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.

Oreo is happy to be home, of course.  He would prefer if he only went to daycare three days a week at most and never two consecutive days, and he definitely would never voluntarily give up a sunny day at home laying in the living room.  I hope that the new house – assuming that we are still able to get it given all that is going on currently – has some good sunspots for Oreo.

The house is oriented on an angle with the front door facing northwest.  There are not many windows on the front of the house – just the kitchen and the master bedroom on the second floor.  So the second bedroom, the living room with the deck and the basement office area with the patio all face southeast.  In theory, this could mean some good morning sun for Oreo but unlikely any in the afternoon or evening.  The hill behind the house is heavily wooded, though, so that might limit Oreo’s sun expose.  He would be very sad.  I think that the deck gets quite a bit of sunlight.  He might use that extensively.  We might eventually add a second deck off of the second bedroom which would definitely get a lot of sun being so close to the roofline.  That would make Oreo very happy.

Dominica’s morning was incredibly busy at work today while mine was incredibly slow.  The fact that I did a ton of work last night playing catchup to make sure that nothing was left pending for me helped, to be sure.  In general just no requests or new work was coming in this morning.  One of the slowest mornings that I can remember, ever.

So last night I had a dream that there were two very large insects in the apartment running along the east wall above the windows and that I was in the living room watching them.  Then they got bigger and it turned out that one was a large bat and the other was a crow.  The bat tried to fly out the south window but was trapped and the crow flew at me and tried to attack my head with raptor like claws.  Crazy stuff.

I am doing a much better job these days of managing my email – both at the office and my personal email.  I have a tendancy to leave things in email as a sort of “to do” list and the email grows beyond the point where I can easily manage it and pretty soon there is no way to get anything done because of the email being everywhere.

My whole day ended up being relatively slow.  Almost no requests and no one looking for me.  It really felt like a bank holiday.

In the middle of the afternoon it actually happened… I got an email from my consulting firm asking me to call them.  They said that everything was completed, agreed upon and signed.  I have a contract again and am “back to work”.  I’ve been working all along but without knowing what the situation was going to be.  What a relief.

As soon as the stress passed the wave of exhaustion hit.  I haven’t been sleeping much the last few days and it wasn’t really hitting me because of the concern and stress but once those were gone it was a bit overwhelming.  I found myself mostly useless this afternoon.  Luckily there was really very little work to be done so I was actually staying completely on top of everything even being quite run down.

I left home at four thirty to go to Totowa to pick up Dominica.  We spent the evening shopping.  We bought me a new suit from Casual Male for the wedding (on Sunday, not Saturday like I have been saying.)  Then we had dinner at Cheeseburger in Paradise where I have never before been.  Then we bought me a new pair of sneakers as my current ones are beginning to fall apart.

We got home and Dominica watched some Voltron and I did a little wrap up work before we called it a night.  My grandmother called and chatted for half an hour or so.  My cousin is moving to Albequerque, New Mexico very soon, but that was about all of the breaking news from Ohio.

I am posting quickly tonight as I am very exhausted.  More news tomorrow.  We are tired but very happy!

My dream involved being trapped in an old high school that was full of people.  I have no idea why we were there and I was thirty-two, not a high school student.  Somehow, in the cafeteria, some “tainted” soup was made that was contaminated with the virus or whatever caused people to turn into the zombie things.  It was a little like Resident Evil in that way.

We had warned people that this was going to happen.  I can’t remember why we were so sure that this was going to happen but in the dream I knew that this wasn’t the first outbreak.  This was actually the third outbreak that I had had to deal with and I had survived the first two and was now attempting to stop it from happening again by tracking down places of possible contamination or something like that.  Hey, its a dream.

The caffeteria was all dark and dank and something bad from a previous dream had happened there, but I do not have any actual memory of that.  There weren’t kids in this high school.  It was all adults just using a high school building (and eating nasty high school cafeterria food..hmmm.)

We fought back the zombie outbreak as best as we could but our space was really confining and we were losing.  Then suddenly, all of the remaining “survivors” were grabbed and pulled through the walls.  It was very weird.

It turns out that we lost the zombie outbreak and the zombies ended up destroying the planet and only a handful of people survived.  Eventually the people that were left were left with a planet that was mostly wiped out and was covered in contamination so nothing was safe even though the outbreak and ceased.  The government of the future was going to start a program of attempting to irradicate the virus but this group that had grabbed us knew that the program would actually cause the outbreak to happen again but no one was listening to them.  So they invented a time machine like device that allowed them to move in time within an incredibly limited space but they could not leave it, hold it for long or extend it beyond a few rooms where they had built the device.

The space that they had chosen was the school’s old locker rooms. So we were pulled into the locker rooms (pulled meaning people’s arms came out of the walls and pulled us through the walls – it was weird.)  There, in this safe “stasis state” they explained to us what had happened and how we had lost and how we had to win his time or humanity was going to be wiped out.

That is about all of the dream that I can remember.  They sent us back to “our time” to fight the zombie creatures but that is all that I can remember.  That is probably where I woke up.

I started work at seven thirty this morning.  I had checked my BlackBerry and there was already work pending so I go up and logged right in and got to work.

Oreo hid his face under the blankets when Dominica went to take him to daycare today.  He definitely wanted to stay at home.

I noticed from Owain’s FaceBook today that it is forty-nine degrees at his office.  For those who are not aware, Owain lives in the UAE and that means that that temperature is in Celsius!  For the American readers, that is one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit!!

I did some more dishes today.  The kitchen is just out of control.  After this load we are on top of things again.  It is really Oreo’s fault.  He produces an inordinate amount of dishes – roughly twenty plastic containers and matching lids per week plus once weekly he generates a number of huge pots and pans used for cooking all of his food plus the utensils and blender needed.  It’s incredible that that little Boston Terrier uses more dishes than Dominica and I combined!

My afternoon was not horribly busy.  Oreo was in quite a mood and wanted to play a lot.  He was faking how tired he was this morning, I think, and really just wanted to stay home with me.  He had more than enough energy for two long walks and about an hour of play time before settling in to his afternoon nap.

Dominica came home and sat in the living room knitting while I worked until eight.  Then I went downstairst to the deli and got us each French toast for dinner and we rounded out the evening watching a few episodes of Frasier.  We decided to go to bed early.  I’m not sleepy so I will listen to an hour or so of “Shadow of the Silk Road” which is quite entertaining thus far.