Sheep Guarding Llama

We were right as to why Liesl was so unhappy yesterday.  Today we could see her second tooth had come in.  She now has both of her front, bottom teeth.  She is growing up so fast.

Liesl still wanted a lot of attention today but was a lot more like herself than yesterday.  It was, more or less, a normal day.  Yesterday was just madness.  Liesl was so unhappy we just didn’t know what to do.

Today we could really see Liesl’s second tooth.  It was more than theory now but very obviously a second tooth was not there in her bottom gum.

It was a heavy work day today.  I had to catch up on a bit from yesterday.  Had been hoping that I would get to play a video game today.  I’ve been wanting to take some time to play a game for the last few days and really thought that I would get to do so today but it turned out not to be the case.  I worked until it was quite late and it was time to go to bed, more or less.

I watched some television with Dominica and Liesl.  Liesl wanted to hang out with me quite a bit and eventually fell asleep between my lets on the recliner while Oreo snuggled next to me.  Not great for productivity but awfully cuddly!  This is what being a dad is all about.  Everyone snuggled on the recliner.

The rain came pouring down tonight.  It caught us off guard and our bedroom got soaked.  The bed was all wet as was the floor.  I had to use the Bissell wet vac to clean everything up.

Dominica baked fresh banana bread this evening.  This time she remembered the sugar which she forgot last time.  Much better this way.

We watched The Gilmore Girls and then Hotel for Dogs and headed to bed shortly after Liesl fell asleep.  Luckily she slept pretty well today so much be getting better now.  Yesterday was really tough.

Hotel for Dogs was pretty cute.  Definitely a kid’s movie.  The little puppy Boston Terrier, Georgia, in it was adorable!  But the movie was sad too because it dealt with abandoned animals and animals being destroyed.  Very sad.  Lots of very cute doggies, though.

Today was incredibly long.  I had to work today, obviously, but that was not a problem.  It was a very light day and it went quite well.  Liesl is teething, though, and that is a killer.  Her first tooth came in last Sunday (one week ago today) and today her second tooth is coming in, and she is quite unhappy.

Liesl decided that the only thing that would make her happy was having her daddy around.  So I was holding her almost the entire day.  She did not sleep well last night at all, presumably because of her tooth, so she was really exhausted today which just exascerbates the toothache.  Because she was in pain she was unable to nap as well so she just got worse and worse throughout the day.

I did manage to do just a tiny bit of reading and finished “Practical Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Python” from the Pragmatic Programmers.  A great book for someone looking to get into serious programming but who does not know where to start looking.  A little more advanced than a normal “learning to program” book but it does start from the beginning and takes you through a lot of concepts very quickly.  It is a condensed version of a collegiate introduction to computer science class.

I gave Oreo his bath today.  He has really been needing one.  The weather has been cold bit it is pretty warm today so I figured that this would be a good day.  He is so good about taking his baths.  He just stands in the shower and takes a shower like a person would.

Dominica tried to work on her college classes today.  She is doing Perl programming.  The idea was that today I would have a lot more time to be able to spend watching Liesl and answering questions than most days.  That did not end up being very true.  I was able to watch Liesl more than usual – it ended up being a real necessity.  I watched her almost all day.  Not just watched her but held her almost all day.  I could never be out of her sight.

Dominica did manage to get some of her class done.  We had hoped that she would have been able to have completely finished it today.  She was lucky to just just over one quarter of it finished.  It is really hard to do homework when there is a baby screaming inconsolably for most of the day.  Very distracting.

I tried to do a little Clojure programming today as well and that really was not going to be a possibility.

Normally Liesl falls asleep around seven to nine in the evening.  We were thinking that because she had not napped today and because she had had no sleep last night (or not much) that she would fall asleep early tonight.  Not so.

Liesl sat on my lap while we watched The Gilmore Girls for most of the evening.  Having the television on helped to calm her and snuggling with me meant that she was not upset and looking for me.  Eventually, around ten or a little later.  She fell asleep on my chest.  We dared not move her in case she would wake up so I sat there motionless until midnight when she felt that she was probably so asleep that moving her upstairs would not wake her up.  It did not and she was able to go really go to bed at midnight as were we – far later than we would normally go to bed.  We have done a really good job of moving our sleep schedule forward significantly in the last month or so.  At least I have.  Now that Dominica has her Kindle she will go to bed but stays up reading for most of the night.

I managed to order my replaced hard drives for the Proliant DL185 G5 today.  Two 1.5TB Seagate drives with which to start.  I am trying to hold off buying any additional drives until I can get them in 2TB sizes and, hopefully, in the new 5,900 RPM Low Power configuration from Seagate.

Liesl was really restless last night.  Dominica and I did not get very much sleep.  Dominica was up with Liesl for much of the night.

I got up at eight and so did Liesl.  She came down to the basement office with me and helped me work for about an hour.  We love our early morning office time together.  She is so happy to just go downstairs with me and watch me work.

At nine Liesl fell back asleep upstairs in her pack and play and slept for another hour or an hour and a half.  She slept for so long and so well that when she and Dominica finally got up Dominica had no idea that Liesl had ever been up with me!

I am working really hard today to try to get caught back up with SGL.  I know that the posts have fallen very far behind this week.  It has been a busy week and there was not much that I could do.  For the most part, though, it was a rather uneventful week so you did not miss much.

Liesl continues to grow and change at an astonishing pace.  It is so neat being a new father.  Every morning there is a new expression, a new sound or something.  She is not yet crawling and I think that we have several days yet, at least, before she does.  She does try quite a bit and we are giving her a lot of time down on the floor trying to encourage her.  She is almost able to stand herself up so we are concerned that she will attempt to walk rather than crawl first which is not supposed to be good for development.

Dominica and Liesl went out to the grocery store first thing this morning.  We were getting pretty low on foodstuffs so it needed to be done and our schedule does not allow for a lot of flexibility.

My work for today ended up being orders of magnitude more involved than I had imagined.  I got started nice and early this morning but that didn’t help at all.  I should have started, apparently, at nine last night and worked all through the night on this.  I am doing Linux server patching and there are so many patches to apply to so many machines and so many problems with the update process that it ended up taking for forever.  My first patch alone ended up taking eight and a half hours!  And that was with ten to fifteen percent of the machines scheduled to be patched being skipped as the patch doesn’t work properly on them!

At three this afternoon Dominica and Liesl packed up and drove on down to New Jersey to go to a PartyLight party (I believe that that is the right name) that Dunia is throwing.  So Oreo and I are left home alone.  Today was really the best possible day for Dominica to have something like this going on since I am so busy anyway.  Now I do not have to feel bad about working all day.

I worked until pretty late.  Around eight in the evening.  I also did a lot around the house.  I cleaned all through the downstairs and I finally got around to scrubbing the floor in our bedroom which was stained when we originally bought the house.  Lots of good work that needed to be done.  Very productive day.

Dominica and Liesl got home and wanted to order in dinner.  So I ordered from Forno’s and we relaxed for the rest of the evening.

It is Friday and the day really took me by surprise.  It was after noon when I even realized that it was a Friday!

Today turned out to be one of the slowest Fridays that I can remember.  It was great.  I spent a lot of the day on the phone.  Around noon I got the chance to start actually working on the Proliant DL185 G5 that arrived late last week.  I was discouraged, after many hours or working, to discover that the drives that I had available for it – four 250GB SATA drives – were unreliable.  We had had issues with them years earlier but I had been hopeful that the issue was not actually the drives but possibly something else.  It does not appear to be the case.  The first drive failed in minutes 🙁

I also had, I thought, two 80GB SATA drives that I would be able to use in this machine but I was only able to find one of them.  I can only imagine that the other one got used somewhere and has since disappeared.  I can’t imagine where it would have been used, though.  Very strange to have a drive physically disappear.

So I ordered two, new Seagate 1.5TB SATA drives.  At least now I will definitely have brand new drives.  Still quite a pain, though, when I thought that I had several drives ready to go.  I will now need to wait an entire week, or more, most likely before the new drives will arrive.  I was really hoping to have been working on this machine all day today and all through the weekend.  That would have been a far more useful use of my time.

At least I was able to check out the hardware today and make sure that everything was what it was supposed to be and that the DL185 G5 truly does support AMD SVM virtualization technology.

Dominica took Liesl and Oreo out to the pet store this afternoon to deal with Oreo’s toenails.  We can’t really handle cutting them ourselves so we have the professionals do it.  It is just far easier this way.

As I said, work was light today but it did end up running really, really late.  I had a team that needed me all evening.  I ended up working until eleven thirty at night!  What a long day.  Tomorrow I have to get up and work again in the morning.  I have a huge amount of Linux patches to apply tomorrow and there is not going to be enough hours in the day.  Two massively long days back to back.  I am thinking about taking a day off next week.  I really need it and I definitely put in the hours for it today and I expect will be in enough to justify another day off after tomorrow!