Sheep Guarding Llama

Oreo decided that he wanted to get up before five thirty this morning.  I got up with him and took him outside for a walk which is always smart as he normally only gets up early if there is an emergency.  Sometimes to scout out sunlight around the house but mostly just to go outside.

Since I was already up and about and downstairs I decided to just log in and get to work.  My “shift” starts at six thirty anyway so there was little point in trying to go back to bed after being completely awake and already in the dining room.  So Oreo staked out a prime spot beside me on the futon as he likes to do when I am working in the dining room and I got down to business.

It was a really productive day as I got started so early.  Really able to get a jump on things.

I discovered a small blister on my heal today.  Probably best not to do any more long walks until that goes away.  Don’t want it to be a problem.  Also probably time to switch to different shoes.  The grey New Balance tennis shoes that I am wearing are many years old and in horrible shape.  We actually bought another pair of shoes over a year ago while we were living in Newark to replace these but these kept on going so I just keep on using them day after day.  How they keep holding up I have no idea.  Pretty silly to have aging brand new shoes while wearing my old ones into the ground.

This evening everyone went out to West Schuyler to get ice cream at Dave’s Diner on motorcycle cruise night.  Dominica and Francesca took the kids and I drove Dominica’s parents and Joe.  The girls left a few minutes ahead of us.  We drove out of the parking lot and were just barely crossing the North Frankfort Bridge when I realized that the gas gauge was on empty.  Not close to empty – On empty.  So I hit the trip computer to ask it how many miles it was calculating were left before we ran completely out of gas and saw it go from two to one!!

It turns out that there is no gas station anywhere in the direction that we were headed so the only option was to turn around and return to town.  I immediately swung around to head back and the reacceleration process took us from one to zero on the gauge and before we were back across the North Frankfort Bridge and into town the gauge went from zero to “——” which seemed like a bad sign to me.

I drove as carefully as I could back trying to keep the speed as smooth as possible.  We went for the Sunoco station on main street.  Somehow we made it.  I am completely amazed that the car did not run out of gas completely leaving us to push it.  When I filled the tank I put in 16.92 gallons of gas.  Definitely a very low tank.

Dominica is always upset with me for allowing the tank to go below a quarter and having the light turn on and then having to look for gas stations in a “panic”.  But this is a new record for leaving the other driver with no gas.  Not even enough to make it to the nearest gas station without hitting “absolute zero”, if you will.  Dominica was all ready to call me an idiot when she found out about it until, she realized, that it was she and Francesca that had driven the car the last time and had taken it out shopping the other day.

So after filling up the tank we were able to head back over the bridge and out to get ice cream.

Nothing too much else to report today.  Lots of work.  Very long day.  Ended up working until around one in the morning.  SpiceWorks has been crazily busy this week.  I’ve never seen it like this before.  It started over the weekend and is continuing on into the week.  Really nuts.  The overall volume of traffic on the site must be double what it normally is.

I had a little bit of blistering this morning.  Nothing bad, but I think that I need to take today off from walking or else I might have a problem.

I was up nice and early this morning so that I could get downstairs and start work at six thirty.  Oreo decided that the bed was comfy so he stayed upstairs for several more hours while I worked.

It is pretty warm today.  Temperatures are way from what we have gotten used to and the sun is out today.  It was out most of yesterday as well but was still partially overcast.  Today it was just sunny here in Utica.

Dominica, Liesl, Oreo and I are still in Frankfort, New York today, for those of you not completely up on your SGL reading.

There was a lot of work to be done today.  I spent pretty much the entire day sitting at the computer in the dining room.  Not the most exciting way to spend the day.  I kind of like working from Frankfort, though, because I am in the middle of the action rather than being hidden away down in the basement corner where no one can see me or talk to me.  I am not used to having so many people around when I am working.

Lunch today was pizza from Big Willy’s around the corner.  The guys recognize me there which is funny since I do not live here.  They have such awesome pizza though.  I eat pizza there more often than I eat it from anywhere else or about the same as I eat it from Davis’ Pizza in Pavilion, New York.  But dad gets the pizza most of the time from Davis’ so they never see me.  We have yet to find anyplace in Peekskill with really amazing pizza.  That is something that we really miss.  However, not having really awesome pizza available just a phonecall away is not exactly a bad thing!  We have stopped eating pizza significantly and that is good for our health and pocketbooks.

I had a server die out in Peoria today.  What a pain.  Was pretty sure that nothing was going to be able to be done remotely so I started planning on driving out there after work today so that I could deal with it.  I was not planning on going out to dad’s house until Thursday night and was very sad that I was going to have to leave Liesl for five days!  I was going to take Oreo with me, of course.  Dominica even packed up my suitcase and CPAP while I was working so that I could leave promptly.

Fortunately the server ended up being repairable remotely.  Thank goodness for good virtualization technologies.  And thank goodness for Mozy backup that made me only have to worry about the inconvenience and not the safety of the data itself.  I don’t need that added stress.

So Dominica unpacked me and Liesl was happy.  It is bad enough that I will be away from her on Thursday night and all day Friday and much of Saturday.  Thursday night will be minimal as she goes to sleep early and I cannot leave until somewhat late.  So at most we will miss an hour of each other.  Saturday I expect to get back to Frankfort in the early evening so I will see her some.  So basically missing two days.

This evening I worked on getting Frank’s new iPod Nano 4th Generation hooked up and working with iTunes on the computer here so that he can use it to listen to Audible.  It turns out, however, that the computer does not have the power to run iTunes.  iTunes being one of the worst pieces of software known to man – it practically defines everything that you shouldn’t do with software.  Bloated, useless and the most confusing and pointless interface imaginable.  How anyone uses iTunes and iPods and thinks that Apple has the slightest clue about interfaces I will never understand.  iTunes runs so slowly on their 2.4GHz Celeron with 1.25GB of RAM that it could take thirty seconds to a full minute for the application to respond to a button click!  It was completely unable to transfer files.  I shut down the antivirus and everything else that was running to try to help it but nothing was going to make it function.  iTunes is barely functional on Dominica dual-core, 64bit laptop with 3GB of RAM so I suppose that we should have guessed that this would be a problem.  iTunes has been on here for a long time, though, and I thought that they were using it previously.  This means that their AppleTV is not functioning either.

So the iPod is being returned as it just doesn’t work.  Instead we found a Creative Zen Mozaic EZ300 that supports the same features and has the same capacity as the iPod for quite a bit less than half the price – and likely will work significantly better.  Apple just can’t get their software to work.  I can’t believe that a company so large that makes so much software can be so bad at it so consistently.  But, it isn’t like Apple users care if it works.  So why should Apple spend extra money making it good when they make more money leaving it as it is.  Oh well.  This money is going to Creative instead.

I worked most of the evening after Liesl went to bed early.  She has started getting really sleepy around dinner time.  I think that being away from home and having so much going on all day is wearing her out more quickly than normal.  People are going to think that she sleeps a lot more than she really does.

I managed to get an article written tonight that I have been wanting to get done for a while so I was happy about that.  Dominica went to bed around eleven and Oreo and I went to bed a little past midnight.

No big plans for tomorrow.  Just more normal work.

Summer arrived today.  Up until today it has been nice and cool.  Almost continuous rain.  Often in the sixties.  Today it is hot, sunny and humid.  I checked the forecast for the week and it is supposed to be hot and nasty all week.  And, of course, it is this week that we are without air conditioning.  That did not work out perfectly.  Now I am really glad that I turned on the air conditioning in the house before we left (I set it to eighty) just in case it got really warm.  It was hard to believe that it would having been so cold that we couldn’t keep all of the windows open up until the time that we left Peekskill.

This morning I learned that Eastman Kodak is discontinuing Kodachrome film.  It was announced today.  I started using Kodachrome 64 film, a standard for professional photographers, especially photojournalists, around 1989.  It was never my normal film which was almost always Ektachrome 100 during my chemical film days but I did use Kodachrome 64 and even Kodachrome 25 from time to time.  Kodachrome began being manufactured, in Rochester, in 1935.  Seventy-four years they have been making this classic film.  There is almost nowhere left where someone can even get the film processed.  It is truly the end of an era.

I am on early morning support this week.  It sounds bad but actually works out pretty well to be the week that I am out of town.

Liesl got up early with me this morning and then hung out with Francesca for a while while I was working and before Dominica got up.  Dominica slept in pretty late not coming down to join us until around ten or so!

Work and SpiceWorks were really busy this morning.  It was all that I could do to keep up with the pace of incoming emails.  Very crazy.

Around noonish, Dominica and Francesca took the youngins out to do some shopping.  They ended up being gone for pretty much the entire day.  They got home around four thirty in the evening.  That was a long day of shopping.

Tonight at dinner, Liesl was so exhausted that she fell asleep with her head down on the dining room table.  She was so adorable.  We ended up putting her to bed at seven – before we were even done with dinner.

After dinner, Frank and I walked the girl, Madeline and Emily, down to the Knight Spot for some ice cream.  We got back to the house and then, after dropping them off, I went out for an evening walk since Liesl was already asleep.

After work I set out on a nice, long walk.  Much longer than I did yesterday.  I have a great book on my iPod that I am listening to so I am really enjoying the time out walking.  And the exercise is great.  Today I walked from Frankfort to Mohawk which was 3.9 miles in each direction for a total of 7.8 miles.  I got back to the house at around eleven.  It was just cool enough to not be uncomfortable walking that much.  Here is my route.  Had I realized how close I was to Herkimer I would have just kept on going the extra little bit to go all of the way.

I worked for about an hour after returning to the house.  I was a little soar after all of that walking but I felt pretty good.  I am definitely glad that I went out for the walk.  I’ve missed my iPod time too.  I like to keep up with my reading but it is hard to do these days.  Both walks together today were easily over eight miles.

It was around midnight when I finally got a chance to head off to bed.

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.