Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is President’s day and the market is closed so I have the day off from work, more or less.  My idea was that today would be a pretty big model railroading day.  I have been looking for a chance to really sit down and get some modeling done.

We slept in a lot this morning.  It was after eleven when I finally got up!  Dominica was heading out the door right as I got up to go do the grocery shopping.  Liesl had just been put down for a nap and Dominica thought that this would be her window of opportunity.  It ended up that Liesl never actually fell asleep so, as usual, with Dominica gone it was a mad scramble to keep Liesl and Oreo both happy.

Dominica was gone for almost two hours doing the grocery shopping.  While she was gone we got the call from the Treat Station in Peekskill that the model railroad layout kits that we had ordered had arrived and that we could pick them up at any time.

Dominica got home in the early afternoon and we had a late lunch, relaxed for what little but we could as we tried to watch some Netflix on demand in between me attempting to work on stuff for the office.  I ended up being busy enough that Dominica decided to make a second trip out and to go to Treat Station on her own to pick up the supplies that we needed.  We had also discovered that we needed food for Oreo so that we could cook for him today as he is going to run out of his dog food (chicken stew) tonight.  So she went to the grocery store as well.  Then, while she was out, she made a run to Home Depot to grab a few other little modeling items of which we were in need.

Altogether today I was in charge of Liesl and Oreo alone for a bit more than three hours.  Possibly as many as four but that is unlikely.

Dominica cooked Oreo food this afternoon and also got a little bit of work done on her second course in her UNIX Administration program at UofI.

It was not really until fairly late in the evening before we really had any free time in which to get to do some model railroad modeling.  We did get to do some, though, and today we got to take our first stab at applying actual plaster which is a first for both of us.  Today I did the plaster and Dominica just watched.  Working with plaster is much more fun and enjoyable than I had guessed that it would be.  I always thought that this aspect of model railroading seemed really boring and intimidating, but it is not at all.  It is really cool.

I also laid the railbed and the track, built the tunnel and did the beginning of the ballast tonight.  After the work tonight the layout diorama is really looking like a real model railroad like nothing I have ever done before.  Very encouraging.  Seeing this take shape is really making us excited about being able to do model railroading together.  This is a lot of fun and we are seeing real results very quickly which we had never imagined would happen.

Overall today was really busy and we ended up staying up incredibly late just so that we would have a chance to work on the model.  It was around two in the morning when we finally got to head off to bed.

Tomorrow I am back to work as usual – at least it is only a four day work week – and Dominica is going to attempt to drive down to Totowa, New Jersey to take her laptop back to work and to take Liesl down to introduce her to all of her coworkers.  No one has seen her since she took maternity leave in mid-November so they are all anxious to see how she has been and to meet our daughter.  So tomorrow will be a pretty busy day.

We failed to be able to ship out the email server today as we did not receive the necessary information to do so.  I have spoken to everyone involved and the hope is that we will be able to deal with this tomorrow.  It is getting down to the wire and we are going to need to do something pretty quickly if nothing happens in the morning.  I can’t wait until this server is shipped and no longer something that I need to keep working on on a regular basis.

The sun is out and it was a beautiful morning.  Dominica was feeling restless today and we decided that it would be a great day to go out for a drive with Liesl and Oreo and to see if it would be possible to find some model railroading supplies so that we could do some modeling this weekend.

It took us a while before we were able to get out the door but we did pretty well, all things considered.  We researched some local model train stores and found one in Katonah that appears to only handle Marklin stuff from Germany which is excellent stuff but only avialable in HO and Z scales so that made it useless to us.  We also found one in Cold Spring which is two towns north of us.  Garrison lies in between.

Dominica attempted to find a yarn store in the area around Cold Spring but did not find one in a quick search so we decided to just drive by a place that might exist but for which there was no phone number.  Better than nothing.

The drive up to Cold Spring was really nice.  The GPS unit took us the east way around the mountain which must be almost exactly the way that dad goes when he is driving to and from Bear Mountain Bridge.  It is not the fastest way to the bridge but it appears to be the fastest way to Garrison.

The drive was really nice.  Such a great day for a nice, relaxing drive along the Hudson Valley.

Apparently we were not the only people who had this thought on this particularlly wonderful Sunday morning.  When we made it up to Cold Spring, probably a twenty minute drive, downtown was completely packed with people and parking was impossible to find.

We finally found a spot on the side of Church Street which turned out to be perfect as it was right around the corner from the little train store to which we were heading.  It was a nice, short walk and Liesl enjoyed being outside.  Oreo stayed in the warm car enjoying the sunshine.

Cold Spring, along with Garrison, are extremely attractive little Hudson Valley towns.  John Nicklin had recommended that we look at them when we were house hunting.  We had decided that they were too expensive and too far away for daily commuting to the city via train.  We will definitely be considering those towns, though, when Dominica returns to work and we need to move for additional space.  The towns are so pleasant.

The train store was so tiny that literally only two people could be in it at once without it causing a significant problem.  They had the supplies that we needed, however, so it worked out perfectly.  We picked up a small “diorama” kit which is designed to allow us to build a small 1′ by 2′, or something like that, little sample of a layout. The purpose being to teach us how to do a lot of the basics of scenery modeling such as the foam benchwork, plastering, making our own trees, ballast (which we have done before,) etc.  We also picked up a “water modeling” learning kit.  Everything is from Woodland Scenics.  Good stuff.

We also picked up some basic rolling stock just so that we would have something work with on the little track that we have at the moment.  We got a box car from Soo Lines and a covered hopper of Corning Glass (dad would be proud.)  Both are Atlas N Scale rolling stock.  The Corning hopper is an especially attractive unit.

After our shopping we took a quick swing down Chestnut Street to see if the yarn shop was still there and we found the address but the shop was long since gone.  No luck there.  So we continued on home to Peekskill.

We managed to spend a bit of the evening actually working on the diorama.  It was really exciting.  In our very first stages we learned quite a lot about how the basics of building a modern model railroad can be done.  This was both our first times working with foam based benchwork – in this case the Woodland Scenics Subterrain system.  It only took a little work with Woodland Scenics foam products before we were sure that we would be able to buy regular foam on our own and do the same type of work.  We learned a lot right off of the bat.

We only managed to get so much done tonight but the progress was very noticeable.  By the end of the night Dominica even remarked that the diorama was already beginning to look like a real layout even after the first half day of work.  We are very pleased and quite glad that we decided to purchase the learning kits because we have already gained a lot of confidence and feel that we will be much more prepared for doing the real layout which we hope to start later in the week.

Also this evening Dominica managed to wrap up her first course in her program at the University of Illinois.  She is doing a four course sequence and the first one is all done.  She also did the introductory work on the second section so that she will be ready to get started on that right away.  She is making very good progress and really learning a lot.  We have some things about the class that we don’t think are as good as they could be but the overall approach is excellent and it is really working out well for her.  Having me as a resource along with her obvious access to all sorts of UNIX platforms and educational resources really is enhancing her learning so she is getting far more out of the class than she would get from doing the class alone.

Today is Liesl’s very first St. Valentine’s day and also her cousin Madeline’s ninth birthday.  I am blessed with the rare situation that I do not need to work at all today.  We got a chance to sleep in a little bit this morning which is awesome for a change.

The weather is awesome today.  Not too much wind and bright sun.  Oreo is very happy.

Dominica and I decided that today was going to be model railroading day.  This past week has been so crazy that this weekend needs to be about relaxing.

We did some looking around to see what local model railroading shops are available.  It turns out that there is a model train and candy shop on North Division which is the Maple Ave extension in downtown Peekskill.  Extremely easy to get to from our house.  It is called Treat Station.

We were all going to go down to the shop but Liesl was not in the best mood and were unsure how the shop was going to be so I just ran downtown all by myself to make a quick trip.  They didn’t have too much train stuff but I was able to pick up the 2008 Walther’s catalogue and some model train books.  I also picked up some chocolate truffles, as it is Valentine’s day, to take home to Dominica.

I got home and was just beginning to look at the books when Dominica spotted the Woodland Scenic’s Mod-U-Rail system as a possible solution to our issues with doing benchwork.  Neither of us have any carpentry skills whatsoever so it is important to find a foam based solution from which to work.  So we decided that we would go back down and see if there was something that we could get.

Around seven this evening we packed up Liesl and Oreo and we took a short little trip downtown.  Oreo was very excited to be able to go for a ride in the car.  He almost never gets out these days.  He misses his car trips.  Liesl was not so excited until we got to Treat Station.

Dominica had them fire up the Lionel train display for Liesl and Liesl was very pleased to watch the trains go around for several minutes.  We talked to the store and they did not have the materials that we were seaking at the moment but were able to order them for us and are hoping to have them for us on Monday or Tuesday at the latest.

We have decided that we are going to start by doing some purely scenery based projects just to learn some techniques and then we are going to do a small, starter layout of approximately six feet by three feet on foam backing on which to see if we can model a nice, complete, working layout with running train and everything.  Then, if that goes well and we enjoy it, we can look to making a real layout that will be built to the wall by my desk.

While at the Treat Station we got root bear floats and drank them at the soda fountain that they have there.  It is small but they have an old fashion soda fountain.  Very neat.

After our little outing we had a nice, relaxing evening at home.

UNIX Time is recorded in seconds since midnight, January 1, 1970 – UTC.  This date is considered to be the beginning of the computer epoch or, more appropriately, the UNIX epoch (love live UNIX!)  At 23:31:30 UTC (that is 11:31 and 30 seconds on London time without daylight savings) the official UNIX date is 01234567890!

Funny enough, today is Friday the 13th and today is the first day that I haven’t had a major disaster with which to deal all week.  So much for superstitions.

Today is an early close for the stock market (because Monday is a US holiday, not because tonight is Friday the 13th.)  I did not realize that until almost lunch time so getting a shortened day was a nice surprise.

Our credit card bill came today.  I had been hoping that it was going to be a small one this month but, of course, there are all kinds of surprises to be had almost every month.  On this particular bill is Oreo’s multiple emergency vet visits as well as the cost of Dominica’s entire curriculum at the University of Illinois so the bill is much larger than I had been thinking that it was going to be.

Work was pretty busy all afternoon since it was a shortened day, but because we did most of our work early the evening was not nearly as long as usual – at least not for a Friday.  So instead of wrapping up really late at night we were able to wrap up more like it was a normal day.  Now we can be somewhat relaxed going into the weekend.

I was very thankful to have some extra time tonight.  I spent the evening doing the remaining setup on the new Zimbra server so that I could get it running to start collecting email.  It was around eleven tonight when I finally got it turned on and the mail started coming in again.  It has been a long week without mail and there are still a lot of kinks to iron out but at least mail is starting to come in once again.

I feel much better tonight knowing that this are mostly working.  We did not ship the server to Toronto today as we had hoped because we just were not able to get everything worked out with them quickly enough to make it possible but things are progressing and the new server should ship out on Monday or Tuesday.

Now for a nice, long, relaxing weekend.

My new Atlas N Scale Genesee & Wyoming switcher, road number 45, arrived today.  I got it on eBay and got a great deal on it.  I collect G&W model railroad items.  Hopefully someday (soon) I will be able to have a small model railroad in the basement on which I can run them.

First thing this morning I discovered that the power had gone out at dad’s house.  They are having fifty-five mile an hour winds today and the temperature has really dropped from yesterday.  The power was out all morning which did nothing to improve my nerves.  Instead of being able to spend the morning dealing with getting the email server back up and running again I spent the morning worrying that the three servers that went down with the power outage (we exhausted the available battery backed capacity.)

Work was very, very slow today.  I was very surprised how slow it was.  I am quite relived that I did not go in to Warren today as I would have been more upset about the downed servers.  I had done a manual backup just a few hours before the systems had gone down but with as badly as everything has been going this past week I was not well prepared for their to be any additional problems of this magnitude.

The power came back on in the early afternoon and I was able to begin checking things out.  It turns out that one server, a virtualized machine, completely disappeared.  Luckily it was a machine that I had just built and had not begun using yet so nothing was lost except for a few hours of initial setup.  Not a big deal.  All of the other machines and virtual machines were still okay.

I got an additional surprise this afternoon when the bank called and informed us that the escrow account was set up improperly and that it was not going to cover the school taxes which are already due.  So now we are forced to come up with the school taxes without any warning at all (they are already slightly past due when we found out that they even existed) even after we have been paying into the escrow for several months now.  I thought that the purpose of the escrow was to protect against tax surprises rather than cause them!  Instead of buffering against tax issues the escrow actually created problems this time by causing us to “pay the taxes” each month and then have to pay the actual tax, in full, out of pocket even after paying into the escrow account.  So we have now paid this tax twice.  Nothing like making things easy.

So we paid the taxes and that was that.  At least we were able to pay the taxes.  It could have been quite bad.  It did nothing to make me more calm after a very long and hard week, though.

Dominica put in an hour or more this morning working on getting our medical insurance dealt with.  We have been having all kinds of problems and this morning our payment for Dominica and Liesl’s hospital stay was denied.  The whole problem has arisen because our insurance was switched on us after having gone to the hospital.  Then we got in trouble for not pre-authorizing the trip to the hospital even though we were not put on that particular insurance until after the visit was over.  The whole process is insane.  We also found out that since Dominica’s old job keeps switching the insurance plan that we are on (it is not us deciding these things, they keep getting forced upon us) that we have to pay the deductable amount three times!  So we are not nearly as insured as it would appear that we are.

I came upstairs for dinner and took over watching Liesl for a while.  Liesl has been in a crazy mood today.  I wonder if it might be a result of all of the stress that we have been under this week.  Maybe she senses it.  She has avoided napping today almost totally.  She slept less than two hours all day today.  She almost dropped off many times but would always leap back to being completely awake.  She also took several bottles today.  She just kept eating and eating.

Liesl finally seemed to have fallen asleep at almost ten thirty tonight while Dominica and I were watched the first season ofGrace & Favour which is more well known in America as Are You Being Served? Again.

We ended up staying up pretty late tonight.  It was after one in the morning when we finally headed off to bed to get some sleep.  Chris and I have been trying to get an FTP transfer working between us which has been a bit of a pain.  We finally got something working tonight and I kicked off a transfer of the email data so that he can work on the email restore portion while I am working on the email primary portion.  The estimated transfer time for the FTP transfer of the highly compressed backup file is a measly twenty-four hours.  Ha ha.  Somehow I imagine the connection getting severed at some point during that transfer process.  That is a pretty long time for two computers to remain connected over the Internet without any major problems.  I think that we will likely have to attempt this transfer multiple times before it actually does any good.