Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 820 – Scott Alan Miller

August 20, 2008: Wrong Station, Ooops

93 Days to Baby Day! (26 Weeks, Five Days Pregnant)

Tomorrow is Dominica’s 30th Birthday.

Happy Birthday Joe Tocco! He is 23 today.

Dominica could not sleep very much last night as she was very upset about Sadie’s passing yesterday. She was awake much of the night and she accidentally woke up Oreo at four o’clock this morning when then proceeded to wake me up as well. Being awake that close to when my alarm would go off, at five thirty, made me unable to go back to sleep. So I have been awake since shortly after four in the morning.

Today is my working in Warren day. I took the train out to Summit, New Jersey, but today it was the “big” double-decker train and not the normal train that I ride. Because of this, or at least that is my story, Summit’s train station appeared from a different angle and I was unable to find the Summit Train Station sign until it was too late and the doors were closing and I missed my stop! Argh.

I rode the train one extra stop to Chatham, New Jersey, bought a ticket to return to Summit and took the next train back. Missing the station was not really a very big deal as I lost no more than fifteen minutes, but it did cause a minor panic and cost me $1.75.

On the train this morning I finished reading “The Sex Lives of Cannibals” and began reading “Attila: The Barbarian King Who Challenged Rome” by John Man. Sex Lives was very interesting; I really enjoyed it. Looking forward to Attila.

Today was quite a busy day. The morning just flew by – I barely noticed. Lunch time came and three of us went out to Chipotle in Bridgewater. I got a little car sick on the ride from a combination of being tired, being way too warm and riding in the back seat. I felt a little ill all afternoon.

Today Jeremy and Tim were at Castile Christian Academy working on the electrical wiring that needs to be installed so that we can get the new computers installed for the new school year.

Michael has a new “photography” blog: CongoBoy.

I got to leave the office by car with a friend driving me to Newark just after five so I was actually home well ahead of Dominica. I ordered in dinner from Nino’s so that it would arrive shortly after Dominica and Oreo would get home. Dominica is really looking forward to trying the rigatoni in vodka sauce that I got on Monday and I am looking forward to having it again. It is really delicious.

Dinner arrived and we settled in to watch some of The Love Boat. We made it through one episode then I had to go work for the rest of the evening.

Ryan stopped by a little before ten and hung out for half an hour or less during which time I continued to work as there was much to do. I worked until midnight. It was a long day, but I got a ton of work done that otherwise would have been left until this weekend. This weekend we are going to Frankfort to see Dominica’s family for her birthday.

For Dominica’s birthday I attempted to get her an Acer Aspire One laptop in pink but that color has not yet released (only sapphire blue and seashell white are available at the moment.) So, rather than settling for something that she would like less than that we decided that it would be more prudent to order one the moment that they are available.

August 19, 2008: Passing of Sadie

94 Days to Baby Day! (26 Weeks, Four Days Pregnant)

2 Days to Dominica’s 30th Birthday. (Thursday!)

Today, sadly, the Grice’s had to put down Sadie, their spaniel. They found her this morning more or less paralyzed. She was only six years old. Thet vet diagnosed her with three calcified discs in her back. There was little to be done.

Sadie was a great dog. A generally healthy, happy spaniel with big, loving brown eyes who was everyone’s instant friend. She was sweet and loving and a friend of Oreo’s as well. Sadie was Madeline and Emily’s little sister. She will be very much missed.

I worked on Wall Street today. Busy day, more or less. Did a quick lunch of salad with the guys and then ate at my desk.

For afternoon tea, Katie and I met at the Financier Pattiserie and had iced coffees and gelatto. The weather wasn’t too bad so we sat out on the street. Katie took a picture – she is a foodie and likes to have pictures of her food experiences.

Financier has the best gelatto. Far better than anything I have ever had elsewhere. After our coffee and gelatto, Katie headed back to work and I went back in to pick out pastries to take home to Dominica.

The afternoon passed pretty quickly. Taking a break to get afternoon tea helps to break up the day. I only worked until a little after six which is not too bad.

I got home and we were talking about doing dinner with Ryan but Dominica had just heard about Sadie and had no appetite. Being pregnant, the news was really rough on her. I was sad but can distance myself from the situation enough to not make me too upset as there is nothing to be done. No action that can help. Dominica was extremely upset though and spent the evening just watching Netflix and The Love Boat in the hopes of finding distraction. I spent most of the evening on the phone with Andy.

August 18, 2008: Buying Lots of Stuff

95 Days to Baby Day! (26 Weeks, Three Days Pregnant)

3 Days to Dominica’s 30th Birthday. (Thursday!)

Boy was I tired this morning. Oreo was starving having skipped his dinner last night. He made me getup and let him explore the house looking for food.

I’ve been having dreams that I remember a lot more recently. In the not too distant past, I went for several years without having any dreams – probably a product of the sleep apnia. Since being on the CPAP the last few years my sleep patterns have changed and from time to time I will dream a bit. The past few weeks have been one of those times.

Last night I had a strange dream in which I was something akin to a superhero sidekick. I didn’t have any super powers but I seemed to work for someone like superman. In the dream the super hero’s arch nemesis had devised some devious and underhanded means of destroying our hero and we had to come up with a plan to stop him.

I don’t remember any details – now I wish that I had written it down as soon as I woke up – but I know that at one point I had to descend into a crypt or prison deep underground and squeeze through a doorway made of stone that didn’t even seem large enough to squeeze through physically, even with a push. The underground area was well lit and pretty clean. Very strange. It seemed as though just being in such a place should invoke panic, but it did not.

The arch nemisis / bad guy had come up with some way to make one of his henchmen temporarily into a super anti-hero so that he could come and destroy the real super hero. Through some ingenious plan that I concocted, though, we were able to fool the super anti-hero into destroying the bad guy instead.

Sorry, that was a pretty awful retelling of the dream.

I did some shopping today. Quite a bit, in fact. I bought two Seagate 750GB SATA drives for the HP DL145 G3 as well as an additional 8GB of memory for it. That will take it to a total of 9GB of memory (it ships with 1GB.) The two hard drives will be in a RAID 1 configuration for redundancy so only .75TB of usable storage.

I also bought a brand new HP DL385 G5 with two quad core AMD Opteron 2.1GHz processors, 4GB of memory (plus an additional 16GB to add to it for a total of 20GB), SmartArray P400 RAID controller with 256MB of drive cache, two Seagate Savvio 15K RPM 73GB hard drives and two Seagate Savvio 10K RPM 146GB hard drives. This is going to be one monstrous server. This will, in the near future, be the server hosting SGL, too.

I picked up a few miscellaneous items as well including an HP USB DVD Burner and an APC Back UPS battery system for dad’s desktop as he has serious power issues at his house and it really causes problems with his computer equipment. This was one major shopping day!

This evening, I tried to buy an Acer Aspire One in coral pink for Dominica for her birthday (which is on Thursday.) To our dismay we discovered that Acer has not started shipping the pink or brown Aspire One models yet and only the blue and white are currently available. We had worked very hard to come up with a good birthday idea and now we have nothing. We might just wait for the pink One to release rather than going for something else sooner.

I worked until seven thirty then we ordered in dinner from Nino’s. Dominica just got a salad and sandwich. I decided to try something different and got rigattoni in a vodka cream sause which turned out to be amazing. I will be getting that more often now. Very, very tasty and healthier than my usual alfredo sauce.

We watched some of The Love Boat and then it was off to bed. Pretty relaxing night for us except that Dominica needed to cook Oreo’s food for the week. He was just about out of food and we just realized it this morning.

August 17, 2008: Nadine and Clarence’s Wedding

96 Days to Baby Day! (26 Weeks, Two Days Pregnant)

4 Days to Dominica’s 30th Birthday. (Thursday!)

I awoke at seven this morning. I have become so accustomed to waking so early recently that it is getting hard to sleep in even when I am tired. My CPAP facemask is starting to fall apart and it is time for me to switch to the new one that I got almost a year ago. I have been avoiding switching to it because I don’t want to go through them any faster than is absolutely necessary since they are rather expensive and dealing with the CPAP shop has been rather traumatic thus far.

We slept in a bit today as yesterday was just exhausting. I did some work in the living room before Dominica got up. I was up a few hours before she was. Oreo came out and laid in the sunlight for a while.

We got breakfast from downstairs, French toast and eggs, and attempted to watch an episode of The Love Boat. Our afternoon ended up being very short. Before we knew it we were rushing around trying to get ready for the wedding. It is amazing how quickly the day can vanish on you when you have some place to be at four in the afternoon.

It was not a far drive to the wedding. It was at L’Affaire Catering on US 22 in Mountainside, New Jersey. It took us just under twenty minutes to get over there. We ended up having plenty of time – we were there about forty-five minutes before the service started.

They had a little panic at the wedding – something happened to the officiating minister and he was unable to make it to the ceremony! Clarence’s father, fortunately, is a minister and was able to step in without any warning. It really caught him by surprise – arriving at his sons wedding with no intention of “having a job to do” and suddenly having to be the officiating minister! What a day for him. He had just come from doing his normal Sunday morning sermon(s) and was rather hoarse.

The wedding was very nice. I tried to take lots of pictures. I was very prepared bring two batteries for the Kodak camera. Both, somehow, were dead. I managed to get approximately five shots before both batteries were dead. What a waste. I had considered bringing the good Nikon SLR and apparenly that would have been the better decision. One would think that by having two batteries for the same camera that these kinds of problems would not arise so often.

We had a good crowd of residents from our apartment there to see the wedding. Nadine is very popular around here. It was nice to get a chance to spend some time with a number of our neighbours that we do not get to see regularly or at least not very often or for very long.

After the service there was a cocktail hour while the wedding party got their pictures taken. JC, who used to work at our building, was one of the groom’s men as well which was nice as we have not seen him for more than a minute since he left our building to take a nice airline job.

The cocktail hour was awesome. Not only did we have fun visiting with our neighbours but the food was spectacular. They had tons and tons of food with all kinds of different stations plus waiters coming around with different items. The baked brie and raspberry sauce, the mushroom pasta, the penne vodka, the salmon on puff pastry with mustard sauce, etc., etc. It was great. It was very, very difficult not to overeat to the point of not being able to eat dinner.

Dinner was awesome as well. This might be the best wedding food that I have ever had. Dominica and I both had the baked salmon, mashed potatoes and veggies for dinner. We didn’t really dance. Dominica, being pregnant, really was not up for it and with my foot problems we figured that it was best if it was avoided.

We stayed until nine thirty or so. The crowd was beginning to thin. We had a really good time and were very happy to have been able to have attended. The newlyweds are off on a honeymoon cruise shortly for more than a week.

Oreo was so upset that we were gone all day that he didn’t even eat dinner. He just lay on the bed with us and snuggled as close as he could while we watched a little The Love Boat before going to sleep.

August 16, 2008: Another Working Saturday

97 Days to Baby Day! (26 Weeks, One Day Pregnant)

5 Days to Dominica’s 30th Birthday. (Thursday!)

NowMedia’s article “Growing Plants the Disney Way” used one of my Disney greenhouse pictures today.

I have been pondering what to get Dominica for her thirtieth birthday. It is a tough time for gift giving – neither of us has any outstanding items of which we wish (other than the obvious – spare time, travel, etc.) nor do we have any space in which to put anything if we were to receive it. The only thing for which I know Dominica has been pining for some time is a pink laptop, originally an Asus EeePC but as those have been discontinued in pink the more powerful and up-to-date Acer Aspire One perhaps. She is addicted to pink personal electronics, as my regular readers undoubtably know.

The issue with any electronic device as a gift is that it is so temporal. The gift will not last, or at least not last as a regularly used item, and will quickly age and be considered to be old. Not a long-lasting thirtieth birthday gift. Other than the laptop we have no other real ideas. Dominica doesn’t wear jewelry really and she just got a nice watch for Christmas. Large items are out of the question right now as well.

I had to be up quite early this morning. Five minutes before six, to be exact. Way too early to be getting up on a Saturday morning after having gone to bed late after having worked a very long Friday, but what can you do?

I worked all morning for the office and then had a little time to myself around the middle of the day. At eleven Dominica drove up to Nutley, NJ to get her hair cut. It is her first hair cut since she had it cut in preparation for our last trip to the United Kingdom in November.

My day, although it involved getting up early and doing formal “work” all morning, is actually an incredibly relaxing one. I have no huge deadlines looming over me today and my to-do list, while always expansive, doesn’t have any really hot, “must-do” items that have to be addressed today. i am pretty much caught up on several fronts and I get to work on some more “fun” items and relax a bit.

I did a bit of reading today, both in “The Zen of CSS Design” and “The Sex Lives of Cannibals.” Dominica spent the afternoon watching Funny Girl and Funny Lady with Barbara Streisand and Omar Sherif.

I spent a bit of the afternoon working on some PHP programming. I have a project that has been on the back burner for way too long and I need to get it “completed”. Right now the project is straight PHP with an XHTML/CSS interface. Down the road I am thinking about converting it to Ruby on Rails and using an AJAX framework to make it really schnazzy. Something like the YUI or Dojo.

We ordered in pizza for dinner from Brazilian Pizza tonight. For the meal we got milho verde and for dessert we tried banana pizza. Dominica really like the banana pizza but for me it wasn’t sweet enough to be a dessert pizza but I could tell that the idea of banana pizza was really good. I think that the obvious choice would be to make a chocolate and banana pizza. That would be awesome.

We finished watching Harry and the Hendersons and then watched two episodes of the second half of the first season of The Love Boat.

Tomorrow is going to be a very busy day. In the morning I will be doing some work but before too long we have to get ready to leave as we have Nadine and Clarence’s wedding to attend at four down in Mountainside, NJ.

I didn’t get checked out from the office until almost eight in the evening. I was stuck supporting the continuity of business test for over thirteen hours. It was a long day being trapped at the computer. Several hours of that were on active conference calls. I have no scheduled work for tomorrow.