December 23, 2008: Liesl’s First Trip

I slept in as late as I could, until just after nine in the morning.  Then it was down to the basement to start work.  Obviously today was a very slow day requiring very little attention from me.  Our goal today was to get everything ready so that we can leave early to travel up to Frankfort this evening.  There is an ice storm expected late this evening and we are hoping to not get caught in it during out drive.

Dominica spent the day taking care of Liesl and getting stuff packed and ready to head out to the car.  I spent a lot of the day working on putting together the first episode of LieslTV that we need to have ready for Christmas morning.  That took a few hours.

I also put in quite a bit of time attempting to load up the iPod with tons of Christmas music to have ready for our drive up to Frankfort.  It wasn’t until later that I realized that we had the Mazda and that it does not have an attachment for the iPod so we were not able to listen to the Christmas music anyway.

We were also waiting for the very last known shipment coming to our house.  Our GPS replacement power adapter for the car was coming from Amazon and due to arrive today.  We didn’t want to leave it outside for a week just asking to blow away in the wind and it would be nice to have it with us so that we will have the GPS for the trip.  We have not driven from Peekskill to Frankfort before and we want to have the GPS to help on on the journey so that we can find the fastest possible route.

Between waiting for the delivery, getting the car ready, prepping the video and iPod it was just after six when we finally managed to leave Peekskill even though I had gotten approval from work to leave around three.  At least I was able to work until five thirty and no one needed to cover for me.

The GPS worked great and showed us a route that we would never have guessed existed that made the drive just three hours from our home to Dominica’s parents’ house.  The drive was pretty uneventful.  We stopped about forty-five minutes away from Peekskill at a McDonald’s just outside Newburgh, New York for a quick dinner.  We wanted to keep moving as quickly as possible so Dominica ran in to grab the food and I stayed in the car with Liesl and Oreo.

We had to make one pitstop about halfway to Frankfort at a Thruway reststop so that we could feed and change Liesl.  That took a bit of time but went pretty well.  Liesl was the hit of the reststop ladies’ room where Dominica took her to change her.  She is a very popular baby.

It was a quarter after ten when we finally arrived in Frankfort.  White Christmas was playing on the television.  We missed the first hour of it but with all of the commercial breaks it really wasn’t all that much of the movie.

We stayed up and visited until well after midnight.  Then it was off to sleep to get ready for tomorrow.  Dominica, Liesl, Oreo and I slept in the small, upstairs bedroom instead of in the dining room on the futon like we used to do.  Now that we have Liesl we have to have a room to ourselves.

Liesl’s first trip went pretty well.  She did not seem to mind traveling in the car at all.  She made it for a really long time between complaining as long as the car remained in motion.

December 22, 2008: Sara Turns 21

Today is my cousin Sara’s 21st birthday.

I really did not want to get up this morning to head down to the office so that I could work but it had to be done.  The sun is really out today and it is gorgeous outside.  We are still buried in snow from the two big snowfalls this weekend, but it is so pretty.  Exactly what you want for Christmas week.

Work was, as you can well imagine, extremely slow this morning.  Christmas week might as well be a holiday between the freeze, the holiday itself and the weather.  And this year Christmas Eve, Christmas and Boxing Day all occur during the week so we only have two days of the entire week that are not some form of a holiday.  Most everyone is probably on vacation all week.

Our schedule for this week, we think, goes as follows.  We are leaving Peekskill to travel to Frankfort tomorrow (Tuesday) after work so we will be arriving pretty late in the evening.  Then Christmas Eve (Wednesday) and Christmas in Frankfort.  This will be our first Christmas together that Dominica and I are not traveling from my parents’ house to Dominica’s parents’ house late on Christmas Eve.

Then my father will be coming out to Frankfort on either Saturday or Sunday to spend a day with the family.  Most likely on Sunday but we are not yet sure.  I think that I am heading back to Peekskill with Oreo on Sunday night.  Oreo and I will be alone in Peekskill for three days and will then return to Frankfort early on Thursday morning (which is a holiday for me) to pick up Dominica and Liesl and to drive them back to Peekskill.  In theory that will coincide with the Ralstons driving down to Peekskill on Thursday.  They are coming down to visit for the weekend.  I will need to leave before them since with my driving to and from Frankfort my drive is longer than theirs but not by too much.  Only by an hour or two.

The time alone at the house should work well.  Three days for Oreo and I to attempt to get caught up on cleaning and unpacking (and probably enough time to complete Fable 2.)  That will make a real difference around this place.  There is additional stuff that will need to be unpacked too since dad is going to bring a large carload with him out to Frankfort that Oreo and I will then haul down to Peekskill and attempt to put away before Dominica and Liesl arrive.

Work was very slow today; it was great.  I spent a lot of the day hanging out in the living room with Dominica, Liesl and Oreo.  I popped in Fable 2 and completed it!  Today was really my final chance to have any hope of completing Fable 2 before we leave for a week and being so close to the end I didn’t want to leave it.  Dominica seemed to enjoy watching the story unfold as it got towards the end of the game.

Altogether it took me approximately 38 hours of gameplay to “finish” Fable 2.  In a game like this there is no clear ending but I decided my ending happened when the main plot line finished, all “completable” quests were finished (including those that cannot be finished under after the main quest is done and those that only appear after the main quest is done), achieved mayor and king status and completed the search for all of the gargoyles.

I still have some ongoing things that I could do if I was really bored but nothing that will add anything to my game experience except, perhaps, to track down every last silver key in the game.  There are fifty and I completed the game with only forty of them which means that there is one final awesome treasure that I did not get.  But it is just a treasure to get for the sake of being very complete.  There are several achievements for which I could spend time pursuing as well but that does not interest me very much.  I played the real meat of the game and was extremely thorough in doing that.

I am excited that there is a downloadable “expansion pack” for Fable 2, called Knothole Island, that was supposed to release today (I finished right on time) but has been pushed back until January to give the team time to complete it.  That expansion is supposed to add one new region to the game (the main game has thirteen) and three additional quests which, I expect, will add four to five hours of gameplay but that is totally a guess.  It might be much more or less.  I really hope that there is something similar to the gargoyles included.  Both Dominica and I had a great time hunting down all of the gargoyles.

I wrapped up the game in the middle of the afternoon.  We got to relax for a little while.  There is a lot of stuff that needed to be done today, though, including some last minute Christmas shopping online (we are now all done), packing for tomorrow, laundry, dishes, etc.  We seem to be in pretty good shape for tomorrow.

After Dominica, Oreo and Liesl went to bed around one thirty I went down to the basement and did some work that really can only be completed when I am the only person awake.  Both Liesl and Oreo need my attention so often that there is no way to get anything extra completed (including getting SGL updated.)  So I worked until a quarter after four in the morning.  I got some good work done, though, and I feel good about the way that I spent the time.  I am working very hard to remain productive while still spending tons of time with Liesl and trying not to neglect Oreo and keeping Dominica company upstairs.  Having a laptop in the living room all of the time is really helping.  We use that constantly all day long.

December 21, 2008: Midwinter

I slept in a lot this morning after having gone to bed just before the sun started coming up.  Once I got up I discovered that the snow had started again in earnest.  It has remained cold here so we still have all of the snow from Friday and now quite a bit more has been added to it.  It seems awfully likely that Liesl will be having a white Christmas on Thursday.  Boy is it hard to believe that it is already winter and that Christmas is in just a few days!

Today is midwinter, the winter solstice, marking the first day of winter for the majority of my readers or the middle of winter for the traditional Irish calendar.  Today is the shortest day of daylight of the year.

Today would have been a nice, relaxing day but Liesl was very fussy all day.  We are pretty sure that she has a tummy ache and is not very happy.  She did not sleep very well last night and is not wanting to sleep very much today.

Late this afternoon Dominica went out shopping as it was an emergency both because we need last minute Christmas items that we have not been able to get because of the weather and because we have to cook for Oreo as he will run out of food later this evening.  So there was not choice.  I would have gone shopping but the Christmas items really require that Dominica be there to make decisions.  So I stayed home with Liesl and Oreo for several hours while Dominica went out.  Liesl was not happy the entire time.  It was a long three hours trying to keep her as happy as possible.

We spent the rest of the day alternating between taking care of Liesl and Oreo and cleaning the dining room and kitchen (and cooking both for us and for Oreo.)  If we don’t do dishes every single day then we can’t even get to the sink.  The kitchen counter space is so tiny that we don’t have any spare space in which to work.  Partially this is because we have a counter-top microwave which we intend to replace with an above-range model eventually.  That will create a lot more space.  And partially because there is a lot of space used by the coffee maker but I don’t have a solution to that problem yet.  In either case, though, the total counter space is still quite small.

We finished watching the fourth season of Reba tonight which is the last season that is currently available either on DVD or from Hulu.  There are a few episodes of the show missing from Hulu, though, which is strange.  We can’t figure out if this is a mistake, if the episodes are just missing in general (Are You Being Served? famously lost an episode for ten or twenty years before a television station in the US turned up an old, videotape copy of it from their archives which is what was used to create the DVD box set) or if Hulu doesn’t get quite all of the episodes so that collectors are forced to get the DVDs.  The fifth season is due to release on DVD in about three weeks.

Our schedules are so thrown off these days.  We did not manage to head off to bed until after two in the morning.  Tomorrow is our last day at home before heading to Frankfort for Christmas.  This will be Liesl’s first time traveling farther than two “blocks” from our home.  She has only ever been to the hospital, the grocery store by the hospital, her doctor’s office between home and the hospital and home.  She has never left Peekskill or Westchester County.  The trip to Frankfort is going to be a really long one for her.  We will see how she does.

December 20, 2008: Laptop Memory Fun

This is the very first Saturday morning since Liesl was born that I did not have to work.  In fact, I ended up making it the entire day without being paged out as well.  It’s amazing.

We all slept in incredibly late this morning.  It was a good chance to really catch up on some sleep.  We need it around here, especially Dominica and Oreo who are the most sensitive to losing sleep.

Early this afternoon my large shipment of electronics arrived that I had ordered on Thursday night.  Fed Ex had said that it was going to arrive on Monday but I am expecting that they were rushing to get things delivered to allow more flexibility for the Christmas load.  It worked out great for us as I really wanted a chance to get taht equipment installed before we left for Frankfort which is expected to be on Tuesday afternoon and having everything arrive on Monday would have been tight.

So today I redesigned out house network.  I pulled out the existing Netgear firewall, an FVG318, and installed the new one, an FVS336G.  The new unit upgrades the ethernet ports from FastEthernet (100Mb/s) to Gigabit Ethernet (1000Mb/s), provides the ability to handle dual Internet connections (for example, to use Cablevision Optimum online and Verizon FIOS at the same time providing load balancing for faster connections and reliability keeping us online in case either one goes down) and provides a built-in SSL VPN which I am looking forward to working with.  The FVS336G is a generation or two newer than the previous unit and has Netgear’s new interface as well so it will give me a chance to get used to that.

I also installed a Netgear GS724T Gigabit Ethernet switch.  This unit provides us with twenty-four ports of GigE connection for the house.  That will really be a nice upgrade.  We are constantly pushing our FastEthernet network to its limits with our large files and media transfers and our Internet connection alone can take a significant portion of the line at times hitting almost 15% of the total line capacity and that is before we upgrade to the faster server and before we add a FIOS line.  Together they could put us to around 60% line capacity of FastEthernet but will be just 6% of GigE.  This also gives us enough ports so that we can start wiring up the house.  We want as few things connected via wireless as possible as that always adds complexity and problems and the more things that share the wireless the slower things go.

Previously we were also running the Apple Airport Extreme as a router sitting in front of the other Netgear which proved to be problematic.  When I first hooked it up I was not aware that it had the option of bridging and acting like a true access point rather than as a router and access point together (which sounds nice but it not a good way to go for very many networks.)  So while I was setting up everything else I also set up the Airport (802.11n) to act as a bridge and to be a transparent part of the network.  In theory this will reduce latency across the network and get everything working better.  We have had a lot of unnecessarily complicated networking problems in the past because of that unit being set up in that manner.

Dominica went out to do some shopping early this evening.  We needed some groceries and the snow had stopped falling so the roads seemed to be pretty good.  Originally Katie was planning on coming over this afternoon to see Liesl and to do some cookie baking but after she tried driving a little bit this morning (it took her two hours to unbury her care – the KTMobile) and it taking her about an hour to go a mile and the cold bringing back her cold she decided to stay home.  So I went out around three-ish and spent half an hour getting the Mazda cleaned off and warmed up and moved up to the sidewalk for Dominica, walked Oreo on a nice long walk and took out all of the backed up trash.  Altogether it took over an hour of being out in the cold.

Dominica went to Stop and Shop leaving Liesl and Oreo home with me.  I tried to play some Fable 2 while she was gone but Oreo had another “has to go out” emergency and Liesl needed a bit of attention so I only got to play maybe twenty minutes at most before she returned.  I did manage to complete the “Treasure Island of Doom!” quest during that time, however.  So I did make some progress even if it was short.

Min picked up frozen pizzas for dinner and I baked those while she fed Liesl.  We spent the evening relaxing and watching Reba.  Then Dominica went to bed early and I stayed up for a few hours taking care of Oreo and Liesl.  I fed Liesl her late night dinner (she always gets one 4oz. bottle of formula around midnight which allows her to sleep through the night – the doctor said that one bottle of formula per day was good but that two would start to cause problems so we only do it once) and then took her up to tuck her in.

I ended up staying up for several hours working on a few different things including the IPSec and SSL VPN connections.  I decided to just do some of the hardware work that needed to be done as well so I installed the new Jaton NVidia 8400GS graphics card into my Windows XP desktop.  That went very well.  I really like this card.  It is practically silent, does not require any additional power connections (which is a major problem with most graphics cards these days) and uses a nice DVI cable adapter (octopus) to get duel DVI-I output from a single DVI connector on the card and it is low profile so that it fits into my HP dx5150 SFF desktop unit.  It is great.  The install was a breeze and nothing went wrong.  If only I could say the same for Dominica’s laptop.

We ordered 4GB of memory for Dominica’s Vista Business laptop – an HP 6515b which we really like.  The first problem that I ran into is that it is practically impossible to find any information on how to install memory into this unit.  Installing the secondary memory module is simple and obvious but replacing the existing one is nearly impossible and involves removing the keyboard and going into the laptop.  I finally, after many, many searches including several of which HP’s website said that there were no document for this hardware at all came across the HP 6515b Memory Install Manual.  So that cost me several hours just trying to find what I was doing wrong.

After all of that work I discovered that there was a problem with the memory so I had to take the laptop apart several time and move the three memory modules around (any two were in the laptop at any given moment) to determine what was wrong.  After several hours I finally determined that one of the two new memory modules was bad and is going to need to be replaced.  But I did get the laptop running with 3GB of memory for the time being which will make a huge difference.  It just didn’t have enough memory to really function before.  But once I get the other, matching 2GB stick installed then it will be able to use its dual-channel memory feature and actually speed up the memory rather than simply having more of it.  So I definitely need to get it replaced quickly.

It ended up being five in the morning by the time that I finally wrapped up and headed off to bed.

December 19, 2008: Liesl’s First Snow Storm

We had a lot of warning about the storm that was coming today.  Almost no one went into the office anticipating that it was going to be very bad.  This, of course, caused a problem because the remote access equipment at work was overwhelmed and it took me over an hour just to log in so that I could work.  Fortunately it is a Friday morning during the financial freeze so there wasn’t anyone waiting for me for anything so no big deal.

Dad was the first person to whom I spoke that saw the snow.  He had gone over to Geneseo in the morning and got caught driving home in the snow which came up much quicker than he had been expecting.  It was quite bad there very early this morning and heading towards us out here in Peekskill.

I was on the phone with people in Ithaca much of the day and about an hour after dad reported the snow in Peoria I was hearing similar reports from Ithaca.  It is going to be a big one for Liesl’s very first snow storm.  There have been a few flakes here and there and once there was enough snow to leave the ground a mixture of green and white for two to three hours but nothing more.  This is going to be real snow and might mean a white Christmas for Liesl’s first Christmas.  If there is snow here then there will be lots of snow up in Frankfort.

The Grices are traveling today from Houston to Frankfort.  They left after work and school and are planning to drive straight through because there is another snow storm expected on Sunday and if they don’t make it to Frankfort before the storm hits then they will be stuck somewhere or stuck driving in a snow storm.

The snow started here around eleven thirty.  At eleven there was no snow and everything was green.  By eleven thirty the ground was white and it was coming down rather quickly.

We were extremely glad to learn that Chapel Hill here in Peekskill does amazing well with snow management.  The instant that the snow was coming down there was a huge crew out keeping our internal roads and driveways clear.  They even had our sidewalk clear within an hour or two.  For the entire rest of the day after the snow started I never once looked out the window and didn’t see the guys out there keeping something cleared.  Extremely impressive.  The complex has several different snow removal trucks with large plows, bobcats, pickup trucks, etc. plus a crew of hand shovelers.  They even have their own salt trucks so that all of our roads are salted.

We didn’t attempt any driving.  I had to work all day and there was no pressing need to try to get out to a store.  We do need to do some Christmas shopping but that will simply have to wait.  It is really crappy that Dominica bought one of the big Christmas gifts from BJ’s Wholesale Club, paid for it and then a day later they emailed to say that they no longer carry that item and that the web site was wrong.  So tons of planning had gone into that item (it was one of the really hard ones) and now we are stuck trying to find something at the last minute, with a snow storm hitting today and another on Sunday, while everything that we look for online is out of stock and won’t be available until after Christmas.  Argh.

After work this evening we just relaxed around the house.  Oreo had an awful day.  The snow was so deep that it is up to his chin even when he holds his head up.  Walking outside is so cold for him and the snow is so deep that he doesn’t know what to do.  This is when it would be so nice if he knew how to use his doggy potty that we have sitting out on the back patio.  After he finally does his business I have to scoop him up and carry him back to the house as quickly as possible as the snow makes him so cold that he can no longer walk.