Sheep Guarding Llama

We did our best to sleep in this morning.  It is just about the only chance that we are going to get this week.

I got up and got working this morning.  I have a big gap in my work day this afternoon so I need to make sure that everything is caught up this morning before we leave so that there are not any complications with taking time off for the baptism.

Work ended up going quite smoothly.  Sundays are generally very quiet but you just never know.

We were all set to get out the door to go to baby Sam’s baptism reception when Liesl decided that she needed to eat right away and there was no other option.  So we had to stop getting ready and instead feed Liesl so we were pretty late getting over to the country club for the reception.

We had a really good time at the party.  The food was awesome and we so seldom get to see everyone.  It is nice to get out to these events.  That and it is just nice to have a break from work for a little while in the middle of the afternoon and just relax.  It was also nice to get to see all of the new kids.  Liesl has several cousins and second cousins almost exactly the same age as her which is really great.  She will get to grow up with family her own age around.

We hung out at the party until around three thirty and then went back to the house and I got back to work.  Two more hours of work before I could call it a day.

Right as five thirty rolled around and it was time to go I manage to score seventy thousand points moving me to the level of Ghost on SpiceWorks’ forums which is the highest level ever achieved on there with only one person having done it before and the next level – quite a ways away yet – is a long way away yet.

Dominica had packed the car while I was working so when the work day was over we were able to just walk right out the door and get in the car and hit the road.  Dominica was very impressed that we were able to leave at the very first possible moment.

We stopped at the Mohawk Service Center and got McDonald’s as that is the best McDonald’s anywhere.  We don’t eat at any others now.  That one is so consistently good that our small allotment of McD’s food is best spent all at that one location.

It was not all that late by the time that we got back to Peekskill.  Around nine in the evening.  Liesl was able to get to bed at a normal time and our schedules are not all messed up from the trip.  We actually had time to relax and to get some stuff done after returning home which is very rare for us.

I slept in as late as I could this morning which was until eight when I needed to get to work again. It is Saturday today. I slept with both BlackBerrys right by my head on the basement floor (dad put down a futon mattress for Oreo and I) so it is easy to push the sleep right up to the very last possible minute as I am checking my emails from bed.

I got up and worked.  Today turned out being a very busy work day.  Extremely busy.  I was working at eight in the morning and ended up working until about four in the evening.  Rather a ridiculous amount of work, in fact.

Dad, Dominica and Liesl all went out to breakfast sometime between nine and ten.  I did not manage to really keep track of the time.  They went to the Omega in Geneseo and brought me back an egg and cheese on English muffin sandwich which was very good.  They also made a stop at Tim Horton’s where Dominica got us coffee and a half dozen donuts.

The hilarious thing that happened yesterday just before most people were calling it a day, someone posted the topic “Is Scott Alan Miller Multiple People” on the SpiceWorks forums.  This turned in to a really hilarious thread.  I really enjoyed discovering that I was a mysterious topic on the SpiceWorks world.

Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo came over to see Liesl this afternoon.  This time she was awake and they got some good, quality time with her.  That worked out well.

Around four, I think, I was able to wrap up work – much later than we had been expecting – and then we headed out onto the road to drive out to Frankfort.  The drive went well.  Pretty easy.  Going from Peoria to Frankfort is so short compared to our other drives that it really isn’t worth thinking about as a long drive.

It just occurred to me that the distance from Liesl to my father is almost exactly the same distance as from my father’s house out to my family in Ohio.  So, at the moment, Liesl is growing up the same distance from my family as I did at her age.  Liesl has family much closer, though, than I did when I was young with cousins her own age under two hours away and Dominica’s whole immediate family within three and a half hours except for the Grices in Texas.  Of course I didn’t have any cousins at all until I was seven whereas Liesl already has first and second cousins already with some just months from her in age.  It will be a very different world for her than it was for me.

We got to Frankfort just after seven.  I jumped in to take a quick shower and then we were all right out the door to go to the Kitlas in Utica for a late dinner.

After dinner we came back to the house where I worked for just a little while before we turned in to get some sleep.  We have been sleeping on the living room floor (on a futon mattress) recently at Dominica’s parents’ house because it is safer for Oreo since he is now blind and will get confused and hurt himself if he is sleeping on a real bed upstairs.  First he will have an accident trying to get off of the bed in the dark with furniture to jump into and then he will venture out and try to go down the stairs which he cannot navigate safely.  So he is at risk and then I don’t sleep because I get up with every twitch that he makes so that I can watch him.

We didn’t really have anything planned for today.  We sort of sprung our trip home on dad at the last minute and today is just a normal work Friday and I do not have it off or anything so it’s just business as usual.  This is one of those days when I really appreciate having a complete workstation set up at dad’s house on my own desk so that it is that much easier to just sit down and work all day without really being in the way that much.

I got pretty little sleep last night and was up and at my desk by eight this morning.  Four hours of sleep maximum after a long day and a very long evening of driving.  Dad was up at six this morning so he had even less sleep.  Liesl got up with me and spent an entire hour sitting on my lap in the office watching me work and pounding on a keyboard of her own set up beside me.  Today was the first day that she began playing with a mouse as well.  She grabs it with both hands and moves it around her desk just like her daddy.  She is so adorable.  We have so much fun just hanging out together.

At nine Liesl decided that she needed more direct attention than I could give her while working so she went back down with Dominica where she napped for a while before they both got up.

Dad was out at a long breakfast until around ten thirty or so.  I did not get very much time to visit today as it is Friday and that is my busy day.  So dad and Dominica hung out for much of the day and played with Liesl.

Work was crazily busy today so I really did not get a chance to do much of anything.  For lunch dad ran out to Davis’ Pizza and picked up lunch for Dominica and I.  Our regular Davis’ Pizza that we get every time that we are home.

This evening my aunt Sharon and uncle Leo came over to see Liesl, but they were a little on the late side being able to come over and Liesl had decided to go to bed very, very early.  I think that it might have been as early as six when she decided that it was time for sleep.  Very unusual for our little party girl.  They stayed for a few hours but eventually gave up and are planning to return tomorrow.

Dinner was the Friday night fish fry from the Copa Lounge near home.  In all the years that I lived there I have never gotten food from there before.  It was only recently that I even learned that you could get food from there.  Now that I think about it it may easily be the closest restaurant to dad’s house if you don’t count the gas station in Greggsville and “the barn” and even then I am not sure.

We all turned in very early tonight.  We were all exhausted all day and were in desperate need of some serious sleep.  It was before eleven when we all got off to bed.  I have been sleeping in the television room downstairs with Oreo while Dominica and Liesl sleep in the guest bedroom.  It just makes it easier for us to really get some sleep.  Oreo does not like us being separated, though.

Today is a big, busy day.  I was pretty tired this morning since it was a short night.  Work was busy today but I decided to put several things on hold because I just don’t have enough time to deal with them today.  I did managed to get the new DL185 G5 checked out.  It is looking awesome.  I can’t wait to get the remaining parts and to be able to start really working with it.  That will be really great.  This server is going to make my life a lot easier (in theory.)

I was hoping to have been able to have wrapped up work by five thirty but that just didn’t happen.  I ended up being stuck at the desk until after six twenty.  Dominica had packed the X3 during the day so we were ready to go as soon as my work was done.

We grabbed gas and horribly stale donuts from the Dunkin Donuts (which we are not going to do again) and hit the road, for the final time, towards Scranton.

It is about a two hour drive from Peekskill to Scranton.  That part went well.  We arrived in Scranton as the sun was getting low.  Just after eight thirty.  More or less on time according to our original plans.  I had told the data centre that we would be arriving between eight and eight thirty so we are just sneaking in under our original plans.

The dr-racking process at Scranton went well.  I was quite relieved by how smoothly it all went.  I was worried that we would have some rail difficulties and not be able to get everything out quickly.  It was probably no more than half an hour there before the two remaining servers, the router and the switch were loaded into the car.  I worked in the data centre with the onsite tech getting everything removed from the rack while Dominica worked on getting the rear of the X3 reorganized so that we could fit everything in.

From Scranton we drove up to Clark Summit.  Dominica and I both came up with the idea of getting dinner at Waffle House.  I was like “do you know what we should do” and she was like “get dinner at Waffle House”; so that is totally what we did.

This was Liesl’s very first trip to a Waffle House.  Dinner was awesome.  We both got waffles and eggs.  Delicious.  And very convenient.  Few things are as convenient as eating in Clark Summit, PA.  If ever there was a town designed for travelers, this is it.  Hotels, restaurants, easy access to several highways, on the way to everywhere and grocery stores all in a row.  Very, very handy.

It was just ten after eleven when we pulled in to Apalachin, New York to stop in to see John “The Surfing IT Wizard” Stephens.  We stayed there for roughly an hour.  We spent most of that time looking at SpiceWorks as I got him logged in and showed him what he could do with the software and with the community.  We almost never get to see each other so it was nice to get a little time to visit.  I got to meet Lilly, his new cat, who is adorable and very sweet.  And John got to meet Liesl for the first time.

From Apalachin it was straight on to Peoria.  Several more hours of driving putting us at dad’s house around two thirty in the morning!  What a long night.  Dad was still up waiting for us too.  So no one was getting any sleep tonight really.  It was after three when I finally got into bed.  I have to be up tomorrow at normal time so no serious sleep for me.  I am going to be really exhausted tomorrow.

We didn’t technically make it to dad’s house on his birthday but we were still awake from him birthday so it kind of counts.

Today is our last full day in Peekskill until Monday.  This weekend we are traveling to my dad’s house for a few days then on to Dominica’s parents’ house.  We are coming home to Peekskill on Sunday night.  Lot’s of driving to be done this weekend

Today was an all work day.  The replacement HP Proliant DL185 G5 arrived today.  That was a relief.  Been looking for that to come for a while.  I didn’t get a chance to unbox it today or to do anything with it so that needs to be done tomorrow.  I can’t actually start the real work on the server yet as not all of the parts have arrived for it yet.  I have additional drive trays on order which I expect any day and need to order the first of the 1.5TB drives to go into it.

I am going to see how long I can get away with only having the one additional pair of drives because I really want to load it up with 2TB or larger drives as those are due out later this month from Seagate in a low power consumption “green” configuration.  I am going to be using two 80GB drives that I have “laying around” for the time being to increase throughput potential.  Since I already own the drives I might as well being getting use out of them.  Come to think of it… I might have four 250GB drives which I have forgotten about somewhere at dad’s house.  I need to investigate that!!  If I do they have been there for years.  Three years or more.

I worked all day.  Nothing new there.  Pretty uneventful day.  Katie wanted to come over later this week to visit but we are leaving immediately after work tomorrow so that will not be an option.  So she came over after work tonight arriving at our place around eight this evening.

Our first order of business was to go out and take a rather quick drive around downtown Peekskill so that Katie could get an idea of what type of apartments were available or options and how the town was layed out especially in relation to the train station which she would be using to commute to and from the office in Manhattan.  That took about twenty minutes to half an hour.  Definitely some interesting apartment possibilities within a nice walk of our place and of the train station.  That would be handy to have her living so close.

Shortly after we got back to the house the Italian take away that we had ordered from Forno’s before leaving arrived.  Yum.  We ate dinner and watched several episodes of the second season of Father Ted which Katie loves.  Many, or possibly all, of these second season episodes were new to her so she has some awesome stuff yet to watch!  Father Ted is definitely one of the greatest television shows ever made.

Katie left around eleven.  Then I had some additional work to do and ended up working late into the night.  Not a lot of sleep to be had tonight, unfortunately.