Sheep Guarding Llama

64 Days to Baby Day! (30 Weeks and Six Days Pregnant)

Oreo and I overslept this morning.  He was being super snuggly and when I woke up his head was right beside mine.  He seems to really be loving his late mornings this week.  What a spoiled little dog he is.  He is going to have so much energy stored up that he is really going to have a lot of fun playing with his grandpa on the farm this weekend.

The weather is a little warner today than it has been, but I really am enjoying the fresh air so I kept the windows open.  The apartment and the plants are all really enjoying it as well.

Side Show Bob, the healthy, upwardly mobile tree that sits on the windowsill directly beside my desk, has been far beyond the capacity of his pot as of late and today I finally got around to transplanting him to the nice, big, new ceramic pot that Dominica bought for him a few weeks ago.

The transplanting process was a bit more work than I thought that it would be.  I knew that I was going to need to cut the put off of him to get him loose but I had no idea to what extent he was going to be caught in the pot.  The foot system had grown a good three to four inches past the bottom of the pot so the pot was pretty well integrated into the plant itself.

It probably took twenty minutes but Sideshow Bob is now into his new pot, is watered and is preparing to undergo several days of shock.  Hopefully he will recover and flourish in his new environs.

I went over to Food for Life to get my lunch today.  I haven’t eaten over there in a while.  Now that we are on the home stretch towards moving to Peekskill I am beginning to realize just how few opportunities I have to eat at places like FFL before we leave the region.

My next greenthumb task is to replant the baby mandarins that we have growing in the same pot as our main mandarin plant.  Originally there were just a few babies but now there are about a dozen!  Anyone want one?  Maybe I can save one for you.  The mandarin houseplant family is known for being one of the best plants for cleaning the air.

I managed to complete all of my textbook reading that was assigned this week for my class at RIT.  I also did the “in class” work which includes going through the professor’s powerpoint presentation.  Now I only have the weekly homework left to do.

Work at the office was not too busy today.  With the stock market continuing to be completely crazy we are really just battening down the hatches rather than making any changes.

For dinner this evening we ordered in from Golden City.  We got our usual order: spring rolls, cheese wantons, vegetable lo mein for Dominica and General Tso’s Bean Curd (tofu) for me.  We will really miss Golden City, Nino’s, Airlie, Brazilian Pizza and Food for Life when we move to Peekskill.

Tonight was Min’s night to cook for Oreo.  There isn’t another evening at home until Wednesday of next week!

After Min cooked Oreo’s dinners for the week we spent the evening relaxing while watching the final season of Frasier.  It is amazing that I had never seen the final seasons.  The first seven seasons or so were ones that I knew so well.

Dominica went to sleep around a quarter till ten.  I was not tired yet and there was only an hour and a half left of all of Frasier and I knew that I would not have an opportunity to watch it again until late next week so I just stayed up and finished watching the final season.  Then it was off to bed for me as well.

Tomorrow is going to be a long day.  In the morning I will be home with Oreo.  Then in to the city and having lunch with Katie.  Then the office in the afternoon.  Dominica will get home as early as she can to rescue Oreo and pack.  Then if everything goes to plan we will be on the road towards dad’s house around eight and arriving around two in the morning.

65 Days to Baby Day! (30 Weeks and Five Days Pregnant)

Dominica was really exhausted when she dragged herself from bed this morning.  She barely got any sleep.  Five hours at the very best and likely only a tiny fraction of that.  Oreo and I had the luxury of sleeping in quite a bit.  Now that I have my office BlackBerry working again I am able to check my email from bed which means I can often get an hour or two of additional rest!  Just one more reason why having a BlackBerry does not necessitate additional work but can actually reduce it.

The weather was really great today.  I opened up the windows first thing this morning and got some fresh air into the house.  It was bright and sunny so Oreo headed right out to his favourite spot in the living room.  We are really hoping that the new house has good sun spots in which he will be able to sleep.

Today was quite a busy work day.  The plan was to do some work from home and then to head in to the office but I was so busy that I never got an opportunity to leave the apartment.  I just ended up working all day.  In fact, it was well after three when I finally had a chance to get some lunch but it was so late that I figured that it would interfere with dinner.  So I skipped lunch and just worked through it.

I did manage to do some cleaning today and to take care of the dishes which have been backing up.  It wasn’t much but it made a big improvement in the house.  We are shipping out the DL385 G5 that has been sitting in the living room for several weeks this weekend and that will allow us to take down the table upon which it sits which will give us our living room back finally.

I had a real ordeal ordering drive trays for the DL385 G5 today.  Who would have guessed that HP does not sell the Proliant 2.5″ hot swap trays separately from their hard drives so there is really no simple was to be able to use third party hard drives in a unit like the DL385.  I think that I found a solution but it took quite a bit of time on instant messenger and on the phone with HP to figure it out.  Once we had figured out what part was needed – and that required tech support, not sales support – then I was able to find the part from eBay even though HP themselves do not sell it.

This is a long weekend for Dominica and I as we are heading up to dad’s house on Friday night and staying until Tuesday night.  This will be our longest stretch in Upstate New York since March, 2006, I believe.  We are pretty sure that we are able to leave on Friday night because of the freeze on the environment at work making it so that teams are unable to do deployments so my night will likely end early.

I have been doing a bit of shopping on Amazon for their MP3 downloads recently.  I’ve found several artists recently that I really like that I just have not been listening to previously.  I really like Michael Buble, Azam Ali and Cheryl Bentyne neither of whom I was truly aware before auditioning them on Amazon.  I’m finding great new music from artists that I used to listen to regularly but with which I have “lost contact” over the years giving me a wealth of great music to discover.  Artists like Enya, Loreena McKennitt as well as Leonard Bernstein conduction Gustav Mahler’s Symphony Number 2 in C Minor, “Resurrection”.

Andy and I were talking about home theatre options for the new house in Peekskill this evening.  Dominica and I had talked about putting a large LCD monitor down in the den in the basement but had kicked around the idea of getting a new projector as well.  Optoma has a really nice sounding 1080p projector that we could ceiling mount in the den that might work out wonderfully.

Projectors have come a long way since we first installed the InFocus X1 into the basement theatre on Hawthorn Circle.  That old projector was not widescreen and had a resolution of 800 by 600 and only output 650 or 700 lumens.  We had it stretched out to a fourteen foot screen size which was really tough to do with that little light output.

In the new house we will have quite a bit less screen area; it will be close to six or seven feet which is just over one quarter the total screen area as we had in Geneseo.  The Optoma has 1300 lumens.  That means that this would be many times brights and higher resolution.  The price is not far off from a nice 47″ LCD so it might be a good option for us, especially as the den area of the basement will be either partially or completely isolated from outside light.

On her way home from work Dominica swung into On the Border and picked up dinner which, as always, means chipotle fish tacos for me.  Today Dominica opted for a salad.  Last night we ate so late that she was not able to get to sleep and that made her really exhausted so we decided that we needed to eat as early as possible tonight so that she could get to bed really early.

I had Frasier all set up and ready to go when Dominica walked in the door with dinner.  We watched three episodes or so while eating dinner.  Then Andy called and we talked for a while.  Dominica went to sleep around eight thrity or so.  She will be feeling much better tomorrow.

The stock market really took a beating today.  Our drop today was far worse than even Monday.  This is really something.  It will be interesting to watch over the next several days to see what happens.

I discovered that there is a bit of Silver Spoons on Hulu today.  I don’t think that I have seen that show since it was new.  I am really unsure if I have ever even seen it in early reruns.  I definitely remember it but only so well.

I was not all that tired this evening.  After having my hours shifted so much the last few days my schedule is off by a bit.  So I attempted to do some work while I was up.  I am a bit behind on a number of things so there is no end to the work that I need to do.  That is especially true as we are traveling this weekend and it would be really nice if I could have my homework done before going to dad’s house as it will take a large chunk of time to work on that while we are there.

I worked until just after one in the morning.  I did not really want to be up so late but it gave me a chance to do some really important catching up on the BrainBench work that I have been doing.

I also logged in to my class to make sure that I was keeping up and not missing anything important.  I put in some comments and responded to people and got some stuff set up so that I can work on my week’s homework assignment tomorrow.  So far, this class is only a tiny fraction of the work that I have had to do in other classes at RIT.  That means that I am starting to be concerned that I am missing something that I am supposed to be doing.  That happens to be a lot.

I looked carefully tonight before going to bed and I do have something rather large due in my class by Friday of next week so I do need to get looking into that right away.  Can’t sit around on these things.  I can’t wait until my degree is done.

Tomorrow I will be home with Oreo all day.  Hopefully getting a chance to do some homework.  My reading assignments at the very least.

66 Days to Baby Day! (30 Weeks and Four Days Pregnant)

I woke up this morning to the sound of the fire alarm.  Fortunately, Dominica had closed the bedroom door and Oreo was under some blankets and was not really disturbed by the alarm.  It turned out later that something in the alarm system had shorted out causing it to go off.  No damage was done.

I worked from home this morning.  Oreo is stuck home all week so we are trying to figure out how to get him through his days without it being a big problem.

It was pretty late by the time that I finally got on my way to Manhattan.  I headed straight down to South William Street and over to Pearl to meet Katie for lunch at Fraunce’s Tavern, an American landmark.  The tavern is famous as the site where Washington officially retired from his post as general and disbanded the young army that had just recently won our freedom from England.  We got to eat in the very room where it had taken place.

The tavern was also the first site of America’s Department of War.  The building was rented by the government as the first capital was just a few blocks away on Wall Street.  Many revolutionary meetings took place here, as well, prior to the outbreak of the wall.  The building itself was a three story mansion dating from the very early eighteenth century.

For lunch I had the lobster roll which was lobster salad on brioche which was excellent.  I am eager to try several different dining options at Fraunce’s.  They have a really great seafood and fish menu.

The day really wasn’t very busy.  Because of the market being the way that it is there is very little to do.  We all are on pins and needles in case something goes wrong but there is no extra work being done for reasons of stability.  It makes for a good week in administration.

It was rather late when I finally got home this evening.  Dominica ordered in from Nino’s while I was on the PATH and we ate while watching some Frasier.  We are now on to the final season.  I am really enjoying the series.  Most of it I have seen over the years but the last few seasons are almost completley new to me, especially the last two.  I am pretty sure that I have never seen a single episode of the final season.

Overall Wall Street was pretty calm today.  We actually made some gains back from the huge losses yesterday.  No one knows if this is all over yet, or not.  It is a good time to be saving for retirement, though, but a horrible time to be burning retirement resources.  Not a really good time to be holding money to buy a house, either.  🙁

Dominica was suffering from insomnia this evening so we ended up staying up until after one in the morning in the hopes that watching some Frasier would tire her out.  Tomorrow is going to be a really long day for her.