Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica and I were both completely exhausted after being up with the Ralstons so late last night.  I am sure that were not as tired as they are as they continue to drive south on i95 towards Florida.  We got periodic status updates from Danielle throughout the day as she has Twitter working from her cell phone now.

Dominica got up around five thirty this morning to take care of Liesl who was tired of this sleeping thing.  Dominica stayed up with her on and off until seven thirty or so.  Then Liesl slept for an hour then I got up and took care of her until ten thirty when Liesl was too demanding for me to be able to handle while working so I had to wake up Dominica and have her take over again.

Today was less busy than most days.  Very nice.  Needed that after getting so little sleep.  I had a lot of paperwork that had to be done today.  Sent out checks, filed for STARR exemption for our taxes, mailed out NetFlix – you know, the important stuff.

We needed to make a post office run so late this afternoon we bundled the family into the SUV (oh how I hate saying things like that) and drove out to Mohegan Lake and sent everything out from the Post Office there.  Then we went and got ice cream, as a special treat, from Cold Stone Creamery as we had gotten all excited to have been able to have gotten it last night and then failed to do so.  They had marshmallow ice cream which neither of us had had before.  I think that it must be a new flavour.  It was awesome.  We both got ice cream creations based on it.

Then we swung into Best Buy because we are in desperate need of a printer and felt that the deals there were pretty good for what we needed.  Dominica decided that she wanted to have a photo printer so that she could print photos of Liesl.  So we decided to get an all-in-one photo printer, scanner, copier and fax unit that is networkable with both wired and wireless connections.  We have to have a printer that connects that way or else it just does not work for us at all.  having to have the printer connected to a computer that is configured and turned on at all times is just too much for a constantly changing environment like ours.

After pouring over every Hewlett-Packard printer model that Best Buy had we finally settled on the C309 which we feel was a really good value and really had the features that we cared about included double-sided printing which is awesome.  We felt that the price that we got was qutie good as well – about $35 less than the HP website.  It is really nice to see network options being available on so many printers today.  Hooking printers directly to computers is very passe and not the most effectively way for most people to use them.  Having printers be their own, stand alone devices is much more useful in general.  This unit is supposed to do a really good job with photos as well.

We got back home and had a little adventure with our naughty dog.  It was the middle of the afternoon and no one was anywhere.  It is was really quite in our complex.  Just nothing going on.  So when Oreo almost jumped out of the car I just grabbed him and lifted him down and set him on the ground and then tried to hook up his leash.

Oreo decided to be naughty and bolted.  He wasn’t chasing in particular – just playing apparently.  We dodged left and right and crossed the road and took off running.  So I got to run down the street after him.  When I finally caught up to him he was definitely is a mischievous mood and had gotten the impression that we were playing a game.  He only stopped running when my voice definitely changed to him being “in big trouble.”

So we don’t get to even kind of let Oreo step outside the door now or anything.  Nothing at all.  Zero outdoor tolerance.  He was a very naughty dog.

Back to work for several more hours.  The weather is much nicer today.  Not so hot.  Just in the seventies.

Danielle posted to Twitter throughout the day so that everyone could keep tabs on their driving progress.  That is one of my favourite uses of the microblogging platforms – the ability to keep track of people when they are traveling, commuting, etc.  Everyone knows where you are when you are sitting at your desk working but when driving thousands of miles it is handy to know where people are and when and get basic information from the road.

They arrived at the Country Inn and Suites in Wilson, North Carolina somewhere around four this afternoon and then went to Cracker Barrel for dinner and back to the indoor pool to relax before turning in for some serious sleep.  They will be driving on to Miama, Florida tomorrow.  They did not get off to bed until almost nine tonight.

I’ve always wanted to go to Miami to see that city and now my car is going there but I am not.

This evening we were hanging out in the basement when Francesca called to have Dominica help her get set up with her new laptop which I am assuming just arrived today.  That ended up taking several hours and we forgot about getting dinner.  We had been thinking about going to Panera Bread for dinner and, at least, this kept us for splurging which we should not have done anyway.

We have two new DVDs that arrived yesterday from Amazon: Whisper of the Heart and Pom Poko. I have been excited to get to watch them and was hoping to be able to take some time off and watch one tonight.

I worked until very late.  Then Dominica and I watched Pom Poko or most of it.  It was pretty good but was so weird and slow and I was completely exhausted that I just was not, at all, able to follow along.  I ended up deciding to give up and to save it for tomorrow and went down to the basement to get some last minute work done so that we could go off to bed and it turned out that it was right at the end and Dominica finished it.  Oh well.  I will catch up at some point.

Off to bed around one thirty this morning.

Danielle did not think that it was funny when I mentioned that Rocky Mount, North Carolina is the exact spot where the Mazda PR5 – the one that they are driving right not – broke down on Dominica and I on our way north on i95 several years ago.  I believe that it may actually have been Wilson, NC where we broke down.

I woke up this morning to the phone ringing.  Dominica actually beat me to the phone.  It was Danielle calling to get some car info.  Their 1996 Buick Regal GS that they have been driving – they just bought it to get them through the month – completely died this weekend after returning home from our house several days ago.  First the transmission started to go and then the breaks ended up failing altogether.  It made for quite the adventure.

So yesterday Art and Danielle went and returned the car to the dealer and went to Enterprise Rent-A-Car and got a Mazda 6.  They have rented a Mazda 6 before when they drove to Florida a few years ago but this is a new style and is apparently less comfortable.  They need a car for the next month so they have to do something.  The rental is like $1,500 every two weeks which is a pretty tough monthly car payment to make (you can buy a bit of a car for $3,000 that only has to last a month!)

The Ralstons have to drive to Florida tonight, down to the Miami area.  A really serious hike indeed.  So instead of renting the car for the next few weeks or a month they are driving down to our place on the way to Florida and picking up the Mazda Protege5 and using it instead which will save a fortune.  They were originally going to leave for Florida pretty late today so they are now leaving as early as they can, which is still pretty late, to drive down to our place.

I spent the day working as usual.  Pretty busy as always.  The last few months have been really busy and there just is not any chance for me to relax.

This evening, Dominica and I decided that we needed a break and coffee and since it was so hot today, ninety-two degrees, we decided that iced coffee and ice cream would work for us.  We drove out to Mohegan Lake and went on a search for the Cold Stone Creamery there.

We never ended up finding the Cold Stone Creamery and finally reached them by phone just minutes after they had closed to discover that they were actually located inside of the movie theatre so there was no way that we were ever going to find them on our own.  What an obtuse location.

Instead we went to the combo Dunkin Donuts / Baskin Robbins in Mohegan Lake and got ice cream cones and gigantic iced coffees.  Big coffee so that we can stay up late.

I worked until a little after one in the morning when Art, Danielle and Michael arrived after having driven for several hours from Mt. Morris.  Our house is not exactly on the way towards Florida.  In fact it is almost completely not on the way to Florida.  It takes five and a half hours to get to our house and it only shaves about half an hour off of the trip to Florida.  So not completely out of the way but just about.

We visited for maybe forty-five minutes and then we transferred all of the stuff from the Mazda 6 to the PR5.  Then Art and I drove down to Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Mohegan Lake and dropped off the 6 and the keys.  We filled up the car, checked the tires and got back to the house pretty quickly.

They were back on the road at approximately three or three thirty.  Their plan is to drive on as far as they can before being too tired to continue.  Their hope is to possibly reach Georgia before stopping.  What a long drive.  I am so glad that I am not doing that drive.

I worked for another half an hour to an hour after they left getting all of my late night work wrapped up.  Then it was off to bed.

Actions speak louder than words and budgets speak louder than actions.

Another warm day today.  That is three really, really hot ones in a row.

Liesl got Dominica up at five thirty this morning and would not let her go back to sleep.  At seven thirty I got up and took care of Liesl for almost two hours so that Dominica could go back to sleep.  It was a busy morning but at least Liesl and I got some time to really hang out together.

Today is definitely not as hot has yesterday although it is pretty decently warm.  Surprisingly warm for April.

Dominica and Liesl hit the road to New Jersey at eleven this morning to go to their play date with Dunia and Landen.  Dominica was supposed to leave at ten thirty but didn’t look up how long that it would take for her to drive that far until a quarter till eleven and then Liesl wanted to eat and then spit up and needed to be changed.  Ah the life with a baby.

Oreo and I had the house to ourselves all day which equates to massive productivity.  My first task was plant maintenance.  I decided that some of the plants needed to move out to the deck as the weather is so nice now.  They don’t get nearly the light that they should inside the house and our living room has absolutely zero spare space so having the plants in there is a giant pain even after the palm trees died on us.

I got tons of work done today while I had the house to myself.  Oreo was very sad all day and spent a very large portion of the day just laying on the runner in the front hallway watching out the door waiting for Dominica to return.  It was very sad.

I worked all afternoon and around six started to worry about where Dominica was.  She had had me make her an appointment at the BMW dealer for mid-afternoon so I was assuming that she was eating lunch in New Jersey and leaving between one and two to drive up to Harriman to take the car in and that she would be home probably before four and if it was any later than she would have called.

I tried calling her and didn’t get any answer.  I knew that the person that she was meeting at the dealer normally only works until five so at six thirty I decided to call the car dealer to find out what time she had left there and found out that no one there knew anything about her having come in and that they were pretty sure that she had not.  So at this point I started to panic a bit.

Not having made it to the car dealer for a 3:00pm appointment implied that she could only have been last seen around 2:00pm in New Jersey and for all I knew she might have left long before that and been missing for as much as five hours or so.  She and Liesl both caught somewhere with a new car that we have not driven very much in 90 degree plus heat was the best case scenario that I could imagine.

I finally got her to pick up her cell and learned that she had just assumed that she could leave New Jersey sometime between seven and eight (she left at seven because I called but might have been much later otherwise) and that she could take the care in to the dealer between eight and nine at night for her “mid-afternoon” appointment even though the dealership isn’t even open then.  Basically she completely lost track of time and completely forgot that I was at home waiting for her as was the dealership.  Dominica likes to say that it is me who is unable to leave when we are hanging out with people but I think that the proof is in the pudding on this one.  Hopefully sending me into a panic today will make her think about not answering her phone or emails when she is away and checking in periodically rather than just assuming that if I haven’t managed to reach her somehow that I must not be trying.

So it was quite late by the time that she and Liesl got home (poor Oreo thought that he was abandoned) so we just ordered in dinner for Forno’s.  We love the food from there.  Especially an order of the fried calamari and an eggplant parm wedge edge. Yum!

We watched some Murder She Wrote this evening which we had stopped working because the episodes were having problem playing previously.  Now they are working quite well so we made it through at least two episodes tonight.  That was a nice change.

Dominica went to bed around midnight.  I went down to the basement and did some final emails and finished the installation of the second desktop that I am preparing for dad’s house.  It is amazing how long it takes to build a Windows desktop.  It is a full day project.  And I have it down to a science with a really well laid out script, good knowledge of the hardware, install CDs layed out and ready to go, all of those “tricky” drivers all together on a USB stick and even my common programs ready on the same stick.  The whole process is incredibly simple and straightforward and yet it still takes all day long.

Tomorrow morning Dominica is getting up first thing and going straight over to Orange County BMW to drop off the title to the 330 and to pick up our car manual (which we really need as this car is very confusing) as well as our spare key.  Liesl will go for the ride with Dominica and Oreo will stay home with me.

Today is my first day of taking the official Sunday shift (as opposed to just being paged out and getting stuck with it.)  I have been working every Sunday since mid-January so just being scheduled and knowing that I will be working on Sunday is, in a way, quite a bit nicer than being thrown into it each week at the last second when I had been planning on doing something else with that time.

I am working from my newly built Windows XP Pro workstation today and, so far, so good.  It has been pretty stable and the fresh install is most definitely a bit faster than the old one.  The newer, main hard drive may have a bit to do with the snappiness of the system although most likely it is just having the drive be mostly empty rather than mostly full and having everything be in fresh shape without a lot of kruft laying around the system.  The extra memory will help from time to time but not likely with my daily work.

I found out today that someone was shot in front of The Spot last night.  The Spot is the restaurant that opened up in downtown Newark just down the block from 1180 where Dominica and I lived for the last two years.  I used to walk Oreo by The Spot a few times per day and a few times he even got to go in there.  Apparently there was still blood on the sidewalk while people were in eating lunch today!

The sun is out in force today.  It is going to be a hot one.  While working in the basement this morning I discovered a garter snake sunning himself (or herself, I really don’t know) on the cement of our back porch which gets a fair amount of sun in the mornings.  He hung out for a good twenty minutes and I attempted to get some pictures.  We will see if they turned out or not when I finally get a chance to upload some of my pictures again.

It definitely got hot today.  Ninety degrees in the shade.  Ouch.  The house was way too warm all day.  It didn’t take too long before I was able to convince Dominica and Liesl that they should come down to the basement and hang out with me down here today.  The basement probably never climbed over eighty degrees while the rest of the house eventually got warmer than the outside.  It felt like an oven in the living room with all of its exposed windows.

Today Liesl discovered the world of evaporative cooling.  She was so warm that she was really unhappy today.  So, to cool her off, we took a wet wash cloth and moistened her skin with it.  She liked that.  I would then blow on her to make the moisture evaporate.  She would shiver and shake and laugh.  She loved it.  We did it over and over again.  Each time she would act so surprised.  She would be a perfect candidate for some commercial for minty fresh gum where she takes a bite and is surprised by the blast of cold or something like that.  It was so cute!  After a while she took the wash cloth from us and was rubbing it on herself.

I talked to Andy a little bit tonight.  Tonight is the official decommissioning of the Waste Watcher which he and I designed and developed back in March and April of 2000.  While we were talking about it I realized that he was bringing down the old application exactly nine years after we had first starting using it.  What an amazing thing that is.  We would never have guessed that that code that we were designing back then would continue to be used for an additional nine years.  We were thinking that it would have been completely replaced long before now.  There isn’t that much code in the world that actually manages to stay relevent and to be used, in production, for nine whole years and to have it keep working the whole time.  Not that there were not ever any changes but not too many that were actually significant changes but just a small amount of bug fixes and some feature additions – mostly around 2002, I believe.  There has been almost no change to the original code for the last several years.

Dominica and I watched some of the Gilmore Girls but as I had more work to do we could not watch very much.  She stayed in the basement and just watched stuff at her desk on her laptop while I worked.

Dominica ended up going to be probably around eleven or so.  I stayed up and worked until one or one thirty at the latest.  Oreo stayed down in the basement with me sleeping on the cinema seating.  It was quite cool in the basement and even in the living room but the upstairs was stifelingly warm.  It was probably still eighty degrees up there, even with every window open and the ceiling fan running.

Tomorrow Dominica and Liesl are driving down to Hasbruck, New Jersey to go on a play date with Dunia and Landen.  They are going to something like a mommy and me gym class.  I am not completely clear on the details.  They will be leaving mid-morning and will get lunch while they are out and will then go to Orange County BMW, which is pretty much on the way home, to drop off the title to the 330 while picking up our X3’s manual, spare key and getting the fog lamp replaced that Art and I noticed had burned out last week.

Oreo and I will just be staying home to get lots of work done which is good.  It has been such a crazy week that having just some simple, quiet time will be really good for me.

Today is a continuity of business test at the office which means a full day of work for me.  Not horrible, nail biting, never get a chance to take a breath, high stress work, but just sitting at the desk doing little things for different teams all day and never getting to go anywhere or do much of anything kind of work.

Originally I was going to get to sleep in a little bit this morning before the work started.  I ended up covering for someone who is out sick today and their team needed me to start work an hour earlier so I was up at eight and at my desk working first thing in the morning.  This has been an exceptionally exhausting week.

Around noonish Katie drove up to Peekskill to visit.  She and Dominica had a baking day planned for today.  I had been hoping to have been able to have hung out but, just like when Art and Danielle were here, there really was not very much spare time for me to be able to do anything.  It was very sad.

Dominica and Katie cooked up a bunch of cookies, meringues, biscotti and more – including Katie recently prize winning bread.  Katie also brought over an awesome bean salad and a surprise of veggie pate which is really delicious.  Katie was able to stay until around six or so.  Long enough to be able to have dinner and to watch a little of Coupling.

Today was an incredibly warm day.  It hit about eighty-eight degrees in the shade which is pretty warm.  We didn’t turn on the air conditioning today and the house ended up getting to around eighty-six or so.  It was a bit unbearable anywhere but the basement and even there it is in the low eighties and even there it wasn’t all that good.  This is the first really, truly hot day.  We pulled the screens out of the basement and put them in in the kitchen even though they are in bad shape because we just need the air flow.  We think that we might be able to put a screen into the front door and think that we might have found the screen that is meant for that hiding in the utility room.  Now if we can just figure out how to take the glass out.  Every bit of airflow makes a big difference around here.

I have been having some problems with my main Windows XP desktop.  I have had it for a while and it has been far too long since I have reinstalled Windows on it.  It has started to freeze on me and that just isn’t going to cut it so I decided that today had to be the rebuilding the desktop day for me.

I have been thinking about giving up my Linux desktop for a while.  Not that I don’t want a Linux desktop but my plan is to move to a Linux server that will provide awesome remote desktop experiences via the NX protocol which would eliminate the need to have a dedicated Linux desktop sitting on my desktop making noise, generating heat and using up valuable desk real estate.  Since I already have a Mac Mini G4 that I have had for years now and for which I have no possible use other than to make into a thin client I have decided to just make my Mac Mini into a thin client and make better use of the resources that I already own.  I need a desktop at dad’s house as I have a desk and monitor there but no computer so this will really work out perfectly.

The two desktops that I have currently (Linux and Windows) run on identical HP dx5150 SFF boxes which are nice, if not exactly new, 64bit single-core Athlon64 units that are rock solid and plenty fast for even pretty serious desktop users – as long as you are not trying to play modern video games.  Since they are identical chassises I cannabilized the existing Windows desktop for its gigantic (well, it used to be gigantic) 500GB second hard drive and took 1GB of its memory (two 512MB sticks – yes they really come that small.)  Then I set that machine aside as a backup in case the Windows install was to fail.

With the addition of new parts the old Linux box now has one 250GB hard drive and one 500GB hard drive, a total of 3GB of RAM, a single AMD Athlon64 3200+ processor and a Jaton Nvidia 8600 Low Profile GPU with dual DVI output via an octopus cable.  I also installed the firewire card that I recently purchased so that I could transfer videos of Liesl to the computer from the camcorder.  So while hardly a screaming new machine this is a pretty serious desktop unit once I put it all together.

The install of Windows XP went fine.  As with any install it took several hours by the time that I had the operating system installed, the latest updates applied and most of the applications that I use installed.  The install went smoothly and before long my dual-head Windows XP Pro SP3 workstation was back together and usable.

Now if time allows I will get the old Windows machine, the one that I have been using for Windows for the past several years, reinstalled with a fresh copy of Windows XP Pro and will be taking it to dad’s house next time that I go there to set up and use so that I don’t have to steal his desktop every time that I do something there.  That machine will be much more limited with only the on-board graphics card, only 1GB of RAM and two 80GB hard drives but for the type of use that it will get that is no big deal and I only have one monitor at dad’s house so that works out fine as well.

Work did not wrap up until around eleven this evening.  What a long day.  After work Dominica and I watched a little Hulu and decided to call it a night.  It is still really warm even long after the sun went down.  It is going to be a little hard to sleep tonight but we don’t want to start running the air conditioning if we can help it.