Sheep Guarding Llama

The irony of the Dick Van Dyke show: A show about a group of writers writing a show for variety show actor who is, in fact, the real writer writing the show for the group of actors playing his own writers.

Six o’clock came way too early this morning.  I was pretty tired as I pulled myself out of bed.  Dominica and Liesl were already awake (but planning on returning to bed shortly) so at least I did not have to wake them from my alarm.  I got up and brushed my teeth, got dressed and drove Ramona down to the Peekskill Metro North station so that she could catch the morning commuter train into the city.

It was extremely cold this morning and the car was covered in ice so it took a little bit of work to get the windows cleared off enough to drive.  After dropping off Ramona I came back home and headed on down to the basement so that I could get to work.  I had run down and checked emails and made sure that I was signed on and everything before I left so that I could be on as quickly as possible.  It ended up being a really slow early morning and very few people actually needed me.  My favourite kind of early morning shift.

So today is the historic inauguration of Barrack Obama.  I believe that this is the first presidential inauguration that will be covered by SGL.  The inauguration of President Bush, eight years ago today, fell just a week or two before SGL started saving posts.  Prior to that point the blog was updated regularly but the old posts were deleted instead of archiving them (not very smart, I admit, but originally there wasn’t any plan for SGL to be a blog and it just sort of developed over six months or so of use.)  So while information about the last inauguration may have been posted it was lost a very long time ago.

The term “historic” is of course completely overused.  Obama is our first “black” president using the completely inappropriate and racist usage of black that we were taught we could never use when we were children – why the media is allowed to get away with it now I have no idea.  He is also our forty-fourth “white” president under the same logic.  So he is our first black and white president which is, at least, definitely a first.  Of more importance, he is the first president to be from a major urban area since Theodore Roosevelt which was quite a while ago.  Rural America has had a pretty dominate presence in the executive office during the twentieth century which seems strangely inappropriate as America has moved so predominately towards urbanization in the past century.

As expected, as always happens with the election of a Democrat, the US stock market took a major hit and actually dropped below the 8,000 mark.  The stock market always reacts negatively on the day of a Democratic inauguration but generally performs better during the tenure than with a Republican.  It’s a paradoxical market reaction and completely predictable.

America’s third car maker (if you can call them American as they have been German for quite some time now), Chrysler, had a major stake sold to Italian car maker Fiat today with long term plans for complete takeover.  Fiat is not well known to American consumers but they are a major player in the global automotive scene and have some really interesting cars over the years including some really nice convertables available in America in the late 1970s.  My friend Steve has one.

Today was very busy at the office.  I was hoping to take tomorrow to go into Warren but I had a server turned over to me today that is high priority so I am taking care of that tomorrow instead.  I am going to go in to Warren on Thursday instead.

After work, I took care of Liesl and Oreo for a little while while Dominica went grocery shopping to stock up for the week.  I was hoping to play some Oblivion but there was no opportunity so I just watched an episode of Knight Rider (the new one.)  Liesl seems to like that show.  It helps her to relax.

This morning I had to get up and work.  Even when Monday is a holiday it is still the day that I have to submit my hours for the past week both to the office where I work as well as to my consulting firm.  If I fail to do it today then it is possible that my paycheck will be missing the hours for this week and I won’t be paid for another two weeks.  I don’t get docked or anything but going an extra two weeks without pay is best avoided.

Once I was logged into the office there turned out to be several things that needed my attention.  One of the disadvantages of supporting global areas, as in outside of the United States, is that not everyone is aware of our holidays and so most of the people that I support are generally surprised to learn that today is a holiday (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) so it is important to be online part of the day to let people know that they either need to make alternate accomodations fo rthe day or to just wait until tomorrow and some stuff, being important, gets handled today on the holiday anyway.

After a couple hours of work I was able to join Dominica in some serious house cleaning.  The house really needs several bouts of serious house cleaning and it only seems to happen when someone is coming to visit.  We are very last minute cleaners.  We did manage to do a lot of cleaning before I had to drive down to the train station to pick up Ramona.  We made a large dent in the “putting away” of stuff and general cleaning.  The kitchen is in the best shape since we first moved in in October.

Overall the cleaning went well and we managed to get most of everything in the main living areas packed up and put away.  Quite an accomplishment if you had seen how much stuff we had scattered around the house.

Ramona arrived at Peekskill at 1:48 via the Metro North from Grand Central Terminal.  I picked her up and we all hung out for an hour or two.  This was her first time meeting Liesl or seeing our new house.

For dinner we went down to the Beach Shopping Center and ate at Pastel’s.  After dinner Dominica and Ramona went to CVS to pick up some baby supplies while Liesl and I stopped by GameStop to trade in a used video game that has been kicking around the house: True Crime L.A.  We had bought the game a year or two ago for the PS2 simply because it was the only HD game that we could find for the system and wanted to test out the capabilities.  Dominica had picked it up for me for just $4.99 used.  It wasn’t the type of game that I enjoy and it was purely to test the technical capabilities of the PS2.  We tried it.  Saw what it could do and neither of us had any interest in playing the game at all.  So I was happy to get $1.83 for my trade in.  Better than having it go into storage someday for no reason.

We went back to the house and just hung out for the evening talking.  We haven’t seen Ramona in months.  Ramona had originally needed to get into the city very early tomorrow morning but her early appointment was cancelled so she decided to crash at our place.

We all stayed up way too late.  It was around one thirty when we finally turned in for the night and Ramona and I need to be up at six tomorrow morning so that I can drive her to the train station so that she can get to work in the city by eight.  I am working starting at six thirty tomorrow morning.  So it is going to be a short night.

After the long day of work yesterday today was a very much needed day of rest and relaxation.  I did not get the long, solid night of sleep for which I had been hoping because I was paged out at five in the morning but at least I was able to go back to bed after a little while and then proceeded to sleep in rather late.

Today Dominica and I really just did nothing, and it was great.  We relaxed, watched some shows on Hulu and just hung out.  I spent the day with the only computer that I was using being the laptop in the living room that we have sitting on the ottoman.  I didn’t do any real work all day.  I did do a little for the office but not a large amount.

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and I am “off” from work.  I will need to log in in the morning for a little while to put in my hours and to make sure that everything is okay but I won’t be working for most of the day.  Ramona is coming to visit in the afternoon.

Tuesday and Thursday of this week I am working the early shift at the office so I will be up very early which is going to be quite the shock to my system after having moved onto “Liesl Time” which means staying up late and getting up late.  Wednesday is my most likely day to drive out to Warren.  We will see how the weather is that morning.

Tuesday is inauguration day.

So much for a nice, relaxing weekend.  I was woken up at eight this morning by my boss calling to let me know that we had a massive disaster at work over the last few hours and that it was all hands on deck.  By a quarter after eight I was down in the basement office (where it is freezing cold) and on a conference call.

My day turned into not only a full work day but it was, in fact, a double work day.  I had originally had some work scheduled to take place this morning but that had to be pushed off as normal work can not occur while there is an outage going on.  That would just add to the chaos.

Today’s issue was caused by the extreme cold conditions in Manhattan this morning.  We were sub-zero before the sun rose this morning.  As often happens when things get this cold, pipes start to freeze which can cause ironic overheating situations when HVAC systems fail or flooding when ice blocks water moving in pipes.

I got a little break in the middle of the morning while waiting between conference calls when I got to play a little bit of Oblivion while keeping an eye on emails.  I didn’t really get to see Dominica, Liesl or Oreo at all today as they were all still asleep during the only break that I had.  I did get to come upstairs and eat lunch and dinner with them but that was about it.  As soon as food was finished I had to head back down to the basement to get back to work.

After fifteen hours things finally cooled down enough (figuratively as well as literally) at work that I was able to start on the work that I was originally going to do first thing this morning.  Wow.  This was just a ridiculously long day.  Almost all of it was spent on the phone.  I had my headset on almost all day.  I went through several handset batteries.

Work continued on into the evening.  In total I ended up working over sixteen hours today!  It was after midnight that my very last server came online in the datacenter.  I officially did nothing but work today.  This was one of the busiest days at the office that I can recall.

Dominica, Liesl and Oreo all went to bed before I was done working.  You know that it has been a long day when the people who got up after you are going to bed while you are still working.  I can barely keep my eyes open as I sit here wrapping up SGL for the day.  I am very, very tired of sitting at my desk.  This has been my longest stretch at my desk since we moved to Peekskill.

Tomorrow I am definitely attempting to sleep in and to take it easy all day.  I really need a break after today.  There is a very high liklihood that there will be residual problems from today’s disaster that will need my attention tomorrow but I anticipate that they will be few and far between.  As long as I get to sleep in in the morning then everything should be okay.

Okay, off to bed for me.  All appears to be right with the world.  I need some Boston Terrier snuggles.

Today I got the wonderful surprise of starting work and then finding out that not only is today a short day with the market closing at two in the afternoon but that Monday is a holiday!  So it is a long weekend for me.  Yay!  We are thinking about shopping for some window dressing for the living room this weekend.  We need to them to help insulate the house.  The big window in the living room is a big heat sink sucking the money right out of the house all winter.

The weekend might be a long and much needed break but today was a completely crazy, long day.  Everyone rushing to get work done prior to the weekend.  I spent the entire day just running from one request to another.  Very exhausting.

Lucking today ended on the early side (whatever that means) so I was able to wrap up around the time that I would be done on a normal day rather than on a normal Friday.

It occurred to me that I have now been working in IT for fifteen years (I started in 1994) and that I have been a consultant for a decade (started consulting in 1998 or 1999.)  Now I feel old.

After work Dominica decided that she wanted to read (she has some new novels from Amazon) and so I spent the evening playing Oblivion on the PS3.  I managed to knock of several quests tonight.

I have nothing major planned for the weekend.  It is my first weekend off in a while.  Ramona is planning on stopping up to Peekskill on Monday afternoon.  It will be her first trip to the new house and her first time seeing Liesl.