Sheep Guarding Llama

I ended up staying up last night after I said that I was heading off to bed.  Dominica was not ready to go to bed yet so we stayed up for another hour watching As Time Goes By before finally going to bed at midnight.  I did get a much better night’s sleep tonight than I did last night.  I feel a bit better this morning but still very tired.

My mornings seem to be the exceptionally busy time for me.  This morning was no exception (no exception to being exceptionally busy.)  I suppose having a situation in which you would need an exception not to be exceptional is oxymoronic.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous today.  The sun was out and it was in the mid-sixties here.  We had all of the windows open all day.  I even took the time to put the screen door in to the basement doorway so that there would be fresh air in the basement.  That was a great change.  So much less like a dungeon.  I felt almost a part of the outdoors.

Instead of taking time for lunch I watched Liesl and Oreo while Dominica went out to get her hair done down at the Beach Shopping Center.  That took about an hour and a half.  While she was out she stopped by the wine store there and grabbed a couple bottles of Australian wine and a bottle of sherry.  I have never really had sherry before and have been wanting to try it.  So she decided to pick some up and give it a go.

Dominica wasn’t feeling all that great today so she was not able to go out for our regular afternoon walk.  So Oreo and I went for it on our own.  Since she was not up to cooking we ordered in Italian for dinner.  It is a special treat.  Very much off of our diets.

While I was ordering the food tonight Dominica made some off the cuff remark about Liesl’s doctor’s appointment on Monday.  I said, “Wait, what day is her doctor’s appointment?”

Dominica’s face went blank and then, “Oh, crap.”  So much for our weekend plans.  Now, instead of driving out to dad’s house on Sunday afternoon to go get the cars we are going to drive back to Peekskill.  We are trying to figure out when we will be going to dad’s house.  Most likely something like Thursday night next week so that we can be there on Friday to deal with the cars.  We will try to get that all figured out over the weekend.

Wednesday I am hoping to be in Warren, New Jersey for an Oracle / BEA Weblogic presentation.  I don’t know yet that I can make it out there, but I should be able to.

This evening we watched As Time Goes By and I got a bit of time to play with Liesl.  She was awake longer and I had more free time than usual.  We have so much fun just hanging out together.  She gets so excited when I come up from the basement in the evening.

Dominica went to bed around eleven and I stayed up for just a little while longer setting up some work to run overnight down in the basement.  Gotta keep those processors hopping!

I got practically no sleep last night.  I went to bed just after ten thirty but really did not fall asleep until around three or so in the morning.  Dominica stayed up very, very late watching Good Neighbours on NetFlix OnDemand and I did not fall asleep until after she came to bed.  I don’t think that I actually fell asleep until after three in the morning and I only slept restlessly after that time.  I am guessing that I am pretty lucky if I got three hours of broken sleep throughout the night.  Today will likely be a long day.

I had originally hoped to have been able to have gotten up around six thirty this morning after going to bed so early last night but that did not pan out in the least!  It was more like eight when I finally got up and felt like crap.

My first order of business this morning was weighting in on the Wii Fit.  I was very excited because I have been really close to hitting my goal for the last week and I was feeling good about it this morning.  And this morning’s result was… down 3.7lbs from last weight in hitting my goal quite solidly.  I am now officially lighter than I was in 2007 at the end of the capital markets weight loss contest in which I came in second place after months of working as hard as I could to lose weight as quickly as possible.  I am now the lightest that I have been in many years and nearing the weight that I was when Dominica and I first met in 2001.  From my peak weight in October of last year I am now down 36 lbs.

The Wii Fit threw some confetti for me and let me set up my next goal.  Twenty-two more pounds in ninety days.  We will see how this goes.  This is going to be really, really hard.  I did twenty-two pounds in seventy days this last time.  I had only lost fourteen pounds before using the Wii to track the progress so this twenty-two pounds is going to be a lot more difficult.

Today was very busy and I barely had time to do anything today.  For the longest time I was just trying to deal with a backlog of requests.  They really come in early in the morning all at once.

I was so busy that I really did not get a chance for lunch today.  I came upstairs and ate with Dominica in the kitchen and then was right back to the office to continue working.  Not a lot of fun, but because I worked through lunch and got caught up with things we were able to take the “kids”, Liesl and Oreo, out for a nice, long walk a little bit later on.  It was a really nice day.  Warm but overcast.  These walks are really helping with the weight loss.  I have to keep doing them because the diet can only get me so far and I think that I have taken it about to its limit.  Luckily we are pretty hilly here so the walks are more strenuously than they might be.

Work was busy this afternoon but really did wrap up mostly by five and I was able to actually call it a day by six which seldom happens.  So I came upstairs and had dinner with Dominica.  We only had enough time all evening to watch a single, commercial-free episode of Babylon 5 together.  Neither of us have ever seen the show before and it is available on Hulu so we are checking it out.  Cheesy early 90s sci-fi but it looks to be about as good as Star Trek: The Next Generation so we will give it a try.

Liesl fell asleep in my arms tonight dancing around to Michael Buble.  She loves listening to light jazz and big band.  It is her favourite.  She falls right asleep.  She went up to bed around nine thirty or maybe ten tonight.  A better time for us.  That means that she will unlikely get up in the morning until almost eight!  Dominica is hopeful, anyway.

Dominica spent most of the evening on the phone and I went back down to the office to get more work done while she was not available to visit with me.  I was pretty tired after a long day and very little sleep so I decided to turn in to bed at eleven.

Tomorrow will be our last day at home for several days.  We will leave home on Friday and won’t be back home until Tuesday, most likely.  Monday night is the earliest possible and I don’t see that happening.  I haven’t even had a chance to talk to dad at all about our travel plans.  Hopefully he is reading SGL so that he at least has a heads up about it!

Liesl, as expected, got us up very early this morning.  I don’t even know what time it was when Dominica got up but it was way too early.  I was awake after a quarter till seven, though, that much I know.  I stayed in bed for a little while but Dominica was exhausted and Liesl was wide awake so I got up with Liesl and we went down to the living room and played for quite some time while Dominica slept in.

Liesl and I had a good time hanging out this morning.  Being up so early allowed me to get a jump on my work for the office as well.  Liesl and I played and talked and she had some of her learning time with her play mat that Dominica usually gets to do with her.

This morning, while in her jumper, Liesl looked at Oreo for the first time and reached out for him.  He was too far away but she is communicating to him that she wants him to come to her in the same way that she reaches out her arms to ask one of us to pick her up.

Dominica definitely appreciated getting the extra sleep.  She got up around nine or so.  I was pretty tired but thankful that I got a morning with my daughter.

This afternoon Liesl began making a new sound.  It is a little like a forced laugh.  From a distance it sounds like a loud giggle but it is a new vocalization that she has not been able to do before.  She did it all through the afternoon and evening.  I expect that her throat hurt by the end of the day.  It is very cute.  She was so excited to be able to show off to us.  She just kept doing it and doing it.  We were even able to get it on video for a little bit and were able to call Liesl’s grandparents so that they could hear here as well.

Dominica finally got a chance to do another one of her lessons in her UNIX SA class today.  We have been so busy recently that she just hasn’t been able to get very much done.

The weather was great today and we all managed to take a nice, long walk pretty early this morning.  The sun was out and it got up to around sixty today.  These walks are really helping with the diet.  Getting a chance to exercise is pretty tough but when it includes getting half an hour to talk to Dominica, taking Liesl out to get air and getting Oreo in his big walk it makes it a lot more possible.

I was pretty busy all day.  Got a lot of work done, though.

Our evening was spent with Dominica and Francesca on the phone planning stuff for Disney World.  I spent the evening trying to get to the bottom of the HP Integrity rx2600.  Boy that thing is complex and poorly documented.  Very frustrating.  It is an amazing piece of hardware but why HP doesn’t have a set of really simple, straightforward guides to it I will never know.  There must be a lot of people who have similar problems and just give up.

I have some theories on what needs to be done with the Integrity and I will document on SGL as I break down the barriers.  I think that the system uses more on the hard drives than I am used to having with Sparc and AMD64 systems.  I need more details as to how this all works under the hood to have some idea as to what is happening.  I know for certain that I am missing a cable that everyone seems to assume that I need so that could easily be the first step.  I hate systems that require special hardware for the most basic of functions.

Liesl fell asleep around eight and I tried to go to bed at ten thirty.  I wasn’t tired enough, though, and ended up not falling asleep for a long time.  Dominica didn’t go to bed until sometime after two in the morning because she was trying to watch all of the available episodes of BBC shows that have been available on NetFlix OnDemand that are going to go away tomorrow because they were just a special promotion or something.

We have a busy weekend coming up.  I am not sure of all of the details but we are going to leave Peekskill on Friday night to drive up to Frankfort because Dominica’s cousin Stephanie’s bridal shower is Saturday afternoon.  I have to work at seven in the morning on Saturday so we have to do the drive on Friday night.  There is no way to do it on Saturday.  So I will work all day Saturday and Dominica will go to the shower.  Then on Sunday afternoon we are having a big Palm Sunday dinner at Dominica’s grandfather’s house which is going to be a full “Thanksgiving” dinner because that was missed this year with everyone being in the hospital with Liesl being born.  This way Liesl gets to attend as well.

Then on Sunday afternoon, after we eat, the plan is to drive out to Pavilion to my dad’s house so that we can deal with picking up the BMW to use for the summer and to get the tires changed on the Mazda so that we are not driving on our snow tires in the good weather.  Then driving back to Peekskill on Tuesday or Wednesday.  It will give us a chance to grab two car loads of stuff while at dad’s as well.

The temperature really dropped last night.  The house was quite chilly when we got up this morning.  I heard some reports from back home that suggested that they may even have seen snow today.  Every time that I hear about snow back home I am reminded how wonderful it is living in the Hudson Valley.

Today was quite busy.  I worked steadily all day and really did not get a lot of time to spend with the family.  I didn’t get a chance to change out of my pajamas all day either.

I managed to find some of my old college roommates on FaceBook today.  I’ve been looking for my original GMI roommate, Jamie Quaderer, for more than a decade now and he finally has an FB account.  Of course, I get the impression that he does not check it very often so we will see how long before he adds me to his friends list.

I decided tonight that it was time to get to serious work on putting together SpiceCorp for New York City.  SpiceCorp is the SpiceWorks User Group.  I sent out emails and did online postings so that I could gather interest in getting people together sometime soon.  Hopefully we will see this go somewhere sometime soon.

Tonight we watched As Time Goes By, which as everyone should know is my all time favourite television show.  We did not get to watch very much of it though.

Between Dominica and I we were pretty much on the phone all day.  I was on all during the day itself and she was on almost all evening.  She and Francesca have been making plans for the big family Disney World trip that is happening the last week of November this year.

Dominica and I have decided, since money is tight and Liesl will not remember the trip, that we are going to stay with everyone at the All Star Music (or whatever it is called) resort.  We had been planning on staying at either Coronado Springs or Port Orleans French Quarter but decided that the cost savings were really worth it.  Not only is it cheaper but it will make things a lot easier for Dominica having the family there to help with Liesl since I will likely be working a good bit of the time that we are there.  We really can’t afford to have me taking extra time off from work.  At least we are going over Thanksgiving so that I have some holiday time to use while we are there.  So it isn’t as bad as it seems me needing to work.

The thing that I am most excited about on this trip is getting to eat at the newly re-menued Tusker House.  Dominica and I ate there before (in the Animal Kingdom) but it was a counter service restaurant back then and we had commented about how it did not feel like it should have been counter service and we thought that Disney should have done something nice with it instead.  Well, they have.  Now Tusker House is an exotic buffet style place with many flavours coming from the amazing restaurants that we love so much at the Animal Kingdom Lodge like Boma.  So we are definitely eating at the Tusker House and reviewing it for everyone.

Liesl, as I have mentioned, is going to bed earlier and earlier these days.  She was asleep around eight or eight thirty tonight.  She fell asleep in Dominica’s arms while she was talking on the phone.  So we are going to be woken up rather early tomorrow, I predict.

Dominica and I went to bed on the early side.  Before midnight at least.  Not exactly early but early for us.