April 22, 2009: The Ralstons’ Final Visit to Peekskill

Today the Ralstons are coming from back home down to visit us for the last time before they hope to be going to Impfondo, Republic of the Congo.  They are hoping to leave in late May so the next several seeks entails them running from one state to another trying to visit everyone that they should be seeing before, very likely, leaving the United States forever – or nearly forever.

The Ralstons still need funds to support them while they are in the Congo working at Pioneer Christian Hospital.  If anyone is able to help support them it would be really wonderful.  As it is they are going over there without enough current support to allow them to stay.  So their hope is that they will be able to raise additional support while they are there.  If they do not their will have to leave the hospital to come back to the United States in order to raise additional support.

The plan was to do as much house cleaning this morning as possible.  Work was so busy that I was never able to even think about doing any cleaning around the house.  Dominica did was she could during the day.  There was a lot of the house that we just did not get enough time to clean by the time that the Ralstons arrived.

Art and Danielle arrived in the late afternoon.  Luckily my morning had been really busy but things were not quite so bad in the late afternoon so we did get to visit some.

One of the very first things that happened after they arrived was that Art was eating some Cadbury’s candy coated mini eggs and he broke a tooth.  Split a tooth pretty much in half.  Fortunately it was not painful and he did not have to go see a dentist about it right away.

Once my work was finally done we all drove out to the New City Diner to get our dinner.  It was rather late when we finally got out there.  Almost eight, I believe.  The dinner crowd had already gone and the people were dwindling.  Dominica got her traditional Veggie Cat Burger (veggie burger with a hash brown, fried eggplant and tons of veggies – extremely delicious.)  She gets that every time that we go there because we do not go out to eat often enough for her not to be craving it.  I got the BBQ veggie burger which I often get.  Danielle got an apple walnut salad and Art got the Philly cheesesteak which we are pretty sure that he got the last time that they were down visiting us in Peekskill.

Since we are obviously already cheating on our diets and are going to be for the next few days Dominica and I went ahead and got awesome desserts because their pasteries there are really something.

We didn’t stay up all that late tonight which was good because I was very tired.  I have gotten almost no sleep all week and it is really wearing on me.  I have a really busy work weekend too so I will not have much of a chance to catch up on any sleep over the weekend either.  In addition to working this weekend, Katie is coming over on Saturday afternoon to visit for a little while.

April 21, 2009: Driving to Connecticut

Not much sleep for me last night.  It was four thirty when I finally went up to go to bed and it was definitely after five when I finally got off to sleep.  There were a few interruptions during the night as well and I was up by eight thirty this morning.  So two to three hours or real sleep in my estimation.

Work was incredibly busy today.  My whole morning was just a matter of running from one task to another as quickly as I could.  Very overwhelming.  I was completely exhausted by lunch time.  Of course, I didn’t get to take my lunch because I was so busy.

I worked through lunch and had a rather busy afternoon as well.  So much work coming in that I was really “task thrashing” as I like to call it.  Constantly context switching and never able to get enough time to just focus on a single task that I spent all of the time doing the task switching rather than being productive at all.

I found out today that we have decided to give up my office on Wall Street and that I am getting a physical company phone delivered to my house so that I will be able to work from home without needing to really think about needing to go to the office or dealing with phone problems because people are calling the office when I am home and vice versa.  That is going to make life a lot easier in the long run.

My connection to the office died today right at five.  I spent half an hour attempting to get reconnected but finally abandoned the idea as a complete waste of time.  Dominica wanted to go for a drive in the new car so we just grabbed the children and headed out the door to the new X3.

We decided to drive up to Washington, Connecticut which is famous as being the town that inspired Stars Hollow, CT in the television show The GIlmore Girls. Dominica has been watching that a lot recently and it was pretty close so it seemed like it would be a nice drive to take.  Dominica has never been to Connecticut at all and I only ever have been once way back when Andy and I drove from Rochester, New York to Rye Harbor, New Hampshire to get food one day.  That was probably in 1999 and I would have only seen Connecticut late at night.

The drive really is not far.  Only about an hour.  Dominica spent quite a bit of time playing with the in-dash navigation system trying to determine how it works.  Once we figured it out it really is easy compared to the touch screen of the Garmin.

The drive went well.  Washington is a really cute little down.  We ended up driving around on the outskirts going down some really tiny one lane roads and seeing some amazing houses.  A rather interesting place to be sure.

We had been hoping to have gotten food in Washington but did not stumble on any place to eat except one which was too fancy for how we were dressed.  So we drove out of town and ended up eating at a Denny’s in Danbury because it was all that we could find easily.

We tried their new pancake puppies.  Oh wow are those every good!  Those are going to be very dangerous indeed.  Everyone should go try them.

It was around ten, I think, when we got back to Peekskill.  Liesl was asleep for the entire trip.  She slept around eighteen hours today!  We are sure that today is one of her big growth spurts.  She will be an inch taller tomorrow.  It is so funny how she just sleeps and sleeps while she is busy growing.

Andy called just after we got home and he and I ended up talking until around one thirty in the morning!  Then I had to get to the work that I needed to do all day anyway.  So I started working and ended up not finishing up until five in the morning!  I am going to be so exhausted tomorrow.  There just is not enough time in the day to do everything that needs to be done.

The Ralstons are coming down to Peekskill tomorrow.  They are leaving sometime in the morning and I believe that they are coming by motorcycle.  Not sure exactly when they are leaving.

April 20, 2009: New Car

I slept in a bit too much this morning.  I was really exhausted from staying up so late last night.  I woke up to the phone ringing.  It was our salesperson from Orange County BMW calling to schedule our pickup of the new car.  We decided to try to do it over lunch so that it would have minimal impact on our day.  This did not turn out to be the case but that was the plan.  So we arranged to pick it up at one this afternoon.

The weather really turned on us.  It is much colder today.  We had temperatures around eighty two days ago and sixty yesterday and today we are around forty degrees!  Ugh.

I got to work and ended up having a crazy morning.  I worked as quickly as I could trying to get everything that I could possibly get done completed before we needed to leave to deal with the car.  It was all that I could do just to keep up.  What a busy morning.

Our insurance company called to walk me through the insurance changes today because of the new car.  Because of the changes to our insurance (changing our commuting parameters, switching from a sport convertible to the SUV, etc.) our insurance is dropping a bit.  I love my insurance company (BMW/Liberty Mutual.)  They really treat us great.  Our prices are amazing and the service is wonderful.  They are very friendly and easy to deal with for everything.  We are saving around $30/month because of the changes.  Every little bit helps.

I didn’t get a chance to even attempt a shower until a quarter after noon – just barely before we were supposed to be running out of the door.  What a busy day.

We got on the road just in time.  It was raining by the time that we left and very cold.  By the time that we got to Harriman, New York we were getting hail!  Talk about a change in the weather.

The process at OC BMW took a bit longer than we had expected but they were able to switch our plates and take care of some stuff for us that they had originally thought that they would not be able to do so it ended up working out well.

Our financing did not go as well as we had planned.  We ended up owing more money on the 330 than we had thought that we owed which made things difficult.  So we had to do some fancy financing tricks to make the X3 a reality today.  It worked out okay, though.  We had to put more money down than we had planned but nothing crazy and we had to do some maneuvering with the dealership between the price and finance rate (we ended up taking a cut on the price while paying more in interest) but in the end I think that it worked out well and may actually be advantageous to us in the long run if we manage the finances on the car well for the next two years.  At the end of the day I was pretty happy with how the financial turned out.  Since we are doing our car financing through BMW Financial we also qualified for BMW Visa cards which will give us credits towards our next BMW purchase so we are totally going to take advantage of that!

Speaking of financials, while we were waiting at the car dealer I saw the news that Oracle had agreed to purchased Sun Microsystems.  Overall I am not completely sure how to take the news but I think, most likely, that it is pretty good news.  Far better than IBM buying Sun.  Oracle and Sun seem to be more in tune with one another and it doesn’t eliminate one of the big server players.  Having only three seemed like a bad idea.  I can live with four.  But Sun plays an important role in market diversification.  The only concerns now are the long term plans that Oracle may have for some of Sun’s software intellectual property like MySQL, Java and Solaris.  It will be important to watch that space to see what Oracle decides to do in the years to come.

After completing everything with the car we were really starving so we drove down to Cosimo’s and got lunch.  Their gorgonzola cheese melted over waffle fries is one of the best things ever.  We just love it.

The drive home was our first long drive with the new X3.  It did pretty well.  I can see that it will be pretty comfortable for long family trips.  We are kicking around the idea of going to Annapolis and/or Bar Harbor pretty soon and we would need the X3 for a trip of a length like that.

Highlights of the new X3 include much lower car payments (almost $200 less per month!), heated seats front and back, tons of storage space, built-in navigation system, Bluetooth integration so that we can just talk to the car and it communicates through our mobile phones, front to rear moonroof so the entire sky is visible, etc.  So far we are pretty happy with the purchase.  Something had to be done and this really seemed to be the economical, utilitarian solution that met our needs and saved us money while remaining safe and convenient.  Dominica has wanted an X3 for a while so she is definitely thrilled.

Once we got back home it was back to work for me.  Way too much work that needs catching up.  Today turned out to be a pretty rough day to be physically out of the office for most of the day.  But dealing with the car was not something that should wait and now it is all set.  All we have to do yet is to have the insurance photos taken and that can be down right downtown so it is no big deal at all.  Will probably have Dominica run out and do that tomorrow.

I worked for the office until quite late and then it was time to get down to some writing that I have been getting behind on and desperately need to get caught up.  Liesl fell asleep really early, around six thirty, and because we had such a big and unhealthy lunch I skipped dinner completely.  So my entire evening was dedicated to getting work done as much as possible.

I got my first article for the day completed around a quarter after ten this evening.  You can check out my article on Microblogging for Business on SMBITJournal.

It really rained today.  Hours of pouring rain.  We got some pretty good thunder in there as well.  I had been hoping to be able to take a nice, long walk tonight since I didn’t get to take one earlier today but the rain really put a damper on that idea.  The rain was far too heavy to allow for walking outside.

I ended up working late.  Very late.  It was four thirty by the time that I finally managed to get off to bed.  It was good that I stayed up, though, because I was able to get a lot of work done and I feel that it was very valuable.  Tomorrow is going to be a rough day.

April 19, 2009: Watching The Gilmore Girls

The weather turned much colder today.  We had the windows open all night and woke up to it being rather chilly compared to what we have gotten used to in the last four months since Liesl was born.  It made Oreo very snugly.

I got up at eight thirty this morning.  Way earlier than I wanted to be up but I am working today so it had to happen.  I don’t expect today to be an exceptionally busy day or anything.  I am just covering in case anything goes wrong because our recent patching processes have been introducing a lot of problems that show up on Sundays.

There was more work to do today than I had thought.  I wouldn’t call it a busy day but when you take into account how backed up I have been all week there was more than enough stuff to keep me busy all day.  I needed to get at least one new server built for a team this weekend so I did that today while I had some quiet time.

Dominica did another class in her Linux Administration course and then set about cleaning the living room as much as she could.  We have several bins in the living room of kitchen supplies that have recently come from dad’s house that need to be gone through, sorted and organized.

In the process of unbinning the stuff from dad’s we discovered just how many wine glasses and hor d’oeuvre plates and coffee mugs (beakers) that we own.  A lot.  Some is going to have to go into the attic for storage.  We just can’t use this many.  We are going to buy a wine glass holder rack thing to go over the buffet that we have not purchased yet so that there is a place for them.

At five thirty I finally got a chance to get away from work and to go out for a walk with the family.  We took a really long walk today.  We walked more than two and a half miles – possibly even three miles.  We are hoping to work up, soon, to walking downtown or to the Beach Shopping Center.  Meaningful trips that replace driving that we already do.

After the walk I worked a little more but not too much.  Then I came up to the living room and spent the evening hanging out with the family.  We watched a ton of the Gilmore Girls and Dominica and I ended up staying up until two in the morning watching it.  I had some work that I needed to do so I was working from my laptop in the living room part of the time.

Tomorrow we have to arrange getting the new car from the dealing and saying goodbye to our current car.  The BMW 330 was the first car that Dominica and I really bought together.  The two PR5s were purchased when we were first dating.  The Mazda 6 was my car just a little before we were married.  The RX7 I already owned when I took Dominica in it for our first date.  So the BMW 330 was the first time that we went and bought a car together.

April 18, 2009: Long Walk in the Warm Spring Sun

It is Saturday and, as usual, that means that I am up at seven thirty so that I can be logged in and sitting at my desk by eight when my work day begins.

The weather is absolutely gorgeous today.  Sping is totally here and winter does not appear to be even considering making a comeback of any sort.  The sun is bright and the temperatuers are soaring.  It almost hit eighty degrees in the lower Hudson Valley today!  I wish that we had some sort of spare time at all we might have taken the BMW convertible out for a final, long drive, but I had to work and there was no point of the day when I could really get away.

We did, at least, open all of the windows in the house and get fresh air into all of the nooks and crannies.  The house got up to seventy five degrees or so.  Pretty warm for us.  We are really noticing that problems caused by our lack of screens.  The screens that we had in the kitchen windows were shot and so we pulled them out because they block some of the light in the winter but now that we would like additional airflow we are missing them.  We would really love to have a screen door at the front door as well but have no idea how we would go about doing that.  We have very limited opportunities to get air to move through the house and don’t want to miss taking advantage of any of them.

This morning I finished converting all of the CDs that came in the last load from dad’s house.  That was a ton of stuff.  It had to be over one hundred CDs.  Dominica couldn’t believe that they were all done already.

Dad left this morning to drive out to Alliance, Ohio to visit the family for the weekend.  He is planning on driving back home on Monday.

I ended up working a full day today.  I wasn’t able to leave the desk until around four this afternoon.  A rather long day for a Saturday.  That seems to be becoming the norm.  Starting an hour early and only working for eight hours makes it feel like a rather short day, though, considering my normal days start around nine and go for eleven or twelve hours.  Getting done at four leaves a lot of time to do other things.

Dominica, Liesl, Oreo and I took a nice, long walk as soon as I was able to get away from the office.  We walked through parts of the Chapel Hill complex that we have never been to previously.  We went all of the way up the hill past the condos and the Lifestyle Center through the housing area at the top of the hill all of the way to the Wood III complex that we touch up there.  We verified that you cannot drive through with a car but that walking or bicycling through is no problem at all.

I measured our walk with Google Maps and am putting the distance at just under two miles on foot.  It is hard to measure exactly because a lot of the trip is on the Nature Trails in the complex and Google won’t measure that for you.  Or if it can I don’t know how to do that.  Two miles means that for the same amount of walking we could have made it downtown, all the way to Main Street, had coffee and walked a third of the way back.  Not too shabby.  The walk was roughly the same distance necessary to make it to the Peekskill Train Station down on the river.  Even closer than walking downtown, I think, is walking to the Beach Shopping Center.  Now that the weather is getting nice there are a number of places to consider walking.  That is something that I really miss from Geneseo – being able to walk to the all night Walmart, Wegmans, Tim Horton’s and Denny’s.  Nothing like that here except for Stop and Shop, as far as I know.

SGL had two outages today.  We have yet to determine what happened.  It appears to have been a power issue but we are not really sure.  The first one happened around a quarter after seven this morning while I was still asleep.  In that case everything came back on on its own and things were fine.  The second happened this evening, after we returned from our walk, around four thirty or so.

I ended up having to spend a bit of time on the phone with the datacenter looking into what was going on and trying to figure out how to fix it and how to prevent it.  We were offline for almost three hours while we worked on getting the machine back online.  Just what I needed tonight.  So much for relaxing.

After the server came back up and everything checked out I went up to the living room and spent a few hours playing with Liesl while Dominica watched The Gilmore Girls.  Liesl went to bed around ten.  I went to bed at midnight.  Dominica and Oreo came to bed around one or two in the morning.  I’m not sure when because I was already asleep.

Tomorrow I am working all day.  I am covering for the team tomorrow so I will be at my desk for much of the day.

Sorry for all of the short SGL updates recently.  Easter really messed with my writing schedule and put me way behind.  I was doing well catching up on them today but then lost three hours because the server was down.  Hopefully by tomorrow I will be back to writing stuff “as it happens” rather than playing catchup and trying to remember what was going on when.