Sheep Guarding Llama

I was extremely exhausted when I pulled myself out of bed at seven thirty this morning.  Oreo made me take him for another walk after I signed off and had started heading to bed last night which always makes it hard to fall asleep.

I am very glad, though, that Oreo made me walk him so late at night.  Because it was so late we took a shorter than usual path that lead us down below and in front of the Mazda parked in our parking lot.  As we strolled by I was low enough that I was able to see that the interior light of the car was on and had been on, I would assume, for about twenty-eight hours!  Oops.  I have no idea how or why it was turned on but it had to have been me when I drove home from Warren on Thursday night.

So, to be safe, I took Oreo inside then came back out with the keys and fired up the car and let it run for a little while.  Fortunately the battery was not dead at all and the car started right up.  I took the opportunity to take out the trash since I was stuck waiting for the car to run for a while anyway.

I started work this morning at eight as I normally do on Saturdays.  The upside to always having work scheduled so early is that I never, ever sleep away my weekends.  I get a nice, long weekend and often my work is done around the time that the rest of the family gets out of bed so I don’t miss any time with them.

Dad was able to leave Peoria just before nine to get on the road.  His first stop is McDonald’s for breakfast and then on to Peekskill.  He is hoping to arrive around three this afternoon.

Work for the office went pretty well this morning.  My scheduled work wrapped up around ten.  Then there was my unscheduled maintenance work to do.

House preparations went well this morning.  Some redding up was done and the kitchen was cleaned by ten.

I managed to get my database server set up finally.  That took some work and, of course, each time that I do it I forget that there is a problem with SELinux and MySQL when you move the default database location so I had to fix that too.  Seems to be working well now.

I kicked off a ton of Handbrake compression jobs this morning.  I am attempting to move as much stuff to h.264 as possible before dad leaves so that he can take the source media and put it into storage and also to clean off Dominica’s hard drive which has been holding a lot of stuff in preparation for compression for quite a while.  He laptop doesn’t really have spare drive space for things like that.

We are planning to get a large server for network storage sometime soon but, in the meantime, I think that we need to have a temporary solution as there is so much stuff that we need to store and move around right now.  No one believes the amount of capacity that we need on a regular basis.  We can eat through terabyte disks like they are nothing.

Dad made some good progress on the road today.  He called from just 110 miles away before it was even one in the afternoon.  Around one o’clock Liesl fell asleep and Dominica took the opportunity to run out to Stop and Shop to stock up on groceries.  Our cupboards are pretty bare.

While Dominica was out shopping I watched over the kids and continued to do some cleaning and redding.  I got a lot of good, manual carpet scrubbing done that I have been wanting to do.  The carpet in the dining room area right as you enter the house gets so much traffic and in the winter that traffic is always dirty and salty both from shoes and from Oreo’s feet plus it gets all of the dirt that sticks to your socks when you are on the kitchen linoleum.  There is no avoiding the linoleum because there is a patch that separates the dining room carpeting from the stairs going upstairs.  So you are stuck dragging the dirt onto the carpeting no matter what you do.  I also got a second round of dishes cleaned.  Lots of dish cleaning done today.

Dominica got back just a little bit before dad arrived.  Dad managed to get to Peekskill before three in the afternoon.  His drive went pretty well.  Good weather with a little cloud cover so that it was not too bright.

We spent most of the afternoon visiting and catching up.  It has been over a month since Dad has seen little Liesl and they had some catching up of their own to do.  I had lingering work that I was not able to complete until the early evening.

We had most of the evening free and we able to just hang out in the living room.  We saved the unloading of dad’s car for tomorrow.  We were all very tired tonight.

When Dominica and I got up this morning she asked me if I was scheduled to work tomorrow (Saturday) morning which I normally am.  I told her that no one had scheduled me to work so I was probably in the clear because I am supposed to have forty-eight hours of lead time on scheduled weekend work (scheduled deployments or whatever, not emergency disasters which are pretty common too.)  But, it turns out, sitting in my email early this morning, having arrived at almost the very instant that she was asking me, was an apology for the late notice that I have to work Saturday morning.  So tomorrow I am working starting at eight as usual.  Can’t complain about overtime hours these days though.  I just wish overtime could start around ten or so.

I was able to get some cleaning snuck in between things today which is good since dad is coming down to Peekskill to visit for the weekend.  I got some carpet cleaning done – the kind that you have to do to keep older carpets seeming more youthful than they really are.  I also managed to bag a ton of loose cables that have been scattered around the basement.  I have just loads and loads of IBM power cables, USB cables, Ethernet cables, A/C adapters and more that all get thrown into large boxes and tangled into a mangled and unusable mess.  So I have started putting like cables into Ziplock ™ plastic bags so that they can’t get all tangled together.  What a good idea.  That makes organizing them much easier and it makes organizing them something that I only have to do once instead of something that I have to do each and every time that I need to look for a specific cable.

I did a bit of plant maintenance today as well which has been lacking recently.  In Newark the plants were very much “in our faces” and it made taking care of them pretty easy.  Now that we are in Peekskill the plants are harder to get to and on separate floors of the house so watering, pruning and tending to them in general is a lot more difficult and in many cases it is an “out of sight, out of mind” problem.  So today I did a lot of work on the plants that are now living upstairs in the nursery.  I trimmed and watered and pruned and coddled.  Hopefully we will see some positive growth and recovery.  Overall the plants are still all in rather rough shape following the move from Newark but, so far, none have actually died except for the one palm tree which was in rough shape in Newark and took a serious beating on the trip from Newark to Peekskill having lost its largest living frond which was its main food supply.

Both Dominica and I really noticed the cupcakes and other naughty food that we ate yesterday when we weighed in on the Wii Fit this morning.  We both were up over a pound!  It is amazing what one day of decadence can do to you!  Having the Wii Fit demand that you tell it what you did wrong yesterday and show your failure on a graph really does help you to think about your food and exercise actions more proactively.  I will definitely be more careful today than I was yesterday and will think about having cupcakes and fried rice in the future.  (Okay, I really can’t resist fried rice daily specials at the Thai place in Warrenville but at least I will think about it first.)

Dominica was able to do three more segments of her first Linux and UNIX Systems Administration course today.  Very good progress.  She has not had time to work on it every day but overall she is finding a good amount of time to dedicate to it and really feels that she is learning from it and is enjoying the process.

Work was pretty normal for a Friday.  Busy overall.  Lots to be done with the regular ups and downs that Fridays create.

We tried to eat healtheir today but there were tempting cupcakes left over from last night that, if not eaten, would only get stale and go to waste.  So Dominica had one for breakfast, we split one at lunch and she had another after dinner.  It was a cupcake heavy day.  I will be surprised if she doesn’t feel sick at some point from all of that cupcakey goodness.  Crumbs makes the most amazing cupcakes ever.

Work didn’t end up going all that late tonight which is good since I need to be able to get up and work in the morning and then to clean all day once the office work wraps up.  Dad is planning to leave Peoria around nine or nine-thirty tomorrow morning which will probably put him in Peekskill somewhere around four in the afternoon.  He hasn’t seen Liesl since he saw her at Christmas in Frankfort.  So almost six weeks.  She has grown quite a bit and is so much more alert and interactive now.

I managed to get some time to work on some of my Xen based Linux servers tonight.  I have just recently really started working with Xen rather than VMWare Server or Microsoft Virtual Server which I used before that.  Overall I think that I like Xen better but it will take some time before I really see where the problem arise with it.  What I have been working on tonight is adding secondary storage from raw EXT3 formatted LVM partitions mounting to already existing Xen DomU guests.  Not too hard but not very many people do this with Xen virtualized machines.  It is important if you really want to be able to tune your I/O performance.  Otherwise you have a lot of unnecessary limitations in your virtualization environment.

We managed to get to bed not all that late tonight.  Dominica, Liesl and Oreo were upstairs and getting in to bed by eleven thirty.  I was not far behind them.  Hopefully we will all be fast asleep by midnight or sooner.  I took Oreo out for a late night walk, wrapped up a final LVM mount to a Xen guest and called it a night.  I wanted to kick off some additional h.264 conversions but decided that I just did not have the extra energy necessary to do it tonight.

I got up this morning and worked from home for a few hours until everything was caught up and there was no work waiting on me.  Then, around eleven thirty, I managed to head out to the car and take the hour and a half drive out to Warren, New Jersey, so that I could spend the day out there at that office.

The weather was pretty nice today and the drive out to Warren was pleasant.  I had my iPod so I was listening to that while I drove.  I drive so seldom these days that putting in the occassional drive out to Warren is actually qutie relaxing and it gives me a chance to learn these roads a bit better.  It is actually surprising how close we are to Warren, Newark and other points of interest where we have recently lived and worked.

I got to the office a little after one.  I was extremely hungry by this point since I had skipped breakfast.  Xavier and I went down to Warrenville to get some Thai from the Thai restaurant there that I have been going to for three years now.  It might be the first restaurant that I went to from work if memory serves.  It has been a while since I have been there and the owner commented but they tend to understand when they find out that I have moved to another state.  It was really nice to have something different in my diet for a change.

The afternoon was pretty busy at the office.  Mostly because I was so backed up from the time spent driving and eating – neither of which do I normally take time away from my desk to do.  My usual workstation was usurped today so I was crammed into a corner at the only working and available workstation that we could find.

I left work around five thirty.  The drive home actually went extremely well today.  Well under two hours.  Even though I was driving in rush hour it was only barely longer than if I was driving without any real traffic.  I was home just after seven which was great.

We spent an hour cleaning, cooking, taking out the trash, entertaining Liesl, etc.  Katie and Dudley arrived just before eight thirty.  It is crappy that Katie is unable to get up to Peekskill until so late in the evening.  It is the curse of living in the New York Metro area – doing anything after work is a major hassle and nearly impossible.  It takes so long to get home and so long to get anywhere else and then, after all that, you still have to go home yet.

Dominica was all sad because she hadn’t had time to bake a pie but Katie (having coordinated with me) had brought surprise cupcakes from Crumbs Bakery near Grand Central Station (there is also one just off of Wall near my office!)

Oreo and Dudley ended up not getting along very well.  Dudley is half Boxer and Oreo has an aversion to Boxers or any Boston Terrier-like dog that is larger than him.  Oreo feels that he always has to be king of the hill.  Dudley is almost three times Oreo’s size and when no one was looking the two of them decided to throw down and have at it in the living room.  Oreo ended up losing being flipped over on his back and panicking pretty badly.  He is not a good loser.

Oreo spent most of the evening locked in the master bedroom where I brought him his dinner.  He was being very boo boo doggy all night.  When I took him out for a walk he didn’t even want to go back to the house.  After a while we were able to leave him out in the open and he just stayed upstairs laying on our bed until after Dudley left.

It is very sad that Oreo and Duds can’t play together nicely because it makes it very difficult for Katie to visit us if Dudley isn’t able to tag along.  And we like having Dudley visit too.  He is a big sweety.

Katie and Dudley stayed until around eleven or so.  Katie was pretty exhausted when she had to drive back home.  We ended up being awake until around half past midnight and then heading off to bed.

I ended up not feeling very well (too much sugar and fried rice, I imagine) and had a tummy ache that kept me up until one thirty in the morning.  At least that gave me a chance to read most of Model Railroading Magazine which had arrived today.

I am expecting to be back in Warren next Thursday again.  We will be attempting a different travel combination this time.  Shuttles and carpools.

This morning I am doing the early shift at the office so I had to be up extra early.  We didn’t manage to get to bed until pretty late last night so I was really tired when I got up this morning and was dragging all day long.

Work was quite busy today.  Not what you want on the day that you are doing the early shift.  It means that there is no quitting work.  It is just a really long day.

During the lunch break, Dominica decided to make a break for it and run to Babies R Us and Shop Rite to do some emergency shopping that just could not wait any longer.  I stayed at home with Liesl and Oreo.

Anytime that Dominica goes out shopping it is always a problem.  I think that Liesl knows that her mom has gone out and gets very fussy the moment that Dominica is out the door.  Oreo always has to go out for a walk or two during the short time span as well which he only has to do when Dominica is not in the house.

Today was, of course, no different.  The entire time that I was home I was literally running up and down the stairs trying to deal with work while keeping Liesl and Oreo happy.  Luckily it was during the lunch hours but I had so much work going on today that I really did not get a chance to take a real lunch break at all.

Liesl was supposed to be sleeping while Dominica was gone and she did try but she was very restless and needed me to retrieve her lost pacifier for her every few minutes and then to hold her hand and rock her back to sleep.  Oreo made me take him out twice.

Dominica did manage to stock up on groceries and we got a little variety because she was able to make it out to Shop Rite instead of our regular Stop and Shop.  Shop Rite is farther away but on the way to Babies R Us.  Mostly she was returning stuff that we do not need to Babies R Us but a lot of the stuff, including brands manufactured by them (!), they refused to take back, even for store credit because we did not have a receipt for them.  Some of the items I can understand if there was a possibility of it having come from another store but refusing their own brand products is a bit much, I think.

I did get a chance, throughout the course of the entire afternoon, to sneak in a tiny bit of time playing Oblivion.  I managed to start and complete the portion of the Path of Dawn quest involving the Shrine of Dagon which was no small piece to complete.  It is not supposed to be that overwhelming of a section of the game but one of the people in the game who was carrying absolutely necessary stuff for me to complete the game was killed in a battle and fell beneath a number of other people killed in battle and I was unable to locate him due to the limitations of the console interface to the game.  Had the game been on a PC with a mouse interface the whole thing would have been very simple.  I was very thankful to get a little time to play Oblivion and to complete a good piece of the main storyline.  I am attempting to complete the main storyline as quickly as possible because I do not enjoy the Oblivion gates and don’t think that they make the game more enjoyable so I plan to close them as quickly as possible and then get on with the rest of the game once they are gone.

We had breakfast sandwiches for dinner which we ate very early because we were both really hungry this evening.  Breakfast sandwiches are delicious.  I am betting that we will be having them more often.  Dominica found Morningstar’s Maple flavored vegetarian breakfast sausage today which is awesome.

After dinner I went back to work for several more hours.  It was a very busy day.  I was really worn out by the time that I was finally able to permanently emerge from my basement dungeon and spend real time with my family.

After work was done, Dominica played some of Escape from Monkey Island on the PS2 which I enjoy watching as it really does play like a well written movie with poor graphics.  She did not manage to get very far, however, because there is some problem with the wireless controller and the PS2 which eventually made the game completely unplayable.  I did not have any spare time to address that this evening, but hopefully I will be able to track down the problem and get it fixed soon.

Our evening was fairly busy and quite short.  Liesl didn’t feel all that good this evening and needed a lot of attention and everyone was really tired.  So Dominica, Liesl and Oreo all went to bed at ten.  I wanted to go to bed then but there were several work items that demanded my attention and I was stuck staying awake until after eleven thirty.  So much for me getting to bed early.

I did get a chance to play with Liesl while she was wide awake and very alert for about half an hour this evening which is unprecedented.  We had so much fun just sitting on the couch talking to each other.  She was all smiles and giggles and talking to me telling me about her day.  After we couldn’t believe that Liesl was still alert and happy Dominica ran down to the basement and grabbed the camcorder and brought it up so that I could get a couple of minutes of Liesl footage to show to the family.

There have been no Liesl videos posted on LieslTV because we discovered that since moving to a low-profile desktop some time ago we gave up all of our desktops that could fit a full sized IEEE1394 (Firewire) card which is what we need to connect to the camcorder.  So we are kind of stuck there.  So I ordered a low-profile PCI card that does IEEE1394 from Amazon tonight.  We should have that on Monday and be able to actually use the camcorder again.

Dad is coming down this weekend.  He is arriving no Saturday afternoon and probably leaving on Tuesday.  Tomorrow night Katie is coming up after work to hang out for the evening.  That will probably be around eight thirty or so with Duds in tow to play with Oreo.