Sheep Guarding Llama

Finally a day at home.  It is hard to believe that we have not been here for a week.  Now it is time to get back to all of those things that we have been needing to do.  It feels really good to be home, though.  It is amazing how much you miss your home when you have been away for several days.

I got Dominica’s Mother’s Day present ordered today – an Amazon Kindle 2.  She is very excited about that.  She has been wanting one for about a year.

I had a rather long work day today.  There was just so much to do to get caught up after yesterday.  And I was completely exhausted.

Today just flew by.  Too much to do and too little time.  I worked in the basement all evening and barely got a chance to see the family at all.  Dominica watched some movie called Bride Wars or something like that that she had on BluRay from NetFlix.  Nothing that I was interested in seeing and I have to be pretty picky these days with how limited my free time generally is.

I was not stuck going to bed as late tonight as I have been recently but it was not early either.  Sorry for the short updates recently.  I am rather behind on SGL and it is all that I can do to keep up as much as I am.  I am planning to be caught up somewhere around Monday.

I ended up being wide awake at six thirty this morning as there was much going on in the house so I decided that rather than laying in bed and not getting sleep I might as well get up and get to work so that at the very least I would get some of the work out of the way.  I have to cut out of the office early today at four thirty in order to make it out to Syracuse to go to the Onondaga Community College Professional Advisory Board meeting.  It is for that meeting that we have been out here all this week.

So I got to work and put in a long day.  Dominica and Joe went out to visit their mom at work with Liesl today so that Liesl could meet people at the office.  So I was left alone to work.

I left Frankfort at four thirty but it took longer to get out to Onondaga Community College than I had anticipated so it was just about six by the time that I arrived.  This year the meeting is being held at a different location than where I have been previously so I was not sure where to go.  Luckily Tim was making a sweep through the student center while I was looking for the meeting and was able to guide me straight there and I wasn’t actually late at all.  Perfect timing, really.

The meeting lasted until quite late.  After the meeting Tim and I talked for a while and did not end up leaving campus until around ten.  That made it after eleven when I got to Frankfort to pick up Dominica, Liesl and Oreo to begin our long drive back to Peekskill.  Talk about being tired.

We decided to grab a super late dinner on the road.  I had had a very light meal at six at OCC but that was not enough to hold me for a four hour drive through the middle of the night.  So we stopped off at the McDonald’s at the Mohawk Service Center just west of Albany on i90.

This was our second stop at this particular McDonald’s this week and I have to say that the food and service at this McDonald’s really stands out as being far superior to the norm.  We are very pleased with them and will likely make an effort to stop there in the future.

It was really late by the time that we got home to Peekskill.  It was between three and four in the morning when I was finally able to slip off to sleep.  While getting ready for bed I was so tired that I spilled a 32oz. glass of water onto the bed so we had to change all of the bedding before going to bed. 🙁

I was really exhausted when I got up this morning.  Ugh.  Dad, Dominica and Liesl went out to Geneseo to go to the Omega Grill for breakfast while Oreo and I stayed home.  I really wanted to go with them but there was just so much work to be done that there was no way that I was going to be able to take time off to go enjoy food.  It was rather late by the time that they went so they brought me back an early lunch when they returned.  One of my favourite Omega meals – the Swiss pattie melt using a veggie burger and dipping it into Thousand Island dressing.  I skipped the fries and just got cottage cheese as we have been eating horribly this past week.

Nothing much to tell about today.  It was a very busy day and I did not really get a chance to visit with anyone.  At least dad got another day seeing Liesl.

Dominica did most of the packing early today so that the SUV was all loaded up and ready to go.  We have another bin of stuff to take back with us to Peekskill.  This time we got the bulk of the Bible collection and another large number of DVDs and some miscellaneous travel and children’s books (older children’s books like The Sugar Creek Gang.)  Each bin that leaves dad’s house is quite a bit of storage that appears for him in his garage.

It was around eight this evening that we managed to finally get onto the road after my work was done for the day (or at least for this part of the day.)  Then we were off and out to Geneseo to pick up Tim Horton’s for the road.  We both got coffee, sandwiches and a donut.  We figured that it would make sense to eat early and not have to stop again while we were driving.

We were in Syracuse at nine thirty and in Frankfort just after eleven.  We listened to a bit of “Liberty” in the car while we were driving.

Once we were out to Frankfort I got logged back into work and got back to the grind.  Everyone was already asleep when we arrived.  We decided that it would be better if we slept in the living room instead of in Dominica’s old bedroom upstairs because being on the ground floor would keep me from worry about Oreo getting up and wandering about during the night.

I ended up not getting a chance to go to sleep until around two in the morning or a little later.

I can’t remember the last time that I was at dad’s house on a normal Monday.  A rather strange feeling.  We had hoped to have been able to have gone to the Omega Grill for breakfast this morning but there just was not enough time to do so as work was pretty busy today.

While I worked for the office from dad’s upstairs office I also worked on getting his “new” dx5150 desktop set up and ready for him to start using.  Simple work mostly involving applying tons and tons of patches and installing a bit of software that was not already installed on there.

This was a nice, relaxing day for dad and Dominica because they were able to just hang out and play with Liesl and Oreo while I worked.

We got our traditional Davis’ Farm Market pizza for a late lunch today instead of for dinner.  Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo came over to spend the afternoon with Liesl.  They visited for several hours.

While they were there I took at look at my cousin Sara’s failed external hard drive.  She has a relatively new Western Digital USB 640GB hard drive that she needs for everything and it has completely died on her.  Dad had already looked into it and as far as he could tell the drive was dead, but everyone thought that I should look at it anyway.

The drive was definitely dead but the errors that we were getting were interface related and the drive sounded just fine inside of the external case.  So with my aunt and uncle there we made the call to rip the drive open and to extract the physical drive from inside of the chassis and see what could be done with it.  Since they are just standard SATA drives mounted with USB adapters it is easy to pull a drive out of an external chassis if you can get the chassis open.

The drive came out and we plugged it in to dad’s new dx5150 and it worked perfectly.  No problems at all.  It was just the USB adapter portion of the drive that had died.  So all of Sara’s data was backed up and easily saved.  Her external drive is no more.  She will need a new one of those.

After the Richardsons left dad and Dominica made a run over to Geneseo to pick up needed supplies from Tim Horton’s.  I am completely exhausted from a lack of sleep and am starting to feel sick from it.  Dad has only half-caff coffee in the house and Dominica is desperate for Tim Horton’s coffee and donuts so they decided that it was worth making the trip.  Dominica drove so that dad could get a ride in the new BMW X3.

Thank goodness for Tim Horton’s coffee.  That really helped get me through the afternoon.

As word was wrapping up, Art and Danielle came over to visit for a few hours.  It is so weird that we see them as much as we do now since no one really sees themanymore and they are leaving for the Congo in just about ten days!  Today is actually their first day at home since the last time that we saw them.  They have been in Florida and Virginia all of this time.  They barely have any time left at home before they leave.  Only one weekend left and it is pretty much packed with appointments and speaking engagements and going away stuff.  Michael did not come over.  He is visiting family and friends.  He will see us in less than two weeks when they all come down and stay for three days before flying out.

Katie (@kweenkmatt) is in Washington, D.C. today.  She is doing a class down there.  

After the Ralstons left this evening it was back to work for me.  I am completely backed up on stuff that needs my attention so I am doing what I can to keep up with it.  This is a really tough week with all of the travel and activities.  I’ve been dreading this week for almost a month – ever since we figured out that there was going to be an entire week of being out of town without any remote chance of there being enough time for sleep.

I ended up working until around three forty in the morning.  Ugh.  No sleep for me.

I did acquire the rank of Habanero on SpiceWorks tonight which is pretty impressive.  That makes me the second highest ranked person out of something like 650,000 users.  There are three rankings higher than Habanero (which is just above Datil which is above Thai) the next being Ghost then Mace then Capsacian.  The highest person is only at Ghost and I am catching up with reckless abandon.  I figure that I am roughly a month to a month and a half away from being the top ranked user on the system and probably just two to three weeks away from achieving Ghost.  It will take a really long time for me to move to Mace, though, the steps get bigger and bigger as you go.

Tomorrow I am working from dad’s house again and then, in the evening, we will be driving out to Frankfort to spend the night there.