Sheep Guarding Llama

It was late when we finally go to bed last night but with being able to sleep in a little it was not too bad although there were many interruptions during the night.  So it was a “holding ground” kind of night.  I am still really exhausted today but no more so than yesterday.  I really feel like we are nearing the end of the tunnel and can start to see the light at the other end with this massive lack of sleep.  We have been worrying for weeks about how bad this week was going to be and that was before going through the problems with my desktop that kept dying on me.  That really added to the problems and it was all downhill from there.

I have a full day of work today but it is Sunday and far less stressful than normal days.  Liesl was really exhausted from yesterday and slept for most of the morning until about one in the afternoon.

We managed to actually get some stuff done today and, for the first time in a long while, actually had a little bit of time to relax.  Not a lot of time but a little.

We didn’t do much actually relaxing today but spent most of any freetime just catching up on little things and getting things into place.  We have been so overwhelmed for so long that it seems like the house must be almost falling down by now.

We got an opportunity to go for a nice walk in the evening as well.  We took Oreo and Liesl out and did a good two to two and a half miles.  We have been missing our walks quite a bit recently.  We have not had any chance to take them at all and we have really been feeling the lack of exercise (combined with an excess of less than healthy foods.)  We were definitely feeling better after getting to take our walk.

My goal for this evening was to go to bed at roughly the same time as Liesl.  That did not end up happening but I did get settled in with a pretty solid plan of being in bed by nine thirty.

That also did not happen.  I ended up having a couple of issues come up at work and it was a quarter after eleven when I finally had a chance to break away from the office and get up the stairs and in to bed.  Dominica actually decided to go to bed as well which I was not expecting.

Finally, at least a chance to sleep potentially a normal amount.  And look, SGL is finally caught up as well!

Last night ended up being a night of practically no sleep at all for me.  I don’t sleep very well anymore if I go to bed before Dominica so I didn’t really fall asleep until after three in the morning.  Then, as Dominica was too tired to wake up to her crying, I was doing all of the getting up to take care of Liesl during the night and it was rather a rough night.  We was up more often than once per hour (she actually sleeps through the night but needs pacifier maintenance performed or else she will awaken) so there was almost never a stretch of time when I was able to get any solid sleep at all.  So I slept in much later than I had anticipated this morning as it was the only chance that I had to get anything resembling real rest.

The one thing, for which I am very thankful, is that I finally managed to finish writing the article that I have been working on for Datamation (an online magazine published by Internet.com) last night.  I was going to be really stressed all day today if I did not managed to complete that before going away for the weekend so I pushed to complete it last night before going to bed.  Dominica proof read it for me and I submitted it.  So I have the weight of that off of my shoulders today.  So even though I have very, very little sleep at least I have one less thing to be worrying about.

Once I was finally up it was time to work.  There was a lot of work to be done and I spent many hours working as quickly as I could trying to get enough work done so that we could get on to the road and down to the Philadelphia area as we are planning on spending the afternoon visiting with Jenn and Angelo whom we have not seen since around February.  This will also be our first time seeing their new home which they purchased around June of last year.

I was finally done with work really late, around one thirty.  I ran upstairs and took a quick shower while Dominica got Liesl and Oreo ready to travel.  We were on the road around two thirty.

The drive down to Ambler, Pennsylvania takes us roughly two and a quarter hours.  A lot of the drive in reminiscent for us as it takes us down past Newark (where we lived 2006-2008) and then past New Brunswick (where we lived for most of 2006) and down a route that we have used many times over the past several years and then down through Trenten and into Pennsylvania.

Liesl did really well on the trip down and slept until we were in the last stretch of about fifteen minutes or so and then she was starting to get a little fussy.  Pretty good considering the length of the drive.

We visited for a few hours and watched the Preekness before going out for dinner.   This was our first time seeing their “new” house.  I saw “new” but they bought it months before we bought our “new” house and we have been here for over seven months already – and are still moving in, of course.   It is a really cute and it, what appears to be, a really neat neighbourhood.  They can walk to a lot of stuff from there is “downtown” Ambler.

Dominica and I were really starved.  Min had had breakfast and nothing else.  I had skipped all food for the day because I didn’t want to take the time away from getting my work completed.  

We went to a little Indian place not far from Jenn and Angelo’s house where we got some of the most delicious curry that we have ever had.  We were really excited to have a chance to get Indian cuisine as there is not any Indian anywhere near home that we have found yet and Dominica is really, really missing it.  It was so good that Dominica and I actually ordered another order of it so that we could take it home to have for another meal!

Liesl had a great time at dinner.  She was the hit of the restaurant and the owner and the waiter kept coming over to play with her.  She had a lot of fun.  She is, as always, our little social butterfly and is all about the attention.  She really wanted to try our food too but she just can’t handle solid food yet.

The food was so good that we ate ourselves sick.  We got back to the house and took Liesl and Oreo out for a walk around the block on which Jenn and Angelo live.  It was a pretty short walk but walking Oreo in the dark is nearly impossible as you have to carry a flashlight to have any chance at all of keeping him from just running into things.  It is very difficult.

We visited for another two hours or so and ended up leaving Ambler around ten thirty at night.  Dominica was completely exhausted and slept for a good portion of the drive home.  I was feeling a bit ill from lack of sleep and it was a very difficult drive especially as it started raining rather heavily.  Not a record breaking rain or anyting like that but a good, solid rain that makes it difficult to drive – especially in an all-wheel drive SUV which does not have good traction like a normal rear-wheel drive car.  It tends to slip much more often.

It was just a little after one when we pulled into Peekskill.  It was still raining so we were running to get everything into the house without getting all wet.  Then it was off to bed.  Probably were able to get into bed around two in the morning.  One of these days I will really get sleep but it is not going to be today.

Tomorrow we will be home all day.  I am working the Sunday shift but I do get to sleep in a little bit as the Sunday work is shifted later than the work during the rest of the week.

I was still pretty tired this morning when I got up at six thirty to cover the early shift at the office.  I am definitely glad to be sleeping in my own bed again but having a short night tonight is pretty rough.  I may have gotten five hours of sleep at best.  Liesl has been pretty restless the last several nights.  She is teething these days and she gets very upset if she loses her pacifier during the night so we have to work to keep that in.  So she manages to sleep through the night quite often even though we do not.

Work went okay today.  Busy but it is Friday so that is just how things are.  I was hoping that my new server, a Hewlett-Packard Proliant DL185 G5 would arrive today so that I could get started on testing it out and verifying that the hardware that I bought for it will really work.  Hopefully it will come on Monday.

The big exciting item of the day is Dominica’s new Amazon Kindle 2 electronic book reader which came late this afternoon.  Dominica has been looking forward to this for a long time and was really anxious for me to overnight it so that she would have it today.

As soon as the Kindle arrived Dominica had it unpacked and started downloading her novels.  She really likes reading books about the undead which I don’t understand at all but seems to be a general fad among younger readers of the last ten years.

Dominica ended up spending the entire evening reading her book.  She finished her first book around eleven in the evening and then bought another and stayed up until three in the morning reading it.  I went to bed at midnight but did not really fall asleep until Dominica came to bed at three. So much for going to bed early.  That was not as worthwhile as I would have expected.

The good news is that Dominica really, really loves her Kindle.  She is definitely going to get a lot of use out of it.

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. 🙁