Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up at six thirty this morning so that I would have time to get prepared for everything that we have going on today.  It is going to be a very busy day.

Quick Tech Announcement: KOffice 2.0 has released and is completely compatible with OpenOffice.  KOffice has always been an awesome product and I am very much looking forward to seeing what they have done in their latest release.  Now that they are using the ODF standard and are available natively on many platforms including Mac OSX and Windows they provide a very serious alternative to OpenOffice and MS Office.

My morning was very productive.  I do manage to get a lot done when I get up early.  I got caught up on a lot of work and had time to look through the notes for today’s export panel webinar.  This is my first time participating online on an experts panel so I want to be prepared.  It should be fun though.  I am looking forward to it and I have a friend of mine from SpiceCorp NY on the panel with me as well.

I worked all morning and then, at eleven, it was time for my panel discussion.  Of course I took Oreo out and made sure that he was all set before the webinar began but, the instant that eleven rolled around, Dominica went and took a shower and Oreo came running into the basement with an emergency.  So I took Oreo out while running up the street in my slippers as I didn’t have time to even consider putting shoes on.  Had I been barefoot that would just have been how it was.

I was extremely fast and back before anyone even began to notice that I was gone.  The webinar went okay.  It ended up being all text-based.  I had thought that I would be dialing in and doing the event over the phone.  The chat format did not work out very well because we were not able to get feedback from the audience and it took people so long to type that it was hard to figure out when people were responding or not.  I think that I did alright.  It is really hard to tell without any direct feedback.

Since I did the webinar I had to work through any lunch break that I would have had.  I ended up being on the phone for the next four hours!  What a long day.  Lots of good work completed.  Can’t really complain.  Things are shaping up for me to actually have some free time this weekend, possibly.

Joe and Brit arrived with a surprise guest, Dexter, around four this afternoon.  We were not expecting Dexter to be here as well.  What a nice surprise.  Dominica and Joe’s parents are in Waverly, New York all weekend and Dexter needed somewhere to go so this was the least stressful option for him.  He really hates traveling but likes coming to see us and to get time with his nephew Oreo.

Dexter’s first job was to go down to the basement and poop on the floor.  He is delivering payback for all of Oreo’s peeing incidents at Dexter’s house.  Boy was that ever stinky!  It was so pungent that even though it happened in the basement, which does not have any windows that face the front or sides of the house, you could smell it in the front yard shortly after it happened!  Ewww.

My work actually wrapped up at a really reasonable time tonight.  It was great.  At six thirty we were actually able to go out for dinner.  We had thought that we were going to have to order in and eat at the house.  Instead we went to New City Diner and get a really nice dinner there.  Then we stopped by Cold Stone Creamery for ice cream on the way back to the house.

We also stopped at Panera Bread to pick up bagels for tomorrow morning.  We were really happy with how well that had gone when the Ralstons were here last weekend so were really excited to be able to do it again this weekend.  It is a very convenient way to have breakfast ready without it being very much work.

We got back to the house and were able to pretty much just relax and visit all evening.  Dominica had meant to have Run Fatboy, Run from Netflix but accidentally had Hotel for Dogs delivered due to some queue mismanagement so instead we watched Don’t Mess with the Zohan via Netflix On Demand which Joe and Brit have not seen before.

I spent the evening laying on the floor because I appear to have either horribly bruised or possibly broken my tail bone.  I am not sure what I did.  I think that I just stressed it by sitting on it poorly for a really long time the other day in my office chair.  I am not sure but it is really bothering me and it is starting to become a problem.  It has only been for about three days so far but is not getting better.  In fact it may be getting worse.  I really need to start paying attention to it to make sure that I do not hurt it further.  It seems pretty likely that I have simply bruised and/or irritated it enough to cause inflamation of the coccyx or the region.  But what a pain in the…

We did a pretty good job of getting off to bed tonight.  I actually went to bed before movie was over because I was exhausted.  It was not long before Dominica came up to join Oreo, Liesl and I.  Tomorrow morning I have to get up and work for a few hours for the office and then the plan is to go our to Orange County BMW so that Joe and Brit can test drive a 2007 BMW 335i.  Dominica called our BMW rep today and left a message that we want to drive one tomorrow.  That should be fun.  Joe really, really wants to get a BMW.

Neither Dominica nor I got much, if any, sleep last night.  Dominica had stayed up until one in the morning doing blog posting and other stuff in the living room with Oreo and I worked until three thirty in the morning.  By the time that I went to bed Liesl was upset and what little sleep Dominica and I got for the rest of the night was restless at best.  I was definitely dragging pretty heavily when I pulled myself out of bed this morning.

It is cool and gloomy again today.  Perfect weather for getting work done.

Today I was able to stress test the new desktop and compare it, doing similar work, to Dominica’s really nice laptop.  The new desktop, in an informal Handbrake test, is able to do roughly double the work that Dominica’s dual-core Turion laptop is able to do in the same amount of time.  To be fair I should mention that the desktop is doing that performance while being used as a full time, heavily used workstation without experiencing the slightest lag in desktop performance while the laptop is almost entirely idle doing nothing but doing the Handbrake work and is slightly sluggish if real work needs to be performed on it.  I am loving this new desktop as well as Windows 7.

Lots of work today but I feel good about it.  I hate being under the gun and I am not keeping up with things, I think.  I am so glad that I stayed up late last night and pushed through all of that work that I had to do.

Today I got to spend a lot of great time with my daughter.  She was in a great mood today and was awake at the right times for us to be able to hang out.  She is already old enough that she loves sitting on the recliner next to her dad.  She often sits beside me while I eat my lunch.  She is very happy to just watch me eat and snuggle.  Then I feed her her bottle.  We have a really good time.

Today was a big cleaning day for us.  Now that the Kirby has bags again I have been vacuum crazy.  The carpet feels so nice now that we are getting it really clean again.  Almost time for its quarterly shampooing!  I can’t believe that we are about to shampoo the carpets for the third time since moving to Peekskill.  Boy does time ever fly.

Katie was going to come over this evening to hang out a little.  She had some dental work done today and while riding home on the bus started to feel ill so decided to take a rain check.  Maybe we will see her next week.

I did some work today setting up LogMeIn which is a really awesome service.  LogMeIn gives you remote access to your computers in a really secure, easy to use way with a lot of great features.  I don’t recommend it for heavy remote desktop usage but it is great for when you need emergency access or just need to get in and fix some things.  One of the great features is the multiple machine support that it has with multiple users.  Very cool.

We skipped most any relaxing tonight in lieu of cleaning and then it was time to turn in “early” as tomorrow is going to be a busy day and I need to be up early so that I have time to get completely caught up on everything before doing my online seminar where I am an expert panelist for backup solutions.  Should be interesting.

In the afternoon, Joe and Brit are due to arrive and are staying for the weekend.  This may be their only opportunity to see where we live before packing up and moving to Houston in a few weeks.

Liesl turns one half of a year old today.  Boy is that ever hard to believe.  She is growing up so quickly.

This morning I got up on the early side.  Liesl is always up before us so I grabbed her and took her down to the basement so that we could hang out.  She hung out with me while I swapped over to my new desktop as my main machine and got it joined up to the Active Directory domain and really working.  She had a good time with me for about an hour or maybe an hour and a half before work started getting busy and I had to go wake up Dominica so that she could watch Liesl and I could work.

No sunlight today.  Dark and overcast all day.  Good for productivity.  We got a little rain but very little.  Mostly just overcast.  Nice and cool outside.  The way that May is supposed to be.

We got our first word from the Ralstons in the Congo this morning at six.  It took twelve hours from the time that their flight was expected to land in Brazzaville before they had an opporuntity to get word out to anyone to let us know that they had arrived and that they were safe.  They had some scares in customs in the Congo but, in the end, managed to get in with all seventeen pieces of their luggage.  Very little news from them today, other than that, just a few sentences but we should hear more soon.

Recently Andy has started getting into photography and today he decided to go out and buy himself a rockin’ Nikon D60 SLR so that he could start doing “real” photography where he has control of his shutter speed, aperture, zoom, focus, sensitivity, etc.  He is going to really love that camera.  Nikon SLRs are just awesome.  You can check out Andy’s photo feed on Flickr.

Dominica was busy working on her class this evening so instead of cooking dinner we ordered in Italian.  Once she was done working on her classes we watched My Name is Bruce which was a pretty horrible B movie with Bruce Campbell playing himself as a washed up actor who gets stuck in a “real life” horror film just like the ones that he makes.  Overall the movie was pretty awful.  Bruce Campbell is always entertaining but this was truly a bad movie.  A B movie about B movies.  Eeek.

After the movie I was on the phone for about two hours and then had to stay up late doing a ton of work that I was not able to get done because I had taken the evening off.  I had a lot to do and I ended up working until three thirty in the morning!  What a long night.  Long but very productive.  I felt good about all of the work that I managed to complete and tomorrow will be much nicer knowing that a very large amount of stuff is not hanging over my head like it was today.

Today things are mostly back to “normal”.  Not only is today a normal working day but we are not even traveling this coming weekend.  Joe and Brit are coming to visit us this weekend so we will be at home doing mostly relaxed things – although that means that there is a lot more cleaning to do this week.

Today is the crazy traveling day for the Ralstons.  They took off from New York City at eight twenty last night and are due to be in the air for almost the entire day today.  They should have arrived in Casablanca, Morocco around three thirty this morning and left again around eight thirty to fly down to Brazzaville.  They are due to arrive there around six tonight.

Of course, everyone is anxious to know if they have arrived safely or not but once you consider all that they have to do after arriving including gathering up their luggage and getting through customs (eek!) and then getting on to the missionary compound in Brazzaville, getting their medical check-outs and all of that stuff we will all understand if it takes a very long time before they have the ability to get to some place with Internet access and get word out to us about how they are doing.

I worked all morning and was very excited when my new desktop arrived early this afternoon from UPS.  I have been putting off spending the money on a new desktop for so long that I really do deserve this.  Moving from my old dx5150 to this dc5850 is going to really be something.  I skipped the dc5750 line entirely and, along with it, the entire Windows Vista generation.  Windows XP was not even in service pack one or had just barely gone to it when I got the dx5150.  So that machine lastest through a pretty significant portion of the Windows XP years and all of the Vista years that I pretty much just ignored.  Vista still feels “new” to me.  But this new box is destined for Windows 7 RC for the time being.

I did a quick Vista install just to see how it would work on this box and it does look pretty nice.  The big problem is that the desktop shipped with Vista 32 and I really have to have a lot more memory than that supports so that is out of the question.  Once I saw Vista Business 32 working I went on to install Windows 7 Ultimate RC.  That really took hardly any time at all.  Microsoft has really improved the installation process over the years.  It is pretty smooth now.

I got Windows 7 installed and updated and my first impression is that it is awesome.  It is solid and smooth and reacts very well.  More pleasant to use than Vista but mostly that is because I have used Vista enough now that nothing is a shock anymore.  Windows 7 is truly just a tweaked and updated version of Vista.  Nothing really groundbreaking on its own.  Just like Windows XP was an update and tweak for Windows 2000.  When it comes to operating systems groundbreaking normally get a bad rap.  What people want is simple, accepted and stable.  Windows 95, 2000 and Vista did the groundbreaking with new interfaces and features.  Windows 98 (for what its worth), XP and 7 are the “followers on” who come along a few years later and provide minimal changes to the basic package but fix the bits that didn’t work and make everything more stable.  By the time that the second generation comes along people are happy with the new interface and are thrilled when things work a bit better.  It’s mostly just the impression that each subsequent release brings but that is all that it takes.  Windows 7 is destined to be the standard desktop operating system for almost the next decade.  Best to get used to it now.

We actually got some time to relax tonight and we watched a few episodes in the fourth season of The Gilmore Girls.  We really needed to just relax to some degree.  There has been way too much going on recently.

We are, more or less, back on our diets again now.  We have been pretty much been unable to keep to them recently because there has just been so much going on.  Now we just need to eat the remaining junk food around the house, which really is not very much, and we can get back to our healthy diets.

We even managed to get off to bed at a reasonable hour tonight as well.  Only a little after eleven.  Very respectible.  I wish that we could push our bedtime forward a little more yet to align more with Liesl’s sleeping schedule.  I tend to be ready to go to bed at ten thirty or so but it takes a bit to get Dominica to be willing to turn in before one in the morning or later.

Today is the big day.  We have nothing planned for today except to see that the Ralston family, missionaries to the Republic of the Congo, get onto their flight at JFK in New York City and off on their big move to the jungles of central Africa.

Art and Danielle really did not sleep at all last night.  Dominica did pretty well but was up pretty early.  I actually got to sleep in quite late which was awesome.  I really needed my sleep.  Today is my only day actually off from work (my second since approximately New Year’s – including weekends) so getting some rest is critical.  So it was around ten thirty when I got up and then I showered and got ready so it was around eleven when I came down to see how everyone was doing.

We had a light lunch but pretty much there was nothing to do except for final preparations for the trip.

The Ralstons’ flight is at eight twenty tonight but the airlines, Royal Air Morac told them to be at the airport at 2:52 pm this afternoon so since we do not have a good idea of how long it will take to get to JFK from Peekskill we decided that we needed to leave by 1:00 just to be completely safe.  We can not take any unnecessary risks today.

Art, Danielle and Michael said their final goodbyes to Dominica and Liesl (who was asleep when they left) and it was 1:05 when the four of us pulled out of the driveway in Peekskill to head to New York City.

Our first stop was to get gas on Crompond on our way to the Taconic Parkway.  We had planned for this so it was not a surprise and did not impact our time table.

The trip was rather interesting since Michael and I were sitting up front in the only seats and Art and Danielle had to ride in the back of the Ford cargo van sitting on their duffle bags holding on to the front seats to keep from getting tossed all around.

The drive through Westchester County and down to the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge and over to Queens and then down to Brooklyn.  Nothing too dramatic happened on the drive.  Definitely not a drive that I would want to do very often and especially not in a cargo van.

We made really good time and arrived at the airport at roughly two thirty.  Very good time.  I dropped the Ralstons at Terminal 1 and drove off to make an attempt at finding a parking spot.  Finding parking turned into a thiry plus minute adventure.  Parking an over-sized cargo van in a very tight parking lot with hordes of crazy New Yorkers who can’t differentiate between Brooklyn and the third world is rather an adventure.

It was after three when I finally went running into the terminal to see if there was anything that needed to be done.  When I got in I found that the Ralstons were standing with all of their luggage.  It turned out that the ticket / luggage booth for Royal Air Moroc would not even open until four twenty – four hours before the flight was scheduled to leave.  That means that we arrived a long time before there was anything at all to do at the airport.

Art and I were pretty pleased, though, that we were there so early.  Standing around waiting is a pretty minor inconvenience compared to so many potentially disasterous things that could happen today.  There is just so much that could go wrong here that being very, very early is not a bad thing at all.

The good thing about being so early is that we were first in line to get the luggage checked when the booth finally did open.  It turned out that there was more luggage here than was allowed per passenger and the flight was completely full so there was no way to buy an extra seat or maneuver any luggage or anything like that.

It turns out that since we were first in line there was some flexibility and the nice lady working at the counter decided to just accept the two extra bags.  She sure did not have to do that and we were definitely considering panic luggage scenarios.  The Lord was definitely watching over us – having the airlines tell us to get there way too early and then having that be the reason that the luggage managed to go to the Congo!

It took rather a while to get all of that luggage checked and ready to go.  Only the two heaviest duffle bags ended up getting flagged as being over the weight limit which was very surprising as everything was over to some degree.  They must have been really over the weight limit.  In the end the luggage ended up being an additional $1,300 USD fee over what they had originally estimated.  It could have been far worse.

That was pretty much it.  Art and I moved all of the luggage over to the TSA luggage handling people and they took all eight hundred pounds of it from there.  We had a little bit of an adventure moving all of the luggage from the airline check in point to the TSA folks but that was pretty minor.  We were definitely covered in sweat by the time that we were done moving all of it.  That was exhausting.

After the luggage was all set it was time to say our goodbyes.  It is really difficult to really conceive of how long it could be before we will see them again.  If all goes really well in Impfondo then it could be as much as four years before they return.  Michael will be about to turn sixteen and Liesl will be in school!  Oreo is very unlikely to still be with us as he would be thirteen then – Oreo and Art will definitely miss each other.  There is only a moderate chance that we will still live in Peekskill.  Four years is a long time to be completely cut off from the outside world.  This is about as remote as it gets.

So at roughly four thirty Danielle tweeted her last, shut off her cell phone and handed it over to me – no service in Impfondo so the phone is staying in the US.  Then we all hugged and they headed off to the security gate where I could not follow.  In four hours they will be in the air and on their way to Casablanca in Morocco then, after a five hour layover, on their way to Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo.

I hit the little cafe by the security gate and had a sandwich while I waited to make sure that they did not have a last minute panic and need something.  Once I was done eating I left the airport and picked up the van and drove, in rush hour traffic, back up to Peekskill.

The drive back to Peekskill was fine.  I got home and immediately Dominica packed up Oreo and Liesl and we ran out to Enterprise to drop off the van.  No reason to let that go any longer than necessary.  That was a quick trip out and back.

It was six thirty when we finally got back to the house.  Five and a half hours from door to door to get the Ralstons to the airport and they still have two more hours to go before they are even in the air!  (It would end up being almost exactly 36 hours from this point before they were finally done with their initial set of travels!!)

Katie, who arrived at the airport half an hour after we did, managed to get into the airport, get through security, board her plane, fly to Washington DC and tweet her arrival half an hour before I got home and two and a half hours before the Ralstons even took off!

I was pretty exhausted when I got back home.  We did some cleaning and mostly relaxed this evening.  I checked my email tonight and it appears that my new desktop, an HP dc5850, is due to arrive via UPS tomorrow afternoon.  How exciting.  So tomorrow I get to build by new Windows 7 machine and, hopefully, have a nice, fast, stable environment from which to work.

We got off to bed at a reasonable time tonight.  It is nice to have some time to relax but awfully sad that the Ralston family has now left us for a very long time.