January 5, 2009: Back to Normal Work

Today is the first day back to “normal work” after the financial industry freeze has lifted.  So I was up at eight thirty and down to the basement to work.  Oreo came down with me as he always does in the morning.  Today he found his inflatable ball in the middle of the room and played for a good twenty minutes.  He was very excited.

Work ended up being much slower today that I had assumed that it would be.  It was not bad at all.

I spoke to the management at Eleven80 today and our deposit for the apartment is on its way back to us (with over two years of interest from the savings account that it was in during that time.)  We are getting back all of the deposit, not just some of it.  So we have enough to be able to buy the new 52″ Samsung LCD that we want for the living room and will still have some money left over to put into the bank.  That is awesome.  We were thinking that they were going to charge us a minimum of two hundred or so for carpet cleaning or something.  Although we did have the whole place professionally cleaned after we had moved everything out of it.

At eleven thirty Dominica and I took Liesl to her doctor’s appointment.  Just a checkup to make sure that this are going as they should.  Liesl weighed in at 9lbs. 6oz. today which puts her at the perfect weight for her age (five and a half weeks) so everything is looking good.  We got to meet another doctor in her pediatric practice today.  We really like this doctor.  It was really easy to deal with him.

We got home and I played some Oblivion during the lunch break.  I was on my BlackBerry checking emails and working when things came up but very little did.

I have been playing enough Oblivion now that I am starting to get back into the game.  What a huge game that is.  I have heard that it takes roughly two hundred hours to complete the main game itself and possibly another one to two hundred hours for the Shivering Isles part of the game and a nice additional chunk for the Knights of the Nine portion.  I really want to play through the game but four to five hundred hours of gameplay is a daunting task.

The afternoon was quite slow.  A mixture or work and relaxing.  Dominica and Liesl ended up taking a very long nap on the recliner from mid-afternoon until the middle of the evening.  We didn’t end up being able to have dinner until after ten at night because we didn’t remember to thaw the frozen tofu that we needed for our PB-BBQ Tofu and Hokkian noodles.

Tonight was watched Prince Caspian on BluRay which I have been dying to see for a long time.  C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia were my childhood books which my mother read to me and recorded while reading onto cassette and that I then listened to over and over again all throughout my younger years.  There are no books that I know better or are more passionate about.

Overall I thought that the movie was really good.  It was more true to the book that I had thought that it was going to be.  This particular title is a bit more challenging to make, I think, than some of the others like TLTW&TW and Voyage which are more adventure oriented.  This one was more political in nature and had more interpersonal interactions.  In general I was quite pleased with the film and am very much looking forward to the next installment – Voyage of the Dawn Treader which is the most “adventure” oriented of the series.

What I really hope happens is that the entire series gets created and not just some of the titles.  A few of them are going to be very challening such as The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle which are so different from the others that I am wondering what they will do for them.  Leaving them out would be horrible though.  Right now they are doing such a good job with the more popularly known titles that it would be a shame to not do the whole series justice.  It is very common for people doing anything with the series to simply ignore the three lesser known or understood works and to focus only on the more action oriented titles (and sometimes that involves skipping The Silver Chair too even though it is the most Lord of the Rings feeling of any of the books.)

Still no mailbox keys.  I think that we are making the decision to have the lock replaced in the morning.

January 4, 2009: Video Game Day

We really slept in this morning.  Boy did we need it.  I felt great getting up well after ten.  All four of us needed the extra sleep.

I was up the earliest, along with Oreo, so he and I came down to the living room and I took the opportunity to play some of Fable: The Lost Chapters.  I can’t play Fable when Dominica is around because she is playing the game herself and I do not want to spoil it for her.  Fable is a very storyline-heavy game and there is quite a bit of opportunity for plot spoilage.

I played a very long and difficult quest that totally stumped me the other night.  I tried to get it completed before Dominica came down to the living room but I failed and she managed to walk into the room at the exact moment that a major plot spoiler was occurring.  After an hour or more of nothing but action she managed to catch the five minutes of dialogue that she should not have heard.  She plugged her ears and looked away but it was too late and she caught some of it.

Once Dominica and Liesl came down I switched to playing Oblivion on the PS3 which I did for most of the day.  Oblivion is a hard to game to set down and then to come back to months later.  It has been over two months since the last time that I have played and the last time that I was playing I was in the middle of trying to close my first Oblivion gate so it was a really hard point to try to jump back into the game.  It took me several hours to get the hang of the interface again so that I could really play it without being totally frustrated.

This evening we decided to watch The Forbidden Kingdom with Jackie Chan and Jet Li.  It was pretty good.  Not a Jackie Chan classic by any stretch but entertaining and a good film to watch on BluRay.

After the movie Dominica played more of Blue Dragon.  I tried to play some Final Fantasy III on my DS but spent about three hours trying to keep Liesl and Oreo happy and never got to the point that I could turn the game on let alone spend any amount of time actually playing it.

January 3, 2009: Ralstons Leaving

No work for me today so I was able to get right up and visit with the Ralstons this morning.  First thing, Art and I headed down to the basement to get more work done on the cabling.  Progress was going well but a little bit of additional parts were needed so another trip to Home Depot was necessary.

We all went to Pastel’s at the Beach Shopping Center for a late breakfast (it was after noon.)  It was really busy and we had to wait maybe more than fifteen minutes to get a table.  Having five people and an infant makes it tough to get a seat in a busy restaurant.  This is Liesl’s third time going to a restaurant.  Her second was going to New City Diner last night.  She did better today.  She slept through all of dinner.  Last night she was awake and unhappy and I needed to feed her a bottle during dinner.

After our breakfast/lunch we made a pitstop by GameStop since it is right next door practically.  Very convenient.  Everyone had some video game shopping to do and I even had a GameStop gift card from Christmas to spend so I was looking for some deals.  I hunted around and found some used PS2 games for which I have been looking: Final Fantasy X-2, Dark Cloud (the original) and Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus.  That pretty much wraps up my attempt at the definitively awesome PS2 RPG collection.  There are a few stragglers which I might be interested in someday like Radiata Stories but if I never get another PS2 title then I will still be happy.  Now to just get a chance to play them.  Dominica picked up Escape from Monkey Island for the PS2 – a serious adventure game classic that we also own on the PC, I think.  Dominica got herself Blue Dragon for the 360 which I have really been wanting to play.  It was the first game that I really wanted to get the 360 to be able to play.  She got it used very inexpensively.  She also got Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None for the Wii.  And finally I picked up Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions for the PSP.  Lots of great games for us to play!  I am looking forward to getting a chance to really play them.

After GameStop, Art, Michael and I went back to Home Depot for a quick run just to get a few small items.  That didn’t take too long.

Once we got back to the house it was back to the basement where Art worked for several hours getting the new electrical outlet in place next to the cable outlet that he had rewired last night.  Then he added the first four runs of CAT6 so that Dominica’s desk, including our Vonage phone, were back online.  Now we are functional again after the new wiring has been put in place.  There was not nearly enough time to do any more work beyond that or else the Ralstons would not be able to get back home to York tonight.  I will be doing the next block of CAT6 wiring on my own.  The next task is getting the wires run that will go to my desk.  Right now I am just using dangling patch cables.

I forgot to mention several things yesterday.  One was that Art fixed the constantly flowing toilet in the guest bathroom upstairs and taught me how to fix them myself.  I then fixed the toilet in the master bath upstairs.  That is going to save us a fortune on our water bill!  Those things were just pouring water every moment that they we have lived in this house.  Also, the new Onkyo receiver for the living room arrived although I did not get a chance to get it set up yesterday.  I also got another Ruby on Rails book from Amazon.

The Ralstons took off at five in the evening to head for home.  Their trip should take less than six hours if all goes well.

After the Ralstons left I hooked up the Onkyo receiver in the living room.  Now that we have the receiver in place we are able to hook up the XBOX 360, PS3 and the AppleTV all via HDMI and once I find all of the cables the Wii will be hooked up as well and upconverted to the HDMI digital output.

Dominica spent the evening playing Blue Dragon on the XBOX 360.  That meant that Liesl was my responsibility for the evening.  Blue Dragon is very cool.  It is from the creators of CronoTrigger, one of my all time favourite games.  The graphics and sound are very good and the storyline is engaging and extremely reminiscent to the Final Fantasy series.  I am enjoying watching the game for a chance rather than being the person playing.  Dominica gets to play all of the grinding and character advancement portions and then I get to watch the plot portions like a long movie.  A very long movie when you consider that it takes three DVDs to hold this game!

I have had to start wearing earplugs because of the eardrum damage to my left ear.  My ear drum ruptured two years ago on a flight to Florida and it has never healed.  It improved for a long time but then I get into situations where there is so much noise that it sets it back to quite some degree.  Now with Liesl I have to be very careful as she will often scream right in my ear and do real damage to my ear.  Tonight she really got me and left me barely able to hear out of that ear and with pain down into my jaw.  I have had to just accept the fact that I cannot leave my ear unprotected much of the time and I have to keep an ear plug in most of the time.  There is no getting around it.

We have no plans tomorrow and will be sleeping in as much as possible.  We are doing nothing but relaxing around the house.

The Ralstons got home at twenty until eleven.  Not bad for such a long trip.  They are very good about taking really fast rest stops.  Each rest stop for us takes twenty minutes at best and easily can go way over an hour.

The mailbox keys have still not been found.  We are pretty sure that we are just going to have to have the mailbox lock replaced by the post office.  🙁

January 2, 2009: Ralstons Visiting

I am a bit behind on SGL updates.  Things have been busy this week.  The Ralstons are visiting this weekend having arrived last night and planning to stay until tomorrow evening.  Today I have to work but since the financial industry freeze is still in effect (today is the final working day of the freeze) there is very unlikely very much for me to do.

We had been planning on going out for breakfast when my lunch break rolled around.  We ended up getting stuck, though, as some people were out of the office and those of us who were still around needed to cover for them.  So I could not go anywhere and be away from the computer.  So we just had lunch at the house.

Even though we didn’t get a chance to go out we did get quite a bit of time that we were able to hang out at the house.  It was a pretty relaxing day overall.

For dinner we all went out to the New City Diner in Yorktown Heights.  Dominica and I have not been there in weeks.  We have really gotten used to eating at home these days.  Not normal for us at all.  What a change having a baby causes!

After dinner, Dominica, Danielle and Liesl went to the Stop and Shop to do some grocery shopping while Art, Michael and I went to Home Depot to do some shopping too.  Art and I have been looking into the wiring situation in the basement trying to figure out what needs to be done so that we can get a modicum of wires run so that it is not a giant disaster down there.

The wiring plan for the basement involves putting an equipment shelf in under the basement stairs that will be used to hold the house networking gear which includes the cable modem, battery backup system, Ethernet switch, firewall, access point and the small SAN system with 1TB of storage.  That is six separate networking devices that have been sitting mostly on or by Dominica’s desk taking up all of her available space.

Then, from the “cabling plant” under the stairs, we will be running Category 6 cabling (to handle Gigabit Ethernet speeds reliably) around the house including four runs to Dominica’s desk, four runs to my desk, six runs to the utility room in the basement, four runs to the basement theatre area (not yet built) and five runs to the living room to support the PS3, AppleTV, etc.  That is a lot of cabling.  Almost exactly 1,000ft so we had to use an entire CAT6 spool.  That wasn’t cheap.  I had wanted to run seven runs to the utility room but that would have required another spool so that is where I had to cut back to save money.

Instead of running all of the cables through the walls which is very difficult and potentially destructive the plan is to run them around on the floors or along baseboards using baseboard cable conduit and attaching the cables to the underside of desks whenever possible.  It isn’t a perfect solution but there is only so much that can be done when the wiring is not done as part of the house construction.  The one part that is going to be quite the pain is running the five CAT6 lines up next to the fireplace in the living room and bringing them up the wall by the fireplace so that they are available to the entertainment “center” there.

After we got back from shopping it was down to the basement for Art and I where I attempted to stay out of the way while he got the shelf installed and we moved all of the network gear into the closet.  Not all of the wiring is in place so an extension cord is running into the closet to keep things working at the moment.  Tomorrow he is going to add an electrical outlet in the closet to power the networking gear in there with its own plugs.  The cable modem (actually a cable bridge for those who know that all-digital devices can’t truly be modems) and the APC BackUPS 350 are wall mounted to make things nice and neat.  Everything else is up on the shelf. It really works great.

Work had to stop so that we weren’t making noise for the neighbours.  We don’t know if the people next door can hear us or not when we do house work so better safe than sorry.  We have not heard anyone else yet except for when major tile construction is going on next door so we are probably safe.

January 1, 2009: Happy New Year

A new year begins.  It will be interesting to see where 2009 takes us.  Last year was such a significant year in our lives with the addition of Liesl to our family and buying a new home in the Hudson Valley, in a region in which we have never lived before and moving from New Jersey to New York.  Lot’s of changes.  This year looks to be a year of many fewer changes (of which we currently know – although one year ago we didn’t know that we were having a baby or moving so who knows) but it should be a year of travel with a trip to Germany planned for September and a trip to Disney World in Florida planned for November or so with the Tocco clan.

Oreo and I slept in until a quarter after nine this morning.  We were exhausted after last night and needed to just sleep until we woke up or we were not going to be ready to drive all day today.  Just before going to bed Oreo had had a big accident which left me cleaning off the bed and changing sheets.  He has been so nervous with all of the recent upheaval and schedule changes and travel that he has been having a lot of problems.  He has been really had the last few days with Dominica being away.  He is not a one parent kind of dog.

Danielle emailed me to see what my travel status was for the morning.  I was not out the door as early as I had hoped but was not doing too badly.  Yesterday evening I had said that we were hoping to be back to Peekskill by six in the evening and I was still looking good to make that happen.  We were in the car and on the road by ten till ten this morning.

The drive up to Frankfort went well.  We stopped at the McDonald’s on US6 en route to grab breakfast at ten thirty just before they stopped serving breakfast to go to lunch and then got gasoline at the Hess station there for just $1.69 which is amazing for the Hudson Valley.  The drive was almost exactly three hours not including the food and fuel time which took at least twenty minutes.

It was about ten after one when I arrived at the Toccos’ in Frankfort.  It took us about an hour to get Liesl ready and to pack the car so that we could get back onto the road.  They looked all week for Dominica’s missing Nintendo DS but had had no luck.  Dominica had torn apart all of the luggage and everything else looking for it but it was really missing.  While packing the car, I immediately spotted the DS in its case in a pocket of one of the luggage bags that we were using.  The DS had been in the luggage the entire time but in an pocket of which we were not aware and that was on the opposite side as the main carrying handle so that the luggage was consistently set down upon the DS so that it was never seen!  Now only the book and the keys are missing.

It was around two when we got back onto the road to head back down to Peekskill.  We made good time.  I am very glad that we decided not to have me drive last night because the weather was pretty bad last night but today was excellent.  There is snow but not on the roads.  Everything is clear and perfect for winter driving.  Really could not ask for better travel conditions.

We stopped at the Guilderland rest stop on Interstate 90 just west of Albany to take the opportunity to change Liesl, grab some late lunch for ourselves, feed Liesl, change her again, etc.  The stop took just over an hour and really disrupted our travel itinerary.  We are not used to having a baby at a rest stop yet and it takes far longer than you would imagine that it would take to do everything that needs to be done there.

We were back in Peekskill at the house by ten after six.  Only missing my original window by ten minutes and I had not estimated for that long of a stop at Guilderland.  We unpacked the car and then I went back out to go to Stop and Shop to get emergency dog food supplies (like celery, sweet potatoes and his chicken) so that we could whip up a batch of Oreo’s food which has has been out of since yesterday.  This was really the only opportunity to do this shopping.

The Ralstons arrived at the house around seven while I was still at the grocery store.  I was probably back around seven thirty.

We all spent the evening just visiting and hanging out at the house.  We ordered in Chinese take away for dinner from down at the Beach Shopping Plaza and had it delivered to make things easier.

We stayed up far too late tonight.  I am not sure how late it was when we finally went off to bed but it was definitely after one in the morning.