouring off of me.  I can only imagine that it was over a hundred degrees up there.  It sure felt like it.  In the high nineties at the very least.  It was good to get stuff put up there.  That was something that really needed to be done.

I went to bed early around ten.  I have to be up before six tomorrow so I need a chance to get some rest.  It is really hard to go straight from work to sleep, though, so I played Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen on the Nintendo DS for about half an hour.  I am at the beginning of chapter three which has a really boring part which was perfect for putting me to sleep really quickly.

Tomorrow I start work at six and hopefully will be done in time for lunch.  There is a lot to be done.  Early morning deployments for the Middle East and then Red Hat Linux system updates for much of the day.

Up early again today.  My work week has been really long.  I am looking forward to the weekend.  Not that that will give me much of a chance to catch up on any rest.  Tomorrow I am schedule to work until eight thirty or later already and on Saturday I am scheduled to begin at six in the morning – yes, six in the morning!  That is way too early for a weekend.  At least that means that I will be able to get a full load of work in before we have anything to do.  Dominica’s parents are coming down to visit on Saturday morning.

Today was overcast and cooler than it has been.  So, we managed to open the windows today to get some fresh air in the house since there are still some paint fumes lingering.  It was slightly warmer than we would have wanted it to be to have the windows open but with the screen on the front door and the fan blowing the hot air out of the top floor it wasn’t too bad.  It rained lightly for much of the day and that kept it from being too bad.  There was very little breeze, however, so we were not getting as much airflow as we would have liked.

Work was busy but not too bad.  I got a chance to do a bit of writing today which I have been desperately needing to be doing.   I am very far behind on that.

I also found out that on Wednesday, August 19th, we have the first meeting of SpiceCorps Philadelphia.  So I will be taking a trip down there in six days to get involved with that.  It turns out that Katie is able to make it as well which didn’t seem at all possible.  I am trying to convince Dominica to come along so that she can hang out with Jenn and Angelo while Katie and I are at the meeting but it will make for a really late night for Liesl so that probably can’t happen.

Dominica and Liesl went out to do some grocery shopping this afternoon.  I stayed home and worked and watched Oreo.  Liesl loves going to the grocery store.  It is her favourite.

After work was mostly over we had dinner and watched Camp Rock: Extended Rock Star Edition on BluRay which arrived today.  Demi Lovato is awesome and did a really good job but overall the movie was definitely weak.  Not bad but tons of it made no sense and was over the top silly.  It had some potentially but was, and you will excuse the pun, campy.  The worst part of the movie is that it is called Camp “Rock” but there is no rock to be found anywhere near this film.  Just tween pop and horrible, horrible, horrible “hip hop” dancing – some of the worst that I have ever seen.  They seem to have been very confused as to what this camp was supposed to be about.  Everyone talks about all of the music that they are being taught but their only “classes” are on how to dance really, really badly.

We watched a couple of episodes of The Wizards of Waverly Place and decided to call it a night at a quarter past eleven.  Tomorrow is going to be a painfully long day.  I am scheduled to work a minimum of fourteen hours if everything goes really well.

Up early again this morning.  Liesl actually slept through the entire night!  The entire night.  She never does that.  I had to go into her room at six thirty this morning just to be sure that she was really breathing.  The Tylenol really did the trick I guess.  I did not hear one peep from her all night long.

Liesl slept solidly for nine or ten hours.  She and Dominica got up around eight this morning!  Must be nice.

At around ten this morning our Internet access went down.  Most likely due to the approaching storm.  No way for me to work after that.  While there was a lot of work to be done and I don’t like things sitting around waiting for me I did appreciate having a forced break in the middle of the day.

I went up to the living room with Dominica and Liesl and spent a nice, long lunch period playing the “See the Future” downloadable content for Fable II on the XBOX 360.  It was awesome to get a chance to really just sit down and play that without feeling like there was something else that I really needed to be doing.

“See the Future” is very short, which I knew ahead of time, and I managed to make it through pretty much the entire expansion just during my extended lunch break.  I completed the “Snow Globe” quest, the “Costume Party” quest and the “See the Future” quest.  I still need to beat the “Colosseum” but that should not take long.  Maybe I will get to play it again sometime soon.  That would be great.

It’s been about five months since the last time that I have played Fable II.  It was great to get a chance to return to the world and see what was going on.  My character has $7.3 million now but there is nothing left to buy.  I can’t wait until Fable III releases.

Our Internet access was out for about three hours.  It came back on at the end of lunch and I was able to get back to work early in the afternoon.  It ended up being a really, really busy day at the office.  I didn’t have any time to relax at all and ended up putting in a few extra hours just to get enough done to call it a day.

Dominica made dinner and I took a break from work to eat and we started watching Race to Witch Mountain – the new Disney remake of the 1975 classic Escape to Witch Mountain.  I had to go back to work for a while in the middle of the movie but we were able to finish it eventually.  It was pretty good.  It had several actors in it that I really like, like Ciarán Hinds, Carla Gugino and Dwayne Johnson.

Liesl and I got to hang out quite a bit today.  It was a good day for daddy – daughter bonding.

After the movie my work was done so we watched some of the Wizards of Waverly Place and relaxed for the evening.

I did get a chance to play a little Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen today.  It has been a while since I really got to play any of it.

Up at six thirty this morning.  Way too early.  It was just after midnight when I got off to bed last night and Liesl was pretty restless again making us wake up several times before eventually bringing her in to bed with us around two thirty.  She then tossed and turned violently until three thirty so we were awake all of that time.  She has been having problems sleeping for the last several nights and we are getting pretty tired.

Dad got up at six thirty when I went down to the office to work, as would be expected since he sleeps in the basement.  Dominica slept in until seven thirty.

This morning dad’s car was finally unloaded.  There were several small items, many of which will just go into storage here rather than at his house – maybe we should reconsider owning all of this stuff?  The big items that arrived in this trip include the four foot desk that Dominica is using.  This doubles her deskspace in the basement.  Now she has a lot of room to work.  And it includes a five foot desk peninsula unit that is added to my two desks adding just over fifty percent more desk to my area.  And the last big item is the baker’s rack which is going to go into the utility closet in the basement and will finally allow us to move all of the equipment sprawled out all over the floor in the basement into the utility room and get this basement cleaned up.  It will also allow us to actually hook up some of this stuff and really use it too.

Dad put the desks together and we moved them into position including moving Dominica’s desk to its final position nearer to the closet under the stairs.  Now the big job that Dominica and I really need to finish is getting all of the cabling run around the basement.  We have been avoiding that all of this time because the desks were not here yet nor was the rack so we did not have a need for them yet.  Now we can use the cables and put them into cable channels and get this basement looking nice.  We have some work to do.

I worked until noon then we all went to Pastel’s for lunch before dad needed to get on the road back home.  We all opted for a late breakfast.  Liesl had a great time watching everyone in the restaurant.  She loves getting to go out to eat, especially at Pastel’s where she is most familiar with her surroundings and is starting to recognize people.

After lunch dad hit the road to drive back to Pavilion and I went back down to the basement to get back to work.

I worked until about five thirty.  Then Dominica, Liesl and I drove out to the Beach Shopping Center to look at some tiles from the tile store there.  We arrived and, of course, like all local businesses in Westchester, they were not open at a time that anyone with a normal, daytime job could get to them.  It’s like they snub the normal, working folk who are their neighbours.  We stopped into GameStop and picked up a used remote control for our XBOX 360 now that we are using it to view NetFlix and Hulu content from PlayOn.

We drove out to Mohegan Lake to see the tile store there since our local one in Peekskill was closed.  We got all of the way out there and found that the store there was closed as well.  Seriously?  If I wasn’t off of work early because of working the early shift today I would still be working for another hour.  These stores not only don’t have any hours to provide service to working people but they do not even bother to work a full day!  No one can say that we didn’t make an attempt at supporting our local businesses.  We are very big on using local businesses over big national chains whenever possible but there is a reason why those big national chains get so much business – customer service.  People like to think that the little local businesses are the ones with the good customer service but generally that is not the case and in this case it is pretty dramatic.  We drove over to Home Depot where, of course, they were open and someone immediately helped us look at tiles.  Those rich, local business owners couldn’t be bothered to show us their wares so the friendly staff at Home Depot came to the rescue.  I’m sure that Home Depot is much cheaper anyway.

We picked up a tile sample and got a few odds and ends that we needed.  We are looking at tile with which to replace the ugly blue tiling around the fireplace.  It was bad before and now with the new colour on the walls it would be really nice to get something matching for the fireplace.  Then we drove back to the Beach Shopping Center – we could have saved a lot of driving and wasted fuel had we just shopped at Home Depot in the beginning – and picked up dinner from Subway and ran into Stop and Shop to get their awesome, single serving cakes for dessert.  We went home to eat while we watched some of The Wizards of Waverly Place.

Dad got home around seven thirty.  His drive went pretty smoothly.

Liesl fell asleep in my arms while we were watching Waverly.  She is really exhausted having gotten almost no sleep for the last several days.  We are thinking that she might be teething and not able to relax because of that.  So we gave her some Tylenol before falling asleep tonight and will see if that helps any.  She needs to get some sleep.

We turned in early as we were both tired.  I have to work early again tomorrow.  It was probably around ten or ten thirty when we shut everything down for the night.

Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to get some pictures of the living room to post.