Sheep Guarding Llama

I tried to sleep in late this morning so that I would have gobs of spare energy for my really long night tonight, but I got called out early and had to get out of bed to go support testing so that the developers could be ready for tonight.  It still was not a short night of sleep so it was fine.  Just not as much sleep as I had been hoping to have gotten.  Liesl got up early and was smacking my head for about half an hour before the phone rang so it wasn’t like I was not already awake.

In the middle of the night last night our shower curtain came crashing down in the bathroom attached to the master bedroom.  It started Liesl, Oreo and I awake but somehow Dominica slept through the whole thing.  That was rather surprising.

I got great news from some contacts at Hewlett-Packard today.  They are able to get me some demo software so that I can run HP-UX on my HP Integrity rx2600 server!  This is really awesome.  HP-UX is one of those operating systems that is nearly impossible to get direct experience on because it is so expensive both for the hardware and for the software.  I am very excited to be able to work on HP-UX on Integrity hardware.  I have an older version of HP-UX on a PA-RISC workstation but working on that is not the same as building my own server.

The rain came during the night and it is much colder today and very, very wet.  By the time that I got out of bed the heater had kicked on even though we had all of the upstairs windows open.  Oops.  So I shut some windows and turned the heater way down.

Today Liesl made her first investment into the stock market.  She has some money that she received from people when she was born and only so much of it was needed to buy her items that she was not given and what was left over we decided we would invest for her.  She obviously did not have enough to open her own brokerage account so she is just putting her money in with ours at the moment.  It is a start.  Hopefully someday this will turn in to something.  The market is perfect now for her to be investing so best to get it in as quickly as possible.

It rained pretty much all day getting colder all day.  I heard that back home people were seeing snow!  I am very thankful to be living in the Hudson Valley.  We really don’t get the snow here at all.

Liesl watched her very first cartoon today.  Disney’s Make Mine Music from 1946.  Quite the classic.  We figure that the early Disney movies that are all music are good ways to give her something to watch while getting her music for those times when she needs to be entertained because both Dominica and I have things that we have to be doing.

Today was a pretty tough day for all of the stuff that we needed to do because I was busy working and Dominica was doing her best to get to the packing so that we could leave as soon as I was done with work.

Oreo is loving the weather today.  I put his big pillow by the downstairs door and had the door open even though it was raining and cold.  He climbed right in and I covered him up in a big fleece blanket and he is as happy as can be.  All snugly in the thunderstorm.  He is only ten feet away from me.

I am concerned that the power is going to go off today.  That will be rather a significant problem.  What a pain that would be.

I did my best to rip tons of DVDs today so that they are ready for Handbrake to convert while we are out of town.  My plan is to let two of the computers run the entire time that we are gone doing nothing but video conversions.  We should make real progress since the computers won’t be busy doing a bunch of other tasks.  I want to get as many of these done as possible before we go to dad’s so that we can drop them off and pick up a new batch to work on.

I finally got a chance to take Oreo out for a walk a little before five.  We didn’t manage to get in a long walk but at least a little one.  He really appreciates our daily walks.  The goose that lives by the house has gotten to know him and they mess with each other every time that we go out.  The goose hisses at us constantly and definitely acts like it might take a run at us from time to time.

Tonight is one of the busiest nights ever.  I’ve been on conference calls for most of the evening.  I have a ton of tickets opened to the data center that need to be worked on tonight.  Tonight is a very busy night from a deployment perspective in addition to everything else that we have to do.

The plan is to wrap up the deployments and then prepare the hardware work for the datacenter so that they can work on that while I am on the road.  Once I get all of that stuff done then Dominica and I can load the car.  Hopefully we will have eaten dinner before then.  The plan was to have dinner while I was still at my desk doing deployments.

It is almost impossible that we will be able to leave before seven.  I won’t be surprised if we are not able to leave before eight.  There is just so much to do before leaving home.

The drive will take three to four hours depending on how the weather holds.  We are driving up to Frankfort tonight.  So we are trying as hard as we can to be able to get there by eleven tonight.

Once we arrive in Frankfort I have to log back in and get back to work doing the checkouts of the hardware maintenance being done tonight.  Because there is so much being done it could easily cause us to get pushed well past midnight.  I am going to be so tired by the time that we are done.

So the expectation is that we will get to go to bed between one and two in the morning.  Then my alarm is going to go off at a quarter till seven in the morning because I have to log back in to the office and get to work support Bahrain.  Tomorrow is a really big release day for them so it is going to be a very long morning.

Once the morning work wraps up I have my regular Saturday work to do.  So my plan is that I will be working from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon at a minimum.  That might as well be a full day.  I am going to be so tired.

We are coming back to Peekskill after Palm Sunday dinner.  If all goes well we will be leaving Frankfort around five in the afternoon on Sunday.

I am working with a new DVD tool called DVDFab that Andy turned me on to.  So far it is working really, really well.  It is working for a lot of media that DVD Decrypter was not able to handle.  I have a lot of testing left to do but so far I am pretty encouraged.  I will have a better idea of how it is working after we let these two workstations run for sixty-two hours on their own.

I am posting really early tonight as I am going to be way too busy once work is done to be able to post without interrupting other things.  So I am posting at around six thirty.  My deployments appear to be completed and I am about to do the final prep work so that we can hit the road.

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.