Sheep Guarding Llama

The alarm went off at twenty after six.  Five hours of restless sleep at best for me.  I feel mostly like crap.  I brushed my teeth and then dragged myself down to the basement to be logged in and working by six thirty!  I can’t believe that I am working at six thirty on a Saturday morning.  And after working until the wee hours of the morning yesterday.

The Toccos are coming down to Peekskill today so in between things for work I needed to do some cleaning.  My initial office work wrapped up at ten but there was more to do after that that required some paperwork that I did not receive yesterday as planned.  I emailed several people hoping that someone would have it for me today.

My next task was to do some cleaning.  That lasted until around eleven thirty when the Toccos arrived.  Since Ramona was here last weekend until Monday we actually had the house in pretty good shape so it was not all that bad to make it presentable again.

Today I finally made the call that the second palm tree, the “healthy” one, was finally past the point of no return and had to be thrown out.  So I carried it out to the dumpster and tossed it.  The palm trees did very poorly in the move from Newark to Peekskill.  They were so large that they really got abused and once here they were competing for the little sunlight that we get which is practially nothing compared to how it was in Newark.  The cycas is doing quite well, the mandarin is hanging on, the tree in the nursery seems to be okay but I can’t be sure and the ivy is impossible to read.  All of the plants are hungering for sunlight but there is nothing that we can do about that.

Liesl was very excited to have her grandparents here visiting her. She was little miss social all day.  Oreo and Dexter were quite happy to have another Boston Terrier with which to play.  They get along so well – especially now that they are both getting older.  They are more snuggle oriented rather than play oriented these days.

Dominica’s parents brought along Dominica’s “new” cedar chest that came from her papa’s house.  It is a really nice, sturdy piece of modern furniture.  It is not what we were expecting at all.  It is actually a very normal piece of furniture that we plan to use in the main living area of the house – most likely as some combination of seating and storage.  It is very heavy-duty.  We had no idea what to expect but this is definitely a really nice piece of furniture that we are going to appreciate having around to be able to use.  We had not realized that this was a relatively new piece before.  We are always desperate for additional storage space so this will help a lot.

This afternoon we all went out for a nice walk as the weather is great.  The sun is out and it is in the fifties outside.  We made it up to the top of the first hill and we realized that Dexter had had all that he could handle as he was still on his drugs from the drive (he is terrified of traveling in the car and has to be drugged to keep him from getting too upset and having a heart attack.)  So we walked back to the house and dropped him off and then set out again which was great for Oreo as it gave him a longish normal walk before embarking on a really long walk.  What a happy dog he was.

So our real walk was the big look of Chapel Hill from our house, all the way around to the nature trail in the front of the complex and then the long way down by the back entrance and back to the house.  It is a nice, long walk without any backtracking and a good climb as well.  We all got some good exercise and Oreo had a wonderful time.  Liesl slept, of course.

For dinner this evening we went out to the New City Diner in Yorktown Heights.  Dinner was very good, as always.  Dominica and I decided to slurge on our diets and each got some dessert to take home for later.  We were not able to eat it with our meals as it was too much food all at once.

After dinner we came back to the house and everyone watched As Time Goes By.  Dominica’s parents have never seen the show so it was nice to have such a great, classic show to be able to introduce them to.

We all went to bed on the early side tonight.  We were really tired.

I got to sleep in a little late this morning because it was Friday and because I did not get paged out at all.

This morning was pretty busy but by lunch time I had enough of a break that I was able to come upstairs and actually hang out with Dominica and Liesl for a while.  Dominica had a chance to actually work on her class today.  She is almost done with her third course.  Just two more lessons left to go after today.

This afternoon my “new” Hewlett-Packard Integrity RX2600 server arrived that I won on eBay on Sunday.  It came in a very large box on a palette which is a bit of a problem because we now need to figure out how to get rid of the palette which is rather large and in the way.

The server is pretty awesome.  It looks like it is brand new.  Even with the cover off there is no real sign of dust.  It has dual Intel Itanium 2 1.5GHz processors with 6MB cache per processor and 10GB of RAM.  The server did not come with any hard drives so I had to order those separately today.  I ordered two HP/Seagate 72GB 15,000 RPM Ultra320 SCSI drives that I will install and use in a RAID 1 configuration.  This will be an extremely fast server once I have CentOS installed on it.  I am very excited to get to try it out.

I was able to get away from the office a little after Dominica had started to eat dinner so I mostly got to eat dinner with her tonight.  Our replacement BluRay for Don’t Mess with the Zohan came today so we were able to watch that.  It was a really dumb movie and yet entertaining.  There were some really funny parts as their often are in Adam Sandler movies.  We enjoyed it.

We needed something to watch since I could not go to bed as the work for the office was not yet done (again) so we looked through Dominica’s movie queue from NetFlix and found Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life which Dominica has never seen (or else it would not be in the queue.)  So we put that on and she tried her best to force herself to watch it even though it is completely not funny in the least.  What a horrible movie.

I spent the evening building a RHEL 5 Linux server on VMWare Server 2.0 to use as an OpenVPN server and a Nagios monitoring machine.  This is my first time installing either of these on Linux so I got to do some learning tonight which was nice.

I got stuck working on late hardware maintenance for the office until just after have past midnight.  I am really getting tired of all of this really late night Friday night work coupled with insanely early Saturday morning work.  I have to be working before seven in the morning tomorrow!  That is only six hours of sleep at best if I could fall asleep instantly once the work was done.  It is far too little sleep to be scheduling week after week.

It was a little after one when I finally got in to bed and I did not fall asleep for a while.  Tomorrow is going to be an exhausting day.  Alarm set for twenty after six in the morning.  Then deployments for my team in the Middle East.  Once those are done it is time to do some serious cleaning because Dominica’s parents are leaving Frankfort early in the morning as if they were going to work so that they can be down to Peekskill for the weekend to see Liesl.

Another long day in my week.  I spent a lot of the day on the phone again.  Nothing really happened to differentiate today from the rest of the week.  So I will keep this short.

Dominica went out grocery shopping this evening so I got some time at home with Liesl and Oreo.  That gave me a bit of a break.

This evening, while we watched Fawlty Towers, the BBC classic from the late 1970s with John Cleese and Connie Booth, I worked on doing a VMWare Server 1.0.8 to 2.0 “upgrade” on a Red Hat Linux 5.2 server.  That ended up going pretty well but taking me until around one thirty in the morning.

Working until two or so has become so much the norm that I really don’t think about it at all anymore.

This week has been so busy that I am having a really hard time keeping up.  I am pretty much working from morning until night and the days are just blending together.  I am having a really hard time remembering what I am doing each day.

Today was overcast and drizzly all day.  It did not get too cold even though it looked like it might.  It never dropped below forty.

It was another really busy day at the office.  I had to skip lunch almost entirely making it so that I really did not get a chance to see Dominica and Liesl all day.

Between this afternoon and this evening Dominica managed to squeeze in enough time to do three of her lessons for her UNIX Administration class.  She made really good progress and is about two-thirds of the way through her third class.  Her goal is to wrap up her currently class and to complete the next one by the end of the month so that she can complete her certificate program before we have to pay another lab fee.

We are thinking that she is very likely to attempt the Database Administrator program through the same school when she is done with her current program.  She is learning a lot and the way that the courses are laid out is keeping her motivated to keep learning.  It is really not too expensive considering how much she is getting out of the whole thing.

I tried to wrap up work early but had a few phone calls and more work that needed to be done.  I ended up being on the phone almost all evening and then, when I was finally trying to come up stairs to spent time with Dominica and Liesl, I got paged and had to go back to work.  Another extremely long day.

After I was completely done with work around eleven thirty we attempted to watch Don’t Mess with the Zohan on BluRay but got about half an hour into the show before we discovered that the disc was no good and would not play.  So we have to wait for another copy of it to come.

I’m sorry for the short updates this week.  I am doing what I can to keep up.

Today was a crazy, long day.  There is so much work going on that I am really getting backed up on work and with SGL.  Work has been really exceptionally busy this week and I am feeling pretty worn out.

This morning Dominica ran out to do some quick shopping and to mail a package and some letters that needed to go out.  So I watched Liesl and Oreo for a while.  Liesl was awake and we spent an hour or so playing together which was nice.  Normally only Dominica ever gets to play with Liesl in the mornings.

I worked like crazy all day and actually had to skip lunch because so much was going on.  It is looking like posting on SGL are going to be pretty lean this week.  I am doing what I can to stay on top of it but no matter what I do I am falling farther and farther behind.

I thought that I was going to be able to wrap up at a decent time tonight.  I came up and tried to have dinner with Dominica and was at least able to eat with her before having to return to work for the office.  Tonight she made this awesome pizza casserole thing for the first time that we both really liked.

I had to go back to work and did not get a chance to quite for the night until almost eleven thirty 🙁