Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 794 – Scott Alan Miller

December 16, 2008: Found a New MUD

I slept in until the last possible moment this morning before getting up and running down to the office to get to work. Not that these is a lot of work to be done. December is the best time of the year to work in technology support in banking and finance. It is mostly coincidence that it ends up coinciding at the same time as the Christmas holidays but it works out perfectly to give everyone a chance to prepare for and to enjoy the holiday season and takes advantage of the time when everyone is going to be least productive anyway.

I stumbled upon a really interesting breakdown of the ethnic population density by region in New York State from Wikipedia.

Nothing much to report today. I worked all day and Dominica watched Liesl.

I talked to Eric Millen tonight. I managed to call him just minutes after he had been rear-ended while driving home and was still sitting in his car waiting for the police to arrive.

Katie and Dudley are coming over this weekend to bake cookies.

I stumbled across what looks to be a really cool MUD today: BatMUD. The really cool thing about it is that it uses a very nice Java client rather than just traditional telnet which is a big drag for traditional MUDs. The client works well and doesn’t compromise the style of gameplay while making playing more enjoyable and fun.

December 15, 2008: New Swing

Liesl ended up sleeping on my chest in the living room until two thirty in the morning! She was so peaceful that we did not want to wake her. So we stayed up far longer than we wanted to be awake. We were extremely tired by the time that we got to bed. Tomorrow is going to be really rough. Dominica, Liesl and Oreo can sleep in but I have to be up for work in the morning so it was a very short night.

My alarm was set for seven thirty this morning but Liesl was very restless last night and I basically got no sleep at all. I am pretty sure that Dominica actually got no sleep at all. So I snoozed until a quarter until nine when I finally pulled myself out of bed and headed down to the office to get to work.

Today is the beginning of the financial industry’s year end freeze so, in theory, my workload drops dramatically starting today. It needs to after the past two weeks. We have all really been looking forward to this. This is the financial and banking industry’s official notification that Christmas is just around the corner.

Oreo ate his breakfast and then got really sick this morning. Apparently he is not feeling as much better as we had thought that he might be.

I was on eBay this morning and found an amazing deal on Kadee Micro-Trains 55050 Genesee Wyoming Hopper 590002. So I picked up five of them. I collect G&W models. You have to having grown up right next to the railroad.

Work was pretty slow all day with the afternoon being even slower than the morning. It’s awesome.

Early this evening Dominica went to Stop and Shop to do the grocery shopping leaving Liesl alone at home with me for a few hours. Liesl just snuggled on my chest and fell asleep so I put on some of the new Knight Rider on Hulu and just let her sleep. I am getting good at this “dad” thing.

Liesl new swing arrived today. This is a second swing that we decided was needed because she loves the first one so much. This one does not use batteries but plugs into the wall and has both a swing and a glider mode for two different motions. We assembled it tonight and moved it up to our bedroom. Our hope is that Liesl will really like it and might be willing to sleep in there rather than in bed with us. We just don’t have enough room in the bed for all three of us and since Liesl wants to be held when she sleeps it pretty much means that one of us has to be half awake holder her all night. That makes it even harder to sleep since we are keeping the house so warm these days that it is causes us to not sleep very well just because of the warmth. So we are hoping that this might be a good solution for at least part of the night. The new swing is much larger than the old one that we have in the living room.

The weather was incredibly warm here today with temperatures almost reaching sixty degrees. It was so warm that even in a slight drizzle it was completely comfortable walking Oreo without a jacket at all. Not what I was expecting a week and a half before Christmas.

Oreo did manage to eat his full dinner tonight. He has barely eaten in days so he was really hungry. To keep him from gorging himself and making himself sick again just from eating so fast I split his meals into thirds and made him wait between each portion. That seemed to work and he was happy and perky all evening.

December 14, 2008: 16 Going on 17

If anyone out there can be really dedicated to loving a Boston Terrier, Annie is up for adoption. She is eleven years old and needs to be in a home without other pets. She is currently in a foster home. Speaking as someone who has rescued a Boston Terrier, there is nothing more wonderful that providing a wonderful home and caring environment for someone who has “lost” their family. An eleven year old will desperately be seeking comfort as her world has been torn apart. A dog like this needs security and a lot of snuggling and reassurance. She really needs to know that there is someone who really loves her.

Oreo had a restless night and appears to be about the same first thing this morning. It is pretty difficult to judge illness on a sleeping dog, however, so we will have to take a “reading” later in the day.

Liesl was pretty fussy last night and got us up around four thirty just wanting to be held. So I stayed up with her until seven thirty or so when she was clearly hungry. So then Dominica got up and stayed up with her for a while feeding her and I went to sleep.

I finally got up at ten thirty, showered and headed to the basement to work on SGL, check email and messages and to log into the office to get some work done. The industry freeze starts tomorrow and anything that we are going to get done before it hits has to be done today. So I am taking advantage of being up while everyone else is asleep to get some stuff done before January. It is also a chance to get in some hours prior to my big rate cut that is coming on January 1st.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I posted some additional pictures of Liesl on to Flickr. These few are the first pictures taken with the new Nikkor F1.4 50mm lens. I took a series of shots of Dominica holding Liesl by the deck door in Liesl’s new striped sweater than her Grandma Tocco knit for her.

I added a bunch of pictures of Oreo to the Boston Commons group on Flickr today.

Oreo came down to the basement just after noon. He seemed to be feeling slightly better than he did yesterday but it is impossible to really tell. He stretched and itched and seemed to be walking okay, but he wasn’t hungry and just wanted to lay beside me on his Star Wars pillow and be covered up in his fleece blankets.

Lunch for me today was just cereal. Dominica and Liesl didn’t leave the bedroom until almost two in the afternoon so I was left eating on my own.

I made breakfast for Oreo and after a few minutes he decided that he would give it a try. This is his first food in twenty four hours.

Another blog, The Urban Muse, used my growingly famous His and Hers Blackberry image today. I am just about to top 2,000 views on the image (which does not include views on the image from alternate sites such as this blog.)

The light was pretty good, for a change, this afternoon so I took a nice walk around Chapel Hill and took some pictures with my new 50mm lens. Now we have a nice set of pictures to show to people to give them an idea of where it is that we live. No one from back home really has a good feel for what downstate in Westchester is like. I took seventy-nine pictures while walking and decided to post about thirty of them.

For dinner, Dominica cooked Quorn chicken with broccoli meals, broccoli au grautin and vegetable steamed rice. We watched a little Hulu on the PS3. Then, after dinner, Liesl decided to take a long evening nap sleeping on my chest after I fed her a bottle. She ended up sleeping on my chest for almost eight hours until one thirty in the morning!

While Liesl was sleeping on my chest we all watched the first half of the first season of Reba which neither of us have ever seen. As far as we can tell the show was really made to be a statement about Texas. The show is just one shot at Texas after another.

Oh, about today’s title. Yes, Liesl is sixteen days old going on seventeen. It just seemed appropriate. And to celebrate this being a “Liesl Day” (watch The Sound of Music if you don’t get it) you can head over to www.statefarm.com/teendriving and download Modern Music’s new rock rendition of the classic song “Sixteen Going on Seventeen“. It is a free MP3 download paid for by State Farm. Good song too.

SGL Quick Changes

Some quick changes to SGL this morning. I have decided to try using dropdowns for the archives and categories in the sidebar as both of these have become so large that they were cluttering the sidebar and making it useless. One of the gotchas of having such a large blog.

Also, the Flickr badge has been added back in so that the five more recent photos uploaded to Flickr will appear on the side providing a quick view for people to see if something new has been added and also providing a quick link to the Flickr site which has become increasingly popular now that Liesl has arrived.

December 13, 2008: Fable 2 Day

I got up at seven thirty this morning and got right to work down in the office. This morning’s work was not too bad and it lasted only until around ten. Not bad at all.

Savanna at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge 2007 from Scott Miller on Vimeo.

I finally got Dominica and my first video from our trip to Walt Disney World in 2007 posted up no Vimeo. I have been meaning to get this done for forever and just have not gotten around to it. Now that there will be baby videos coming soon it is rather important that I eliminate any potential video processing backlog and get things completed.

This video was shot using our Canon Elura 60 camcorder from the balcony of our hotel room at the Animal Kingdom Lodge where we stayed for a weekend early last year. If you have a good video player on your computer such as VLC you can download the original 640×480 video in h.264 (m4v) also from Vimeo. Original h.264 video of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge. This version should play beautifully on AppleTV as well and is available via the vlog feed for our subscribers.

Dominica, Liesl and Oreo slept in until around ten. I was in the living room playing some Fable 2 on the XBOX 360 while I had some quiet time to myself. Today is my relaxing day for the week and I am taking advantage of it.

I spent the bulk of the day playing Fable 2. What an awesome game. I am so glad that Dominica decided that we needed to get that as our one game for the XBOX 360 for “Christmas” as a gift to each other. I am over halfway through the game now playing as the boy and going for “good and pure”. Dominica is only about an hour or so into the game and is playing as the girl and has decided to go for “evil and corrupt” so that she can get as different of a storyline as possible from mine as she has watched so much of the game as I have played it.

Dominica spent most of the day shopping and surfing the web from the laptop that we have set up in the living room. Christmas is always a busy shopping time. We are so thankful that we live in an era when Christmas shopping is an online affair. There is no way that we could handle going out to the stores looking for things. We would go crazy. It would have to be me doing it all as Dominica can’t go out shopping. We learned that lesson from the grocery store a few days ago, and the grocery store doesn’t have crazy Christmas crowds.

We were both very thankful that today got to be a “do nothing” day for the most part. Liesl was a little fussy today but not horribly, and today we began switching her over to cloth diapers. Cloth diapers are cheaper, better for the environment and better for preventing diaper rash and/or contact dermatitis – which I had as a child. Liesl has a little bit of diaper rash at this point and so Dominica felt that it was the best time to start switching her over before it got any worse.

We did several loads of laundry and two loads of dishes today plus hand cleaning. We generate so much stuff that needs to be cleaned every day around here I just can’t believe it. And several loads of garbage too.

This afternoon Oreo started acting strangely. We first noticed that something was wrong when he went down to the basement all by himself to get away from us. He wasn’t acting funny beyond that so we didn’t think much of it. As the day wore on, though, he started spending more time away from is in the basement and started acting more sluggish and sickly.

I took Oreo out for a walk and he didn’t even make it past the front walk before he was sick twice. Hopefully this is nothing more than a stomach ache. I brought him back inside and offered him dinner or a bone and he wanted neither. I went down to the basement (which is when I managed to get the videos uploaded to Vimeo) and spent a few hours with him while he just lay on his pillow feeling sick.

Later in the evening I forced him to go on a little walk just to make sure that “everything was working” since he hadn’t been eating. Everything was working (you can work out the details there for yourself) and as soon as he was done I scooped him up and ran him back to the house because it is so cold outside and he is so weak. So at least we believe that there is no blockage and it appears that he just doesn’t feel well like he has a doggy flu. He went to bed as usual and seemed to be about the same so we will watch him through the night and judge how he is doing in the morning.

We are not aware of him having eaten anything strange in the last twenty four hours. He was very happy, alert and perky when I took him on his long morning walk around the top of the hill. He seemed to be in better than usual spirits, in fact. He was extremely energetic and after his walk demanded his breakfast and then made me play fetch with him for half an hour or more. It was surprising how healthy he seemed. I know that he was still feeling okay at two thirty when Dominica and I had our lunch because he cleaned our dishes in the kitchen (we had mac and cheese for lunch.)

The only possibility for him getting into something that he should not have, as I think about it, was on our morning walk he was spending some time sniffing under a boulder (we have a lot of those here) and with his nose burried in some leaves it is possible that he ate something in there of which I was not aware. I did not think that he did but looking back it is theoretically possible.

We will just have to wait and see tomorrow. We were all off to bed around midnight.