December 26, 2008: Happy Boxing Day 2008

I really wanted to sleep in this morning.  Oreo has been extremely snuggly since we came to Frankfort and Dexter comes in to our bedroom early every morning to snuggle as well so I wake up with two snuggly Boston terriers and it is very difficult to get out of bed.  We are sleepingin Dominica’s old room, the small middle bedroom upstairs which has two twin beds in it.  So Dominica sleeps on the firm bed for her back on one side of the room, Liesl sleeps in the swing in the middle of the room and Oreo and I sleep in the bed on the other side of the room.

I couldn’t sleep in this morning, though, because I forgot to shut off the alarm on my BlackBerry and I could hear it go off downstairs in the dining room.  So I got up and headed down to shut it off and to sign in to the office.  I don’t have today officially off from work although it is probably the slowest day of the year.  So there is little to do today but I still need to be signed in and to watch things to make sure that everyone is okay.

Today was the after-Christmas relaxing day around the Tocco house.  Boxing Day is the day of downtime between Christmas and Dominica’s mother’s birthday (and the day when Liesl turns one month old.)

Much of the day was spent in the living room with people playing either Rock Band 2 on the PS3 or, after we got it all hooked up, Carnival Games on the new Nintendo Wii.

Most everyone went out shopping this afternoon for necessary after-Christmas supplies.  They got the component cable, a game that Dominica’s mom wanted for her birthday for the Wii and Joe found an amazing deal on really awesome and quite expensive Klipsch tower speaks for less than half of their normal price!  So he jumped at those and now has quite an extensive surround sound system set up in his room with all matching Klipsch as he already had matching Klipsch bookshelf units for the surrounds.

We did a bunch of Amazon ordering which we are clear to do now that I will be home by the time that anything can start arriving.  I got an order of books for educational purposes, we ordered a few Holiday-sale BluRay movies like The Forbidden Kingdom and Shinobi.  We also decided that it was time to go ahead and order our new receiver that we are going to get for our living room because the Onkyo TX-SR606 that we are getting has a built-in quad HDMI switch with 1080p upconverting that we will use to replace the HDMI switch that we are currently using.

The Toccos need an HDMI switch and they are rather expensive and we thought that it would be a waste to have us stop using one right as they needed to buy one so we just got the receiver earlier than we had planned to save money overall.  We are quite excited to have good sound in our living room.  Currently we only have the sound from the cheap television unit that we have and beyond not being very good sound it also cuts out fairly often when using the HDMI input and that is really annoying.  So that is being fixed too.

We also ordered a new wall-mount atomic clock from Honeywell that was about 70% off from Amazon today.  We desperately need more atomic clocks around our new house.  We never know what time it is.

I went to bed early tonight as I was really tired.  Liesl ended up being really, really wide awake late at night tonight and Dominica got stuck staying up with her until after two in the morning.  She is going to be really exhausted tomorrow.

Emily was unaware that I write SheepGuardingLlama everyday so she is hanging out on the couch watching me write today’s update.  Now, years later, she will be able to go back and look at the site and figure out when she first learned about SGL because I am writing this update while she watches.  She is giggling because she is reading along as I type.

December 25, 2008: Baby’s First Christmas

Last night we waited until Dominica’s parents went to bed so that we could break out the new AppleTV that arrived for them today and get it hooked up to the television in the living room.  That ended up being a pretty long and involved process.  We had to unhook the PS3 as there was only a single HDMI connector available and then we had to find a place to hide the AppleTV so that it could be hooked up but would remain hidden in the morning until we could turn it on as a surprise.

After we got the AppleTV hooked up and downloaded and synced to Joe’s laptop which was the only machine that had iTunes installed on it we were finally able to test out the stream from tv.liesllee.com.  The stream is working but the compression is incorrect for the AppleTV.  This is my first time making my own video from high def source that will be compressed for the AppleTV and I was aware that 720p (1280×720) was the maximum resolution and I was okay there (1210×720) but was unaware that the AppleTV has to drop to 24fps and can’t handle 720p at 30fps (30fps is what comes from American and Japanese television, 90+% of camcorders, DVD, etc. and 24fps is what comes from most film-based movies.)  So I need to reencode the video to a lower framerate so that the AppleTV can handle it.  My biggest complaints about the AppleTV are its inability to handle really high quality HD standards (like 720p/30, 1080i and 1080p) and that it does not handle open-ended content streams like Hulu, CBS and Netflix.

The AppleTV unit exhibited some problems too that we need to check out.  We aren’t sure that the unit is actually bad because it was just shipped and just updated and has not really had a chance to warm up yet and the problem that we have been seeing, output blacking out, seems to happen with decreasing frequency so it might be okay once we let it warm up.  We will see.

We tried to convert the first LieslTV video for the AppleTV tonight but Joe’s laptop was running on battery and was going to take many hours to do the conversion so we gave up on that and planned to do it in the morning.  It was around two thirty when Dominica, Oreo, Liesl and I finally managed to get off to bed.

It was a short night leading into the busy Christmas day.  I’m not sure how late we slept in but we were the last to get up.  The girls, Madeline and Emily, had to wait upstairs and so we got up when we heard them approved to go downstairs so no one was really waiting for us.  There was piggy pudding (a breakfast food made with eggs, cheese, vegetarian sausage, maple syrup, etc.) waiting for us which I grabbed for Dominica and myself to give us some energy before heading into the gift unwrapping part of the day.

We got started on presents right away.  With the two new babies, Garrett and Liesl, there are far more presents than there used to be and it is a rush to get it all done before we go to Dominica’s dad’s father’s house for Christmas dinner.  There ended up being so much to unwrap that eventually we had the call that Garrett and Liesl’s presents were not going to be unwrapped today because there just was not enough time and they both had so much stuff.

Big items for Dominica and I included a 16″ Westinghouse HDTV (that is going to go into our kitchen and be hooked to an AppleTV so that Dominica can watch her high-def podcast-based Internet television cooking shows while she cooks and so that we can watch shows while eating in the kitchen which will encourage kitchen eating versus sitting in the living room to watch stuff and eating on the recliners) and a Keurig coffee organizer unit that will go on our kitchen wall to hold four boxes of coffee and will clear up a lot of our kitchen counter space while being far more attractive, The Dark Knight on BluRay and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian on BluRay.  I also got several nice work shirts, pajamas and some really awesome video games that I have been really excited about getting: ChronoTrigger and Dragon Quest IV for the Nintendo DS.  I got Dominica Guitar Hero World Tour for the DS which has a guitar pick and cool guitar attachement.  Joe got her the matching Guitar Hero World Tour Decades which is the sequel so that she can play all of the DS-based Guitar Hero games.  It is hard to list gifts as there are so many.

Dominica wanted to start using her Nintendo DS to play Guitar Hero but we then discovered that her DS (the pink one) is missing.  We tore the house apart looking for it but had no luck.  We have no idea where it could have gone.

It was around four when we made it over to Dominica’s grandfather’s house for Christmas dinner.  We were there for about three hours.  There was additional present opening there.  It is going to be a big load of stuff going back to Peekskill with us.  Babies generate a lot of gifts 🙂

There was no organized activity after returning to Dominica’s parents’ house.  Joe and Bennie played some Call of Duty: World at War but that was about it.  I spent over an hour searching for Dominica’s Nintendo DS but was unable to find anything.  This is rather worrisome.

Tomorrow morning I am back to work.  Dad has decided to come out to Frankfort on Sunday rather than on Saturday because of the weather that is expected on Saturday.

Tomorrow I will be probably hooking up Dominica’s parents’ new Nintendo Wii.

December 24, 2008: Christmas Eve in Frankfort

Today is my very first time spending Christmas Eve at the Tocco’s in Frankfort and, as well, dad’s first time spending Christmas Eve with me (since Christmas 1975, obviously.)

My secret project for the day was working to get the new website and blog, tv.liesllee.com, created and up and running so that we could use it to feed into AppleTV by tomorrow.  For Christmas, Liesl got all of her grandparents AppleTV units so that they can use the AppleTV to keep up with her.  The AppleTV will subscribe to Liesl’s Flickr stream so that all of her pictures show up on it automatically.  The AppleTV will also subscribe, via iTunes, to LieslTV to automatically download Liesl’s videos.  This is the coolest way to keep up with grandkids ever.  Just plug in your AppleTV, set your subscriptions and grandchildren magically appear just like they are television stars.  I imagine that this will be the new means for everyone to see far away family as AppleTV-like devices and high quality camcorders become more and more prevalent.

It was extra hard doing all of the setup in secret because Dominica’s parents won’t know about the AppleTV (which arrived from Amazon today – buy them from Amazon and you save $10 over the Apple Store price and you get free shipping) until tomorrow morning when they unwrap it.  My dad got his today and opened it because our tradition is to open presents on Christmas Eve as it was ever since I was little.

Getting everything set up was no small trick.  There is a lot to do when setting up a new website and getting the blog working and getting the video feed working in its enclosures and making sure that it works through iTunes.  By early evening I had LieslTV working in iTunes and the website was working well.  There was no way for me to test with an AppleTV, though, to make sure that the video that we have ready for tomorrow is going to work (the AppleTV that Dominica and I own at home has not been hooked up yet so we could not test there either.)  The plan is, after everyone goes to bed tonight, that Dominica and I are going to work to hook up the AppleTV in the living room and get it all set up with iTunes on the Toccos’ computer and get the subscriptions set up so that all they have to unwrap is an AppleTV remote, turn it on and see the first video right away along with all of the photos that we took throughout the day today that should already be available on Flickr.  It is a major project.

Most of the day was spent in the living room for me.  I did not have today off from work so I was logged onto my laptop all day although the work load was pretty light.  I did some installations and talked to several people at the office but it wasn’t bad.  The market closed early today so my work stopped completely around two in the afternoon when the last stragglers headed off for home.  By the end of the day I was pretty soar from having sat on the couch all day with a laptop on my lap.  I can’t wait to get back to a desktop again.  At least I should not have to use a laptop all that much tomorrow since the office is closed and the website is all set up.  Only additional picture processing and posting to Flickr should demand my time tomorrow.

At a quarter until five we all loaded up and drove over to church to attend Christmas Eve Mass.  This is Dominica’s first time in Frankfort on Christmas Eve in seven years and my first time ever.  So Christmas Mass is new to me although, in reality, it is practically indistiguishable from the Presbyterian Christmas Eve Candlelight Services that I have been going to for almost all of my life.

After church we came home and did family pictures.  I got a ton of pictures and was able to, around midnight, get them edited, thinned out and uploaded to Flickr.  I am excited that I was able to get them done so that when the AppleTV gets hooked up it will show the Christmas Eve pictures from tonight which will be a really nice touch.  I know that the Flickr portion will work.  It is the video portion that I have not been able to fully test yet.

After pictures we had dinner all together.  Then the girls pretty much went straight off to “bed” where they watched first Beetlejuice from 1988 and then A Christmas Story all thanks to Netflix while the adults hung out in the living room.  Francesca and I spent the entire evening, almost two hours, working on finding an appropriate theme for tv.liesllee.com.  We finally got it down to two choices and let Dominica make the final decision which we all really like.

Tonight is the very first time that I have ever been able to witness the Christmas Eve craziness in action firsthand.  I have seen the present layout after arriving from dad’s house as Dominica and I have always done but this is the first time tha tI have been able to watch it actually occur.  What a project.  Plus this is the first year when their are four grandchildren instead of just two (Emily’s first Christmas was my first Christmas at the Toccos’ so it has always been two grandchildren as long as I have been around.)

It is a quarter after midnight and I just got the Flickr updates posted so that dad can see Liesl for Christmas online at the very least and so that everyone here can see them via the AppleTV.  I am posting and heading upstairs to do the last minute wrapping of Dominica’s Christmas presents.  Our big present to each other was the XBOX 360 and Fable 2 which we got a month ago.  We weren’t going to get each other anything else but there was something that Dominica really wanted and so I got it for her.  But that is for tomorrow’s update (on the off chance that she is checking the site somehow.)

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.