Sheep Guarding Llama

So much for sleeping through the night.  Going to bed so late did not help things and instead of sleeping for about seven hours Liesl barely slept at all.  She was awake all through the night which, of course, kept us up.  Dominica tried to let me sleep some but it isn’t easy when Liesl needs things and Dominica needs me to pick her up for her.

Liesl got up at seven thirty this morning which was close enough to the time that I needed to start work that I just got up, changed her and headed down to the office to get to work.  Six and a half hours of irregular sleep isn’t very much after working a double and I think that Dominica is quite a bit more tired than I am even though she got a great, multi-hour nap in yesterday afternoon without any interruptions.

It is dark and rainy again today.  The rain has not stopped in three days at least.  There is standing water on the patio, in the grass, in the parking lot.  Westchester is saturated with water.

Lot’s of layoffs at the office yesterday.  Some of the first that really impacted people that I know directly and work with everyday.  One person was emailing me in the morning and then just stopped responding to the emails.  Turns out that she was layed off during our email conversation.  I am told that London is being hit very hard with jobs being relocated to low cost centers rather than insanely expensive London itself.  Few people will be willing to relocate out of London so those turn into layoffs rather than relocations.  A handful of people will choose to move, I’m sure.

I found out that I am scheduled to work tomorrow again.  I think that this is three Saturdays in a row.  I’d complain about the amount of time but given the current situation we sure can use the extra money.  Liesl doesn’t really fit into the Mazda PR5 so we are kicking around the idea of buying another car (and trading in one of our two current cars.)

The deals right now are really good but buying a new car is still buying a new car.  We would really like the Mazda 3 but it is unlikely to be enough bigger than the PR5 to make a difference.  The 6 is pretty expensive for a second car.  We don’t really like the 5 and the CX series aren’t what we are really interested in although Dominica did drive a CX7 as a loaner and it wasn’t too bad.  It’s an option.

The problem is that once we start getting past the price of a Mazda 3 then it starts making us wonder if it wouldn’t be better to put the money into a BMW instead.  When I bought my Mazda 6 I got five years with 0% APR and they are not offering that again.  Now they are just offering 3 years with 0% APR and a small customer loyalty bonus.  The deals are good but not as good as they used to be back in 2002.

By late morning we actually had a little sunlight.  This is the first that we have seen in days.

Dominica spent most of the day in the living room watchnig Kate and Allie.  She is up to the third season now.  While I was working I did some editing of Dominica and my footage from Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom Lodge from 2007 (yes, two trips ago) and am working to get it collected into a finalized video so that I can finally post it.

I discovered, while preparing to compress my home movie of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge, that Handbrake 0.9.3 has released.  The new Handbrake is much more flexible and solves a lot of the problems that I have had in the past plus it runs faster and, in theory, produces higher quality output.  Anyone doing video conversion to Xvid, MPEG4 or h.264 (or Ogg Theora) should definitely download it and give it a try.  I have to use a tool like Handbrake becaue Pinnacle does not produce h.264 output, output for AppleTV nor does in dei-nterlace – all which are critical to producing even the most rudimentarily useful output for video today.

I saw an add for the Honday Insight today.  Their first hybrid car is scheduled to return next year and it looks pretty nice.  I would be interested in driving one.  In their add, though, they lead off the add by asking “Who introduced the first hybrid to the United States?”  This got me thinking.  I knew that Porsche introduced the first hybrid ever, in 1901, but I also knew that they didn’t sell it in the US.  So I did some quick research and the answer is The Woods “Dual Power” of 1915 – 1918.  Of course, the Honda add claims that Honday introduced the first hybrid vehicle to the US in 1999.  I have a feeling that there were dozens of hybrid vehicles on the US market before 1999.  The Prius is from 1997 but was not sold in the US until 2001.  My guess is that Honday uses that one, single latecomer to the market as their basis for being “first”.  Rather like South Africa claiming to be the first country to put someone on the moon in fifty years after Russia, China and the EU have already done it but before Ethiopia does.

I worked until around eight this evening. Then Dominica and I spent the rest of the evening watching The Dick Van Dyke Show on Hulu via PlayOn on the PS3 in the living room.  It was around midnight when we finally convinced Liesl that it was time to get off to bed.

The video turned out pretty well.  It is about twelve minutes long and is just footage from Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge’s Savanah.  Kind of boring but it is also a pretty amazing sales pitch for the Animal Kingdom Lodge considering the entire thing is shot from out hotel room balcony and a few shots from the central observation platform by the restaurants.  Now I just need to figure out how I can get it posted online for people to see.

My work starts tomorrow at eight in the morning.  This should be the last busy weekend for a while.  At least busy from a work perspective.

Liesl slept pretty well last night but Dominica and I did not.  We tried putting Liesl into her own bed/positioner thing that we then put between our pillows.  Being in the positioner made her toss and turn all night, though, and she kept making sounds that caused us to wake up all throughout the night.  So even though Liesl slept through the night pretty well, Dominica and I did not sleep much at all.  Apparently we need to work on “sleeping logistics” even more than Liesl does.

It’s another warmish but very rainy day here in Peekskill, New York.  My kind of weather.  Light rain that never stops.  Constant overcast.  Dark grey.  The kind of day that doesn’t hurt your eyes and provides nice, cool, even lighting lowering eye strain in every possible way.  The only downside is that it is so dark so quickly that by four in the afternoon it had might as well be midnight.

Dominica had a morning doctor’s appointment, just a checkup.  I had to drive her down since she still cannot drive herself.  That meant that today is my very first time completely alone with Liesl.  I am now dad and in charge and responsible for keeping my daughter alive and healthy.

Liesl and I stopped off at the Gulf station on Crompond to get gas.  It is full service there which is handy when you have an infant in the car.  Gas is down to $1.99 here which is extremely low for Westchester even if it is one of the highest prices in the country.

We got home and I raced around the house attempting to work and to keep Liesl happy as much as possible. I tried putting her in her car seat and having her on my desk next to me but she was very unhappy about that situation (this was her very first trip to the basement of her own house.)  So I moved her back to the living room and put her into her swing.  She always likes her swing.

Liesl was still very unhappy and it was escalating so I decided that she must need her bottle.  I started preparing her bottle.  I turned on the PS3 and PlayOn showing Knight Rider off of Hulu to provide some background noise for her while I was getting her bottle ready.  By the time that I got back to the living room with the bottle she had fallen asleep to the sound of the television and remained asleep until Dominica called for us to go back downtown and pick her up from the clinic.

Lunch was more prepared food from Stop and Shop that we picked up last night.  We tried their baked macaroni and cheese but it wasn’t very good.  We need to just make that at home if that is something that we want.  It isn’t hard to make.  Dominica didn’t even eat her portion and just threw it out.  I didn’t think it was that bad just rather bland.

My day was incredibly busy at the office.  This will probably continue for at least another week.  This is the busiest time of the year and it really is exhausting.

I took a break after the main part of the day was done and went up and had dinner with Dominica and we watched a little of The Dick Van Dyke Show before I headed back down to the office to get back to work.

What a long day.  I ended up working about sixteen hours.  A full double.  I was really exhausted by the end of the day.  It was well after midnight when I got a chance to wrap up and head off to bed.  After getting everything ready and feeding Liesl it was around one in the morning when Dominica and I finally went to bed.

Liesl slept though the entire night last night!  She went to bed with Dominica at eleven when she had her bottle.  She didn’t wake up until after seven this morning.  What a blessing.  We are now getting real sleep again.

I got pictures from yesterday edited and uploaded to Flickr this morning.  The Liesl Flickr set is now up to 111 images, and I haven’t even had a chance to start using the new 50mm lens yet that arrived yesterday.

My morning was completely crazy.  I worked until one thirty in the afternoon without any break at all.  Major problems at the office keeping us all on our toes.  Not a fun day.  Not interesting work just cleaning up after things have broken. The worst kind of work.

This afternoon was Liesl’s checkup at the doctor’s office.  My morning was so crazy that I didn’t get to shower or eat or walk Oreo before we had to go.  We took him with us and he had a quick walk on the way to the car but that was all.

Liesl’s doctor’s appointment went well.  She is up to eight pounds now which is very good.  All of her signs are very healthy.  Her umbilical cord fell off this morning so he got to inspect that as well.

After we got home, Dominica made me some lunch while I got back to work and then she started playing the original Fable on the XBOX.  She had started Fable 2 the other day but then realized that we had the original game as well so she went back and is going to play them in order.

It is a dark and dreary day here today.  We are into the darkest few weeks of the year plus it is very overcast and has been raining all day.  So there has been practically no natural light at all.  One of the problems of having a baby just as we head towards winter is that there is so little light with which to take pictures.

Pinnacle Studio Plus 12 arrived today.  I wanted to update to the latest version now that I will be taking videos of Liesl on a regular basis.  I already have one video that I attempted to post to Flickr just to discover that Apple’s faulty QuickTime wasn’t able to play the audio on the file but that once it got to Flickr it had audio of people talking in the background that I have to fix.

I got the first video posted.  Pinnacle has not really improved at all in this latest version.  I am very disappointed.  It was cheap and will work for me for now just fine but down the road, when I get a high def camcorder for recording Liesl, Pinnacle completely falls apart.  In Pinnacle’s extreme wisdom they have decided to completely block the use of 1080p output (even though practically everyone shoots in this for home use these days and needs it for viewing on their televisions) as well as h.264 compression (the only practical compression solution for anything online) so that you are limited to old, bulky compression algorithms at artificially low resolutions maxing out at 1080i (but who has a monitor that handles interlacing without having to convert to progressive – and even progressive is a misnomer since LCD displays it all at once!)

I’ve heard a rumor that Adobe Premier Elements doesn’t have these artificual cripplings so I will be able to use that to make my “basic home movies” that even Pinnacle can’t handle properly 🙁  (Just to open videos taken with my over-a-year-old Kodak digicam required me to upgrade again to Pinnacle 12.1 and to apply an h.264 license!)

For now by highest definition camera is my Kodak Digicam which is only 720p which Pinnacle can handle.  I have to output to somewhat bloated MPEG-4 files and just work with those or else output to super low-compression MPEG-2 and use a third party conversion utility to transfer into h.264 files that can be handled by AppleTV or for other online download purposes.  The worst part is that in the Pinnacle forums everyone defends Pinnacle Studio’s shortcomings by claiming that no one can use this stuff online – as if AppleTV and FrontRow on Apple products, iTunes, and the like’s default settings (which are pathetically low IMHO) don’t even represent real users!

Not to mention shows like Mariposa which has been available in 1080p for years now and is doing well.  Part of the problem is that everyone assumes a tiny slice of possible usage scenarios and thinks that everyone else wants to do the same thing.  They point out in the forums that services like Vimeo don’t go to such a high resolution and ergo those resolutions don’t matter.  But Vimeo is a single, free, Flash-player service.  What about RSS based background downloaders and Torrent users?  There are a lot of us out here ready to consume 10-100x the bandwidth that videos are currently be offered in but no one is providing any content.

I took Oreo on a very long walk this evening.  We went up the hill and all the way out to the main entrance of the complex and back along with a short side trip too.  He was very excited and very hungry by the time that we returned home.

The Ralstons are planning on coming down to Peekskill the weekend after New Year’s.  We haven’t seen them in months.  They are planning to stay two or three days.  This is their chance to see Liesl.  Ramona is coming next weekend to visit Liesl (that is the the weekend after this weekend coming up in a few days.)  Liesl has a lot of people looking to come visit her.

I am working on getting the first Liesl video cross-posted to Vimeo but am having some problems getting their uploader to accept the file.  I know that the file is good because it worked fine on Flickr.  I tried YouTube but they are down for maintenance at the moment.

Dominica, Liesl and I all went out to the Stop and Shop tonight for some serious grocery shopping as we are out of everything at the house.  This is Dominica and Liesl’s first trip anywhere other than the doctor’s office.  Liesl did really well barely making a sound the entire time that we were shopping – which is good because it is totally unfair to force a crying baby onto people in public unnecessarily.

We got a ton of food and supplies.  We should not need to go back to the grocery store for some time now.  At least a week, I hope.  We had to go today because Oreo is just about out of food and needs something to eat tomorrow.

For dinner we picked up a ready to bake pizza from Stop and Shop and cooked that ourselves.  We put on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and watched that before going to bed.  No video games for me today.  Dominica did get to put in a few hours on Fable.

Liesl really slept last night.  We went to bed around ten thirty and she pretty much slept all night long!  This was definitely the most sleeping that she has done yet.  Quite impressive.  We were definitely not expecting her to allow us to get this much sleep already.

I got up just after eight this morning and showered and got ready for the day.  Then I came down and visited with everyone, since they were already up, for a little while before heading down to the basement to get to work.

Dad, aunt Sharon and uncle Leo went out to Pastel’s in the Beach Shopping Center to get breakfast before hitting the road.  They woud have just eaten on the road but they wanted to be able to see Dominica and Liesl before they left.

Everyone took off around eleven this morning.  Now Dominica and I are alone with the baby.  Alone for real.  No one to pass her off to and no one arriving in a few hours for the “next shift.”  Just us and Liesl.  Now it gets scary 😉

I had a really busy day at the office.  It is a very busy time of year so it is not unexpected.  I did get a chance over my lunch break (which isn’t so much a break as I am constantly on my BlackBerry and checking in on requests) to play a little of Fable 2.  Dominica started playing it herself this morning but then decided that she wanted to play Fable 1 before getting into the sequel as it truly is a sequel continuing the story from the first installment (or so I am told, I am playing them out of order.)

Today is definitely a relaxing day for us.  Liesl slept well last night but we are still tired.  We spent the evening relaxing in the living room with Oreo and Liesl with a fire in the fireplace that burned most of the night (two artificial logs done sequentially.)

The fire didn’t go out until late so Dominica, Oreo and Liesl all went to bed and I stayed up waiting for the fire to die down enough so that I could close the glass doors and go to bed.  It took about an hour before it was safe to wrap things up.  I played a little Fable 2 while I was waiting.

I didn’t even get to sleep in until it was time for work this morning because I got paged out to keep working on the same problem that there was last night at eleven that was not wrapped up during the overnight shift.  So I only got about six hours of sleep at maximum if that.  Dominica and Liesl slept for a while longer.

I managed to get a bunch more Liesl pictures edited and uploaded to Flickr this morning.  Using the Nikon with the SB-600 SpeedLight really makes it easy to take pictures in the house.  What a blessing that I bought that SpeedLight more than a year ago.

Dad, aunt Sharon and uncle Leo went out to Pastel’s for breakfast late this morning around ten and brought back take out for Dominica and I.  My morning at work was extremely busy.  It was just one request after another coming in as quickly as we could handle them.  There are a lot of people out this week making it very difficult to keep up as we also have to figure out what to do with all of the requests which normally are handled by other people and no one is running triage.

After breakfast dad, aunt Sharon and uncle Leo set to work working on installing the “drip tray” under the washing machine which is located on the second floor of our house.  Why a washer was installed without a drip tray to protect the structure of the house I have no idea.

While installing the drip tray (which doesn’t fit as there is no room at all in that tiny space) they discovered that the dryer was installed completley unsafely and that it really wasn’t working.  The dryer vent was smashed so that almost no air could get into it and the lint trap was so full of lint that it held water!  It is a miracle that the thing didn’t blow up for the previous owners.  It appears that they installed it themselves instead of having an installer do it for them which would explain why it matches all of the faulty wiring, missing GFI and sloppy paint all over the place.

Hours were spent working on the washer and dryer.  We even considered running out and buying a new dryer because there were so many problems.  It was a pretty major project.  Eventually they figured something out though that will hold us for a while safely but with the dryer sticking into the hallway slightly.  Sometime after Christmas dad is planning on coming down again depending on the weather.  Maybe in January or February if we get some nice days.

Work remained pretty busy all day and I didn’t get a chance to leave the “office” until after seven making for an eleven hour straight day.  Pretty long.

There wasn’t much chance for an evening after getting done after seven.  We had had a really early dinner around five thirty that aunt Sharon and uncle Leo picked up from Beach Shopping Center.  So now that I was done with work we just hung out in the living room with Liesl and watched The Gameplan again.  Even though we have Hulu and Netflix and CBS all working via PlayOn on the PS3 there is no easy way to sort through all of the available material and the Netflix queue only includes stuff for Dominica to watch and no one felt much like watching many of her picks.

We headed off to bed around ten thirty.  Not too bad.