May 12, 2009: Dad’s Then Out to Frankfort

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.

May 11, 2009: A Monday at Dad’s

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.

May 10, 2009: Dominica’s First Mother’s Day

Like most Sundays I am scheduled to work today.  I was really exhausted this morning because I really did not manage to get any sleep last night.  Dominica’s father was paged out during the night because the extreme winds caused a security alarm to go off at the center so he had to go there for an hour to deal with the alarms.  Oreo was interested in what was going on so he was awake for a while and I had to stay awake to watch him.  Now that he cannot see very well, or at all at night, I stay awake watching him to make sure that he does not hurt himself.  He will easily fall off of the bed and if he makes it out the bedroom door he can fall down the stairs.  So I was awake for much of the night.

For breakfast the family went out to Denny’s in Herkimer.  Dominica has been telling everyone about pancake puppies so we got everyone to go out to try them.

Today is Mother’s Day.  It is Dominica’s first Mother’s Day as a mother herself.  Liesl and I got her a card but, as always seems to happen, Dominica managed to see it yesterday because I didn’t have a good place to hide it and then today, because she had already seen it, I forgot to give it to her.

For mother’s day all of the kids went together with Dominica’s dad and got her mom a Kindle 2 from Amazon.  She was very excited and said that it was the best mother’s day present ever.

What is funny is that Liesl and I had decided that we were going to get Dominica a Kindle 2 for Mother’s Day as well.  We were not able to get it for her already because we are out of town and that would have most likely ended up in it being lost because we would have shipped it to the wrong place or something.  So it just has to wait until we are back in Peekskill and know that we will be around to receive it when it shows up.

I worked for the day as I am now on the Sunday shift.  It was a slow day at work.  Dominica and Liesl had a chance to hang out a really visit with everyone while I worked.

We had originally thought that we might try to make it to the Drive In in Perry tonight but had not really calculated just how late it would be when we got out to dad’s house.  There was no way for me to work a full day in Frankfort, drive to dad’s house and then go to the Silver Lake Drive In.  Not going to happen.

It was around six or six thirty when I wrapped up with work and we got on the road to drive out to dad’s place.  I can talked to Andy earlier in the day and he was spending the day visiting his family in Avon so he was going to come down to dad’s at nine or so because he had not had a chance to meet Liesl yet!

The drive out went well and we got to dad’s around twenty after nine in the evening.  Andy was already there and we all visited for several hours.  It was after midnight when Andy headed out to go home.  He and Liesl had a really good time hanging out together.  Andy held Liesl for an hour or two!  She is a very social little girl.

Andy also brought out an HP dx5150 desktop (Athlon64 3200+, 1GB, etc.) that dad is going to use as his new desktop replacing his old, Pentium 4 based HP d330 minitower that he has been using for years.  Maybe even for seven years.  It still works perfectly fine but just is not fast at all and only has 768MB of memory which is pretty crazy for a machine these days.  I find it rough trying to work with only 1GB when I get stuck with a machine with so little.  I am used to having 3GB on my desktop and I really would love to have more.  I plan to switch to 8GB when I get a 64bit Windows 7 system in a year.

So this desktop I will be rebuilding and getting ready for dad to use while I am in Peoria for the next few days.  Andy did the base Windows XP install so that we didn’t have to worry about that piece.  The dx5150 is going to go on dad’s desk and his old d330 is going to be moved to the basement to be his dedicated entertainment machine used for watching Amazon Unboxed and similar content on the basement television.

This week is going to be really tough for Sheep Guarding Llama.  Our schedule is completely packed and writing anything is going to be nearly impossible.

I worked tonight until one or two in the morning.  I don’t really remember exactly how late I was up.  Far too late.  That much I know.  Before going to bed I saw via Twitter that the Ralstons had left Virginia and were driving up to New York tonight and were expecting to be in Mount Morris before five in the morning.

May 9, 2009: Introducing Dr. Tocco

Never trust the anecdotal evidence of stability from a system administrator who’s company has not existed as long as you have maintained uptime.

I got up around seven thirty this morning and got right to work to get as much done as possible before we needed to leave to get out to Albany.  I worked for several hours until about eleven when I quickly got ready so that we could get on to the road.  It is roughly an hour drive from Frankfort to Albany.

Oreo stayed at the house with his Uncle Dexter.  The two Bostons will hopefully keep each other under control while we are gone.  This is going to be a very long day for Oreo.  He has been really nervous about being alone since losing most of his eyesight.  He has been walking into things in broad daylight now and he is visibly beginning to act differently – more nervous and hesitant – all of the time.

The weather was good for the drive out to Albany.  We were running forty-five minutes early as we approached downtown so we decided to stop in at the very final rest stop on I90 eastbound going into Albany to grab some quick McDonald’s so that we would not be starving through the ceremony.  Dominica and Liesl stayed in the car while I dashed in and out with our food.  That was a really good idea because it was a bit less than ten minutes total lost on the entire venture.  If we take Liesl in even the quickest trip has timed around forty minutes.

The Albany College of Pharmacy ceremony is at The Egg in the Empire Plaza in Albany.  I have been to The Egg as a child with my parents on a trip to Albany long ago but have not been, I do not believe, inside of it previously.  I vividly remember dad and I walked around The Egg on the top of the plaza and wondering what it was as it looks like a giant sculpture and not a convention center.

Parking at the Empire Plaza was a bit of a disaster.  The first underground lot was full and the second was closed.  We were in a panic and decided to go into the East Lot which states that it is permit parking only but appears to be open, free parking on the weekends.  No information posted anywhere so we were really just taking our chances.  The parking garage was almost completely deserted which was really confusing as the other parking areas downtown were completely full.

The downside to parking in the East Garage was that we were physically far below the Empire Plaza and with Liesl in her stroller we had to somehow get up to the plaza’s level.  The East Garage is not, at all, handicap accessible, and we had many flights of outdoor stairs that had to climbed with baby and stroller and paraphernalia to get to The Egg.  We tried several options before deciding that the best thing was for me to carry the stroller in front of me with Liesl intact and sprint up the long flights of stairs while Dominica carried the diaper bag and anything else that we thought might fall from the stroller as I ran.  It didn’t work as badly as it sounds and the parking garage turned out to be pretty close to where we wanted to go other than for all of the stairs.  At least the trip back will be easy.

We arrived at the perfect time.  It was easy to get to our seats and to get situated but we had to wait almost no time at all of the graduation ceremony to begin.

The graduation ceremony took about two hours.  Liesl did very well.  She was very sociable with everyone that she met.  She did get sleepy about an hour in so I took her out into the lobby area and danced around with her until she fell asleep.

After Joe and Brittany officially became Doctors of Pharmacy (PharmD) we did some quick pictures in the lobby of The Egg and then headed out for dinner.  Dominica and I had much better parking than everyone else and were out of there in minutes which was amazing.  The walk back to the parking garage was all downhill so this was much easier than it seemed.

For dinner the entire graduation group, fifteen of us, went to Buca di Beppo.  Dominica, Liesl and I arrived about an hour ahead of everyone else as they ran and got some quick pictures taken before heading to the restaurant.

While we were waiting at the restaurant a massive rain storm arrived and we had torrential downpour.  It was really something.  The heaviest rain that I have seen in years.  I took Liesl and we stood under the awning enjoying the rain.  It was so much rain that the parking lot filled up with water six to eight inches deep and a giant fifteen food wide whirlpool formed around the storm drain and was still going twenty minutes after the rain had subsided.  Quite an impressive rain.  Liesl and I really enjoyed it.  Dominica stayed in the waiting area.  She is not into rain like Liesl and I are.

Dinner ended up being awesome.  No wonder this is Joe’s favourite restaurant.  The place was loud and the eating is family style which I do not necessarily like but the food itself was truly amazing.  We definitely had the best fried calamari that I have ever had and the apple walnut gorganzola salad was really something too.  Because there were so many of us we were able to get many different items and got to sample a large amount of the menu.  The pesto cream salmon was quite excellent and reminiscent of many salmon dishes that we experience in Walt Disney World on a regular basis.  Dinner was also surprisingly affordable considering how many people were there.  The per person price was excellent.

After dinner Dominica and I headed back to Frankfort as quickly as possible so that Oreo would not be stuck alone.  Joe rode back with us so that he could check out the new X3.  This was his first time riding in it.

Oreo did really well for being home “alone” with Dexter all day.  We thought that he would have been in a panic and would have had an accident but he did not.  At least not as far as we know.

I went back to work and worked for several hours before going to bed.

May 8, 2009: Liesl’s First Thunderstorm

Is it telling that it is good when a doctor is accountable but bad when an accountant is doctoring?

The alarm went off super early this morning which did not make me happy.  I am on the early shift this morning after having worked until after one last night.  Hardly any sleep at all and today is a long day too.

I worked from six thirty until a little after nine.  Not too bad of a morning.  I love this shirt because it is slow and relaxing and that is exactly what I needed this morning.  It gave me a chance to catch up on a few things before we had to hit the road.  Like packing up all of the converted CDs and DVDs to take back to dad’s for storage so that we can take back another giant load with us.

We spent another hour, from nine till ten, packing the X3 as quickly as we could.  There was a lot to squeeze in there.  An HP DL380 G2 server, an HP dx5150 desktop, a bin of media, two suitcases, tons of baby and doggy supplies, a bit stroller and more.  We actually barely fit everything into the X3.  Good thing that we didn’t go for something smaller.  What would we do?

On the drive Dominica and I started listening to Garrison Keillor’s new book “Liberty” which is due out in paperback next month.

The weather was good for a long morning driving.  We were on the road around a quarter after ten or so.  We drove up to the traffic circle on the north side of Peekskill and swung into the Dunkin Donuts there to pick up coffee and breakfast and fuel up the SUV.  Then it was back onto the road.

Liesl was fussy so we stopped into a rest stop on I87 north on the south side of Albany.  I grabbed a small bite at the McDonald’s there.  Dominica was not hungry so she skipped eating to save room for dinner.  Liesl ate and was slightly happier when we left.  We lost forty minutes at the rest stop.

It was about a quarter after two when we rolled in to Frankfort.  I hopped right online and got back to work.  There is a ton to be done today and I am way behind from having been offline for so much of the day.  People were covering me but just catching up on email can be quite the challenge.

A big thunderstorm moved in this afternoon.  Liesl has never really been out in the rain so I took her out and held her standing on the porch so that she could watch the storm with me.  She seemed to enjoy it.  Every so often she would shake when some mist would blow in on her face.  She was not afraid of the thunder or lightning at all.

It was a very busy day for me.  I worked like crazy all afternoon and into the evening.  Because we are going to be gone tomorrow I have to do a lot of tomorrow’s work today which is tough.  So I worked until a quarter till ten this evening.  Then Dominica and I took a quick trip out to New Hartford to go to Barnes & Noble’s because I had forgotten to bring a book with me on the trip – along with other important things that I forgot.  So we picked up the “VMWare Certified Professional Exam Cram” and “History’s Worst Decisions – And the People Who Made Them”.  That way I will have something to read for the next several days while we are out of town.

Then we went to Walmart in the same parking lot to get baby formula and prune juice.  Nothing exciting.

We got back to the Dominica’s parents’ house and I got right back to work.  There was so much to do that I ended up working until around three in the morning.  How awful.  This is really exhausting.  At least I was able to get a lot of work accomplished today.  I will be mostly off tomorrow.  I still have to work all day on Sunday, however.  Then drive to dad’s house after work is done.