Sheep Guarding Llama

It’s Friday.  Oh is it every Friday.

The weather is great today.  Heavily overcast but warm.  Temperatures in mid-fifties for a change.  Very nice.

I was dreading weighing in this morning on the Wii after this week.  I avoided weighing in for several days because of the bad eating habits around my birthday.  I wanted to give the cupcakes and wine time to wear off although for a late night snack last night I treated myself to two bagels with lox and cream cheese which I thought was going to be a killer this morning.  But, fortunately, the week of bad eating only retarded my weight loss and did not actually stop it.  So my weigh in this morning had me, just barely, at a new low weight since having started the diet several weeks ago.

Today was incredibly busy.  No one big item, again just like it has been all week, just a ton of little things that just keep going on and driving me crazy.  I am quite looking forward to the weekend.

I was on the phone for the bulk of the day.  The phone just rang and rang all day.  I was really tired of talking on the phone by the time that the end of the day rolled around.

Lunch was quite short and late today.  I didn’t get a chance to pull myself away to go to lunch until about twenty after one and then I was back at my desk at a quarter until two and I took Oreo on his walk in between.  So you can extrapolate how short my time to eat and relax was.

At four Dominica took Oreo to the Peekskill Animal Hospital for a well visit.  The only time that Oreo has been to his vet here in Peekskill was when he was very sick and his doctor has never seen him when he was healthy, happy and perky so we wanted him to get to see him and start to acculumate good baseline data from which to judge future issues.  He was very happy to see Oreo doing so well and now has a much better impression of what he is like and feels that he is much younger than he thought in his initial assessment.

Oreo’s eyesight is also better than we had been worried that it was.  He definitely had cataracts but they are not advancing like we were worried that they may be.  So everything is okay there.  Surgery likely in a few years but not anytime soon unless something happens to dramatically change the situation.

The stock market took another massive beating in the US and European markets again today.  The S&P 500 is at its twelve year low today.  Ouch.  Two big factors hitting us today.  The first is that the US government has bought a thirty-six percent stake in Citi which seriously diluted the investors’ shares and the price of Citi stock came tumbling down ending around $1.46.  To put that into perspective the stock price was $40 in 1977 and was in the high thirties in 2006!  It is practically worthless today sending everyone into a panic about bank nationalization.

The other big factor is a new report released detailing the collapse of the European economy painting an extremely dark picture for them.  In the US our big concern is our recent slip from a dragging economic slowdown into recession but in much of Europe their concern is leaving recession behind as they sink into a full-fledged depression.  Things could get quite bad before we see things getting better.

It’s hard not to be depressed in an economy like this when you are constantly being bombarded with one item of bad news after another and when you see the value of your investments and retirement plans reduced to almost nothing.  I know that, in reality, the economic climate today is very good for us in the long run because of the ages that Dominica and I are now but the general depression going on is very overwhelming.  I am glad that I don’t see people on a daily basis who are complaining, or worse yet panicking, about the financial condition of the country or it would be really hard.

I am always torn between feeling bad because our bank accounts are dwindling and being excited because our long-term financial prospects keep improving.  If I step back and look at the big picture this is all great for us, but when you are too close to the situation it can be tough.  So many people with their crazy theories about how this recession is, for some crazy reason, so much different than any other as if we aren’t on a normal cycle and as if this was not expected.

Work for the office wrapped up at a surprisingly good time today considering how busy I was all day long.  I thought that I was going to have to do a lot of work tonight but it was not all that bad.  Tomorrow morning I have to work again as I normally do but because the work for tomorrow is pretty light and because the team in Bahrain are now able to work from home we are able to have some additional flexibility in the schedule so we are not starting until nine in the morning rather than the usual eight or earlier.

Around eight I was able to finally get away from the office for a little while but not entirely.  I worked relatively steadily until around ten thirty.  Then I was able to go upstairs and spend several hours with Dominica watching the British series MI-5 from 2002 and 2003.  I came in just as Dominica was watching the last episode of the first season of the show.  So I got to see the cliffhanger and the first bit of the second season.  Not a bad show.

I was hoping to have been able to have gone to bed at a reasonable time tonight, but I should know better than to even think that that might happen on a Friday night.  I was working with the datacenters tonight to do some server hardware maintenance work.  The work stated at eight which forces it to go pretty late and, as usually happens, it overlaps with a shift change at the datacenter making things go even later as projects get handed off from one team to another.

So at two in the morning I ended up having to do checkouts when I had deemed that it was so late that things really could not wait any longer.  These servers absolutely have to be up and running long before morning and two in the morning here is seven in the morning in London so we are already pushing the time envelope.

So I did not get a chance to get to go to bed until around two thirty in the morning.  Saturdays are actually one of my most exhausting days because Friday nights are my latest night working and Saturday mornings I normally have to get up extra early or, in the case, at least only at a normal work day time.

While I was stuck being up so late I took the opportunity to finally do some documentation work that needed my attention during the day but had gotten skipped because I was so busy.

Tomorrow we are hoping that at some point, probably around late morning, that Dominica will get a little bit of free time to make a run to A.C. Moore or Michael’s, whichever it is that we have around here, to do some shopping.  We need some paint and other modeling supplies and she is anxious to be able to get started on the buildings that we have for our model railroad.  We also need to make a trip to Home Depot to get a 3’x6′ cut of plywood on which to put the layout so that it is sturdy enough to be moved around.

This week seems to have just blended together into one long day.  I’m not even sure why.  Some combination of being busy but without having anything particularly disasterous or exciting happening.  I keep doing the work but nothing big happens to make me remember one day from another.  Strangely, even with my birthday being yesterday, I can barely remember the days.

Oreo is very noticeably losing his eyesight these days.  We knew from his last vet visit that he is developing cataracts but they thought that they were really minor and probably would not impact him for a long time yet.  We have been noticing that in low light conditions that Oreo is really missing a lot.  We are very concerned that he is losing his eyesight very quickly.  If it is cataracts then we will probably need him to have surgery rather soon.  He needs to visit the vet again and get checked out again.  Hopefully it is nothing more than low light issues.

Today was another rather busy work day.  I barely got any break at all.  The last few days have involved a lot of long telephone conference calls.  It has been rather boring.  I got a lot of work done today, though, which is good.

Nothing eventful happened all day. After work was over we just relaxed and watched Murder She Wrote while I worked from my laptop.  At the very least I managed to get caught up with SGL today so that tomorrow I will be back to writing “as it happens.”

Liesl has really been growing.  Since we changed our feeding patterns for Liesl she has visibly started growing faster.  She is doing really well.  She started laughing at us this past weekend and now she is a happy, laughing girl all of the time.  She is sleeping more and is upset far less than she has been recently since changing how she eats.

Dominica got up early this morning and went to Shop Rite to do some birthday grocery shopping before I got up.  I did not sleep as late as she had thought and I was awake when she returned home so she was unable to surprise me with breakfast in bed.

Dominica picked up cupcakes for my birthday.  We did not want to get a full cake as it would just encourage us to eat too much.  The shop did not have the right cupcakes so Dominica had them make some special ones just for me.

Dominica cooked my favourite breakfast, Egg Beaters on wheat toast with veggie cheese (a soy product, not a dairy one) with maple syrup flavoured veggie sausage.

I did not get very much time to spend with Dominica and Liesl today for my birthday.  Work was quite busy and I was stuck in the basement all day and only barely had any time to come up for lunch.

I never came up with what I wanted for my birthday but today Dominica came up with the idea of getting me a solid state drive based Acer Aspire One running Linpus Linux, a Red Hat variant.  It is a small netbook style laptop which is just one kilogram.  It is very small with an 85% size keyboard – perfect for working in the evenings.  The full-sized HP laptop that I normally use is too large and clumsey to use in the evenings.  Working from the couch in the evenings is difficult to do and having something smaller and lighter would work much better.  It would be especially handy to have a Linux-based machine from which to work as almost everything that I do is on UNIX.

This evening we finally got an opportunity to watch Joss Whedon’s new series Dollhouse starring Eliza Dushku which we have been wanting to watch since it came out.  It is available on Hulu so we are able to watch it.  It is pretty good so far.  We watched the first two episodes.

My last day of being only thirty-two.  Boy the years just fly by.  This morning I got started with work right away and worked solid until a little after noon.

After noon, there was some good sunlight coming in the living room windows so I pulled the Ottoman over into the sunlight and set up the diorama that I finished last night so that I could take a series of pictures of the diorama as well as my locos and rolling stock.  The pictures turned out quite well.

I am very happy with how the diorama turned out.  The pictures were the true test.  The pictures turned out well enough, I think, to look just as good as the pictures that they put into the big model train magazines.  I only have one or two angles that I can use with the tiny layout that I have but what is there looks really good.

Dominica and I can’t wait until we have a chance to work on the real, working layout.  It will take us a bit of time to get it to the point where it is ready for pictures but we will get there. Dominica is anxious to get to the store to pic up paints and other modeling supplies that we need to get started.  The real layout has thirteen model buildings that we have already picked up and we will be getting started on those right away so that we don’t have all of them waiting for us after we have the trains running and the scenary completed.

This afternoon I managed to get a lot of pictures uploaded to Flickr.  Check out the Flickr feed for tons of new Liesl pictures including her pictures taken with Landen Laguna on Sunday.

Tonight Dominica and I watched the first of the Miss Marple Mysteries from the BBC.  Dominica has never seen them before.  I have not seen them in years.

We tried to go out shopping tonight but I got stuck working a long day and it was after eight when I was finally able to emerge from the basement and we figured that the shop would either be already closed or closed shortly after we would have arrived.  So we gave up on that idea and just spent the evening at home.

Late in the evening Dominica decided that she needed to make a run to the grocery store.  So I stayed home with Liesl and Oreo while Dominica did her grocery shopping.  I watched the remaining episodes of Knight Rider on Hulu while Dominica was out.  It is a super cheesy show but I enjoy it for some reason.

This week has really gotten away from me and I am working hard to get caught up on my blogging.  Neither Dominica nor I am able to really remember today.  It just went by in the blur.