Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is my very first Father’s Day!  How cool is that?  For Father’s Day Liesl (and Dominica) are getting me a new 35mm lens for my Nikon SLR camera (D50) as well as a 52mm Tiffen UV filter for it.  I can’t get them until we get back to Peekskill, though, so it will be more than a week until I get them.  I am looking forward to have a “normal” lens for my SLR.  Once I try it out I am expecting that the 35mm lens will be the only lens that I take with me to Germany in Septemeber.  I’m going to be traveling really light on that trip so taking multiple lenses is really not an option even though it would be a great time to have some serious camera gear.

I got up at a little before eight this morning.  Liesl was awake and wanted to hang out with her daddy.  So we went downstairs together and hung out for Father’s Day and let Dominica sleep.  Francesca was awake watching MTV so she watching Liesl for a little bit when I started working.

Work was nice and slow today giving me a chance to get caught up on SGL.  It was quite a busy day on SpiceWorks so that worked out pretty well.  I did a lot of posting today.

Breakfast today was donuts from the Friendly Bake Shop in Frankfort as it always is on Sundays.  They have the best vanilla fingers ever.

Today I managed to update SLG and Laborers for the Harvest to WordPress 2.8 “Baker”.  That went really smoothly.

Liesl was very tired today.  She spent much of the day just bouncing from person to person.  The last few days have really been wearing her out and she ended up napping a lot more than usual today.

Today Liesl did her first really successful eating of solid food!  Francesca helped Dominica work on convincing Liesl to try actually eating solids.  Liesl was definitely not very interested but she humoured them anyway.

We did cake and ice cream this afternoon for the Father’s Day party.  The family got Dominica’s dad a fourth generation iPod Nano for Father’s Day because it will allow him to read Audible books without losing his place when the batteries die.  You still have to manually have it save your place in the book but at least it can be done.

In the late afternoon I went out for a walk.  I’ve been dying to get in a nice walk and I have my iPod all loaded up with great stuff to “read” so I took advantage of the time after work was over at around six thirty or seven in the evening.  I did a couple miles around the village going out past the school on Reese Road out to Litchfield and around the back side of town out in the country past the highway and back to Main Street and then all the way back down Main Street to get ice cream at the Knight Spot and then back the other way up Main past Railroad and then back to the house.  I Google Mapped the trip leaving out a few bits that are hard to put on the map and it came to around 4.4 miles.  It was probably 4.5 with the extra bits that I couldn’t map.  Check out my walking route.

While walking I listened to Edward Hermann (my favourite narrator) reading David McCullough’s “The Great Bridge” from Audible.  It is the history of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge that spans the East River connecting Manhattan (at the time called “New York City” to Brooklyn which, at the time, was a separate city.)  I love reading books by David McCullough.  He is definitely one of my favourite authors.  It is especially cool to read this particular history now that I live in the New York Metro area and have had an office right at the Brooklyn Bridge.

I got back to the house and pretty much everyone was winding down for the evening.  I fed Liesl her evening bottle and to my amazement she suddenly pulled it out of my hands and fed it to herself!  She has never held her bottle for herself previously, to the best of my knowledge, and this came as a bit of a shock for her to not only hold it but to take it from me so that she could do so.  Apparently Francesca and Dominica had been working with her to show her how to hold her bottle earlier today using some additional grips that can be attached to her bottle.  She did not have those grips tonight and she was still really, really good at holding her bottle.  One day and that was all that it took.  She is growing up fast.  She turns seven months old in less than a week!

Heading off to bed shortly after eleven tonight.  It remains very, very warm here.  The weather has not been hot but completely humid and the house is much warmer than it is outside.  Probably in the high seventies.  I’ve been sweating inside even wearing shorts and a thin shirt.  We have a massive fan in our bedroom upstairs which helps a lot though.  So that has not been too bad.

Tomorrow, and all week, it is work as usual.

I was up just after seven thirty this morning so that I could get down to the dining room and get logged in so that I could work.  Not a super busy day today which is really good since we have the wedding this afternoon.

Work went really well and I was done by early afternoon with plenty of time to be able to get ready for and head out to the wedding.  The morning deployments were really simple and that just left the normal Linux server patching that I do every Saturday morning for the last six months.

For lunch I walked over to Big Willy’s and grabbed a large cheese pie for Dominica, Francesca and I.  I love their pizzas.  I always try to get some ‘za when I am in town.

It was, as always, a bit of a panic to get out the door in time to make it down to the church for the wedding.  The wedding was at three at the Methodist church in Frankfort on the east side of town right on Main Street.  It is a church that Dominica and I have attended previously many years ago.  Very convenient to get to from her parents’ house.

The server was very nice and rather short which was perfect as it was quite warm.  The weather was not all that warm, lower to mid seventies, but it was a light rain and it was one hundred percent humidity so the ambient warmth combined with all of the people in the church made it quite warm.  They had the doors open and the fans running so it wasn’t too bad and the fresh air was nice.  Liesl did really well and barely made a peep for the entire service.

We were headed back to the house around three thirty.  The rain picked up a little which worked out well to cool everyone down.

Francesca and I made a quick soda run as the supplies were getting low at the house.  Then we had almost two hours to kill between the wedding and the reception which is in Utica.  So we just hung out at the house and had some snacks.

We got to the wedding reception at six thirty for the cocktail hour.  We were later than we had hoped.  The reception was at the Valley View Golfcourse and Country Club in Utica.  We had a good time and did a bit of dancing.  This was Liesl’s first wedding and reception.  She did really well.  She is quite the party animal.  She just keeps going and going.

Tonight was really special because Liesl and I had our first father-daughter dance.  The played Butterfly Kisses by Bob Carlisle and asked the fathers and daughters to go out and dance.  So I took Liesl out and we danced.  It was so sweet.  Dominica did her best to take pictures but could not stay for long without crying.  This will be a memory that I definitely keep forever.

We left the wedding at around ten thirty.  Liesl was finally getting tired and we did not want to keep her up later than she wanted to stay awake.  It was way past her bedtime anyway.

We got back to the house and were all asleep pretty much by eleven thirty.  Emily stayed late with her grandparents and didn’t get back until almost midnight.  The rest of us were way too tired to party that long.

I didn’t get to bed until three thiry last night.  But I got a lot of stuff done so it was not so bad.  I think that I need to make this a Thursday night routine.  Spending the time on Thursday to get way ahead on my emails and miscellaneous tasks makes me massively more productive on Friday and throughout the week.  It gives me enough momentum to keep my email under control all through the weekend (which is pretty easy since the volume goes way down) and then I slowly lose ground during the week until Thursday night and I can catch up again.  But I don’t end up getting completely bogged down in “email thrashing” as I call it if I do this to keep it under control.

I slept in some this morning but not too badly.  I got enough sleep so I am not concerned about being tired all day.  I can start later on Fridays.  Nothing happens in the morning and I always have to work later than other days so it is a good match.  Makes staying up late on Thursdays make more sense too.

It was a busy day of working for me and Dominica was busy spending the day cleaning (mostly kitchen stuff since we will be away for a week and a half) and packing.  Lot’s of packing to do for four (Oreo takes as much stuff as a human would take) to get everything that we will need for such a long trip as well as making it all fit into the X3.

I put in a lot of time today ripping DVDs as quickly as possible so that we would have a full load of DVDs to ship back to put into storage.  It has only been two weeks since the last shipment went but I did not want to waste the trip.  So I just ripped them as quickly as I could using both the laptop and the desktop until both machines hard drives were completely full.

My plan is to have the dc5850 run all week while we are gone.  I am hoping that I managed to load it up with enough content that it will be able to compress videos for the entire time that we are gone and will finish up just before we return home.  Although, of course, Microsoft will likely release some patch that will cause it to reboot midweek.  That would be really crappy.  This was a lot of work to get this all ready.  If it works it will mean not losing all of that time for compression.  It takes so much time to do this that I really do not want to give up a week and a half of computational time while we are away.  And when I am not using that computer it can do the work even faster so this is the best time to not lose.

Dominica went out around noon to get her hair cut which she has not done in a while.  She was really unhappy with her last haircut.  It was her first one in Peekskill and she had tried the local chain place instead of going to a real salon and decided not to go that route again.  Today she found a salon that she really likes and so will be returning there.  Really close and convenient too (and not a chain) so that will work well for her.  Nice to support the local businesses.

My book from Amazon, “Ruby by Example” that I ordered the day before yesterday arrived today.  I had ordered it on accident forgetting that we would be out of town and I was concerned about it arriving while we would be gone.  Especially with all of the rain we have been getting having it sitting outside would not be good.  But it came earlier than expected so all is good.  It also gave me a chance to let UPS know that we would be gone for a little while.  It is really handy having everything delivered via UPS so that they really know us.  Our delivery guy knows us so well that he always has a treat ready for Oreo and he looks in the front door to see if Liesl is sleeping or not to know whether he should ring the doorbell or just knock quietly (because Oreo does not bark if he just knocks.)

I worked until seven and then we started really packing the car.  Dominica had everything staged and ready to go out but the plastic bin with the DVDs for storage was not ready until the very last second and then I had to pack it additionally with SpiceCorp swag that I am taking to the Upstate New York SpiceCorp meeting next Saturday in Rochester.

We were on the road around eight.  The trip was pretty uneventful.  We stopped at a McDonald’s on the Thruway south of Albany for our dinner at around ten.  It was just before midnight when we pulled into Frankfort.

Francesca and crew (Madeline, Emily, Garrett, Joe and Brit) had arrived in Frankfort just forty-five minutes or so ahead of us.  They were pretty much asleep when we arrived.  Francesca was just barely awake and held Liesl for a few minutes and then went right to sleep.  We had to unpack the car and get everything set up upstairs before we could get to bed.  Tomorrow is Stephanie and Josh’s wedding at three.  I am working in the morning starting at eight and attempting to wrap up in time to make it to the wedding.

I got up around eight this morning.  Ramona got up and joined us around nine but was on the phone earlier.  Liesl got up with me and came down to the basement to hang out while I worked as has become pretty common for us.  She just loves hanging out with me while I work and I really enjoy getting to spend that early morning time with her because she is somach zehnder modulator happy first thing in the morning.  Happy and content to just sit on my lap and hang out.

Ramona poked her head into the basement and said good morning.  Things were slow so Liesl and I went upstairs and hung out for a while.  Liesl had a great morning playing on Ramona’s bed.  She was in a really great mood.  It was nice that Liesl and Ramona got quite a bit of good bonding time this week as they will not see each other for a really long time now.  Probably around eleven months, I would guess.

Oreo came in and discovered that a bed was set up for him in Liesl’s room and that it already had blankets on it so he curled up and went back to sleep.  He is so happy when we have a bed set up in there.

Dominica got up around ten or so and then came in to hang out with us.  Then I went back to work so that I would be caught up and able to go to lunch with everyone when lunch time rolled around.

In addition to normal work, I was able to build several new servers today. That went really well.

At noon I was able to go up and join the girls.  Ramona was surfing the web on her laptop getting her flights booked to China – she leaves in early July.  Dominica was reading on her Kindle.

It was about half past noon when we got out the door.  We decided to go to Grandma’s for lunch as it was on Crompond on Ramona’s way out of town towards Maine.  It was an awesome lunch.  I got the bagel and lox platter again as it was so good last time.  Amazing tomatoes.  I don’t know what they do to get such good tomatoes but they are just delicious.  Ramona was very excited about the pie selection.  We all got pie for dessert.  Ramona got two pieces but her eyes were bigger than her stomach and she took a good portion of her meal and most of one piece of pie to go to eat on the drive north.

It was around two when we said our goodbyes to Ramona.  It is sad that we will not see her for so long.  A whole year on the other side of the world.  Although, really, when you think about it, we have a lot of friends who live pretty close that we easily go that long without seeing so it really is not that bad.  Several people reading SGL right now will probably note that we have not seen them in a year or possibly a few.  It sounds like a really long time but when you get into your thirties, like me, it is easy to have a few years fly by and have only spoken via email, FaceBook, SGL or phone.

It was back to work for me as soon as we returned to the house.  It was a busy afternoon and I was working hard until seven.  Then I came upstairs to be with Liesl until she went to bed.  I was so full from lunch that I just skipped dinner entirely tonight.  I had a snack of rice crackers and spice tunafish salad later on but that was all.

Liesl went to bed around eight thirty.  Then it was back down to the basement to work for me.  I put in another hour or two.  Then Dominica buckled down and got started on her Perl scripting and programming class and I hung out upstairs so that I could help her with it.  It was really late when she started and we were both pretty frustrated with how tired we were.  She went to bed a little before midnight and, like always, I returned to the basement to get back to work.

I really wanted to get caught up on SGL tonight in addition to completing some important tasks for the office and getting my email mailbox cleared down so that I could work in the morning.  That is a task that can only be done at night or on the weekend.  So I stayed up taking care of those things until well after two thirty in the morning.

Tomorrow Dominica is getting her hair done at a new salon that she is going to try.  Then in the afternoon we have to pick up my suit and the drycleaning in Yorktown Heights.  Dominica will spend much of the day packing.  As soon as my office work is done tomorrow we are hoping in the car and driving up to Frankfort.  Saturday is Dominica’s cousin Stephanie’s wedding.  I am scheduled to work Saturday morning at eight.  It is going to be a long day without a lot of sleep the night before.

Also on Saturday, Francesca and the girls along with Joe and Brit are going to be arriving from Texas just in time to make it to the wedding.  They are going to be exhausted.  So we are going to spend the week visiting with them.  Later in the week I am going to go to dad’s house for a few days as I have SpiceCorp Upstate New York next Saturday in Rochester.  It is going to be a busy week.