Thirty weeks of pregnancy.  I can’t believe how quickly time has flown.  We have just been so busy since having gotten pregnant that we really haven’t had a chance to slow time and take stock of how quickly everything is happening.

After working really late last night, until almost two in the morning, I decided to sleep in a bit this morning and didn’t log into the office until seven thirty or maybe even eight this morning.  I needed it though.  I am not really sleepy today; that was enough sleep for me to be feeling pretty good.

The weather is awesome today here in the New York Metro.  Cool and just a touch of rain with a nice breeze.  What a great change from the warmth.  Autumn is peeking from around the corner and teasing us with our short window of wonderful north-east weather.  An entire region of the country with just one to two months of great weather each year.  It’s a rough existence but we really know how to appreciate the good weather when we finally get it.

I worked from home for a little while this morning – all of the windows open now for the past several days.  The apartment is getting a wonderful airing out and the plants are loving it.  I hit the sidewalk and starting walking to the office just after ten.

For lunch, as is our tradition on Fridays, Katie and I walked over to Financier between Stone and Pearl and got the smoked salmon and brie sandwiches and crab and fennel quiche that they only offer on Fridays.  Determined to make the most of the weather I convinced Katie to skip the crowded cafe innards and to sit on the mostly empty street and to enjoy the seclusion so seldom offered in lower Manhattan, especially during the mid-day lunch rush.  Only one other band of stalwart lunchers dared to brave the elements outside of the cafe.

In reality it was quite nice sitting outside.  We commandeered an umbrella and took shelter beneath it.  Eventually Katie went for her own umbrella for some additional rain protection.  The rain was quite light but just enough to threaten to be a problem should the wind really kick up.  It is so much nicer sitting outside enjoying good coffee and awesome food in a light rain with a nice breeze and only the occasional passerby rather than the usual – elbow to elbow with other tables while sitting in blazing sun in the staggering heat.  This is how cafes are meant to be enjoyed when a sunny morning in the south of France isn’t readily available.

While it was raining, my walk back to the office did not really result in me getting at all wet.  One of the benefits to Manhattan life is that there is always a lee in which one can avoid the elements if one so desires.  I’ll take rain over sweat anyday, though.  No complaints here!

My new Blackberry Curve for the office arrived today to replace my ancient Blackberry that died a few weeks ago.  The new unit is very nice and sleek.  I am excited to be switching over.  I won’t be embarrassed to use this one on the train or at a restaurant.  I’ll also be more careful not to drop it.  The Curve is nicer than Dominica’s Pearl model.  This one is halfway between the 8830 and the Pearl in size but has the full keyboard like the 8830.

I had been planning and hoping to have been able to have gone back out for coffee this afternoon but my afternoon ended up being so busy that there was no chance whatsoever for me to take a break from the office.  Fridays can be like that.  It is very easy for things to get very busy very quickly.  One little issue and the day just vanishes.

One of my friends in the office felt bad for me and went to Starbucks around five and brought me back some coffee.  Not the same as going out, escaping the office and getting some fresh air but at least it helps to keep me awake.

I spent a good portion of the day today working with Chris on issues with the email system.  We were never able to positively determine exactly where the problem was stemming from but we tried many things, many of which resulted in long periods of time sans email access, and eventually got the system to some moderate degree.  After many changes it seemed to be working even more smoothly than before.

Not content to do all of this work and get almost nothing in return for it, I decided that it was high time for a system upgrade.  Generally I avoid doing this because it is so much time and effort dedicated to just updating the email system which really has very little impact but to avoid issues like this in the future I decided that tonight was the night to do it.  I’ve spent so much time with the email system over the last few days that no time is actually going to be as appropriate as this to do the work.  No time like the present!

I started the process of upgrading the email system at eight in the evening.  The first step is to do a backup.  I did that and my first attempt failed due to a network error.  That cost around forty minutes.    It is going to be a long evening.

While waiting for other things to finish over which I had no control, I took the opportunity to perform the SGL WordPress update to version 2.6.2.  Always nice to have things up to date and running with the latest features.

Dominica and I decided that it was going to be so late before I would reach home that we would just eat separately.  I will probably rue this decision as I will probably be in the office so late that there is no more food to be had on my journey home and our trip in the morning will be so early as to preclude getting breakfast on our drive to Peekskill.  She decided to just eat some food that we had in the house.

Tomorrow is Dominica and my Lamaze class up at Hudson Valley Medical Center very near to the new house.  We have to be up around six thirty tomorrow morning so that we can get ready to go.  I have a deployment at seven that I need to do and then we should be on the road around eight.  Poor Oreo is going to be stuck at home all alone all day which is going to be awful for him.  He is going to be very unhappy about how he has to spend his weekend.  Fortunately, he will be completely exhausted from a long week of daycare and should sleep almost all day.

We heard good news about our house process today.  The committment letter from the bank arrived both at our agent and at our attorney’s offices.  My attorney called and said that everything looks good.  The loan is all confirmed and now the only real issue is to set the closing date.  Hopefully we will have the final details by early next week.  The attorney was very happy with our bank and how clearly they wrote the proposal without any stupid issues that keep it from actually working.  We are still looking great to move in mid-October.

One of the nice things about staying at the office really, really late is that it gives me a chance to be all nostalgic for the days when I used to work late in Washington, D.C. and in Pittsburgh.  Back then I would be stuck in the office until all hours of the night waiting for system maintenance, doing work when no one was there to bother me or because I was waiting to see if the waste management plant would run into unforeseen issues.  Sometimes I would be there late just so that I could spend time training and observing the overnight crews.

I’ve always enjoyed working late at night.  Once the office lights turn off and everyone else leaves there is a certain happy loneliness to the office.  Once night falls and I am all alone I can magically picture the loading docks at Washington Hospital Center perfectly.  I can remember every inch of the facility, the walk down the dock, getting into my car behind a roll-off and driving through the dim, back streets of northeast Washington, D.C.  It is so vivid it is like I was just there.  What a huge part of my life that was.

Being in any city at night, on a cool, rainy, lonely Friday night in a business district where no one goes for after hours is always an experience.  Being here on Wall Street really takes me back.  While waiting for backups and updates I can walk around the office and experience the feelings all over again.  Looking out the windows and watching the cars on the FDR zip by or the people milling about in front of St. Maggie’s Cafe at 110 Wall St.

Growing up in the country you don’t get the same feeling at night.  Once the sun goes down and people start going to bed in the country being outside is lonely – completely lonely.  In the city it is a completely different type of lonely.  You can always see people, you are always near people.  It is a shared loneliness.  The quiet of the city at night.

The quiet, dark city might be my very favourite place.  Even Newark is nice once everyone is asleep.  Washington was a bit of a stretch but it had its high points.  Not many, but a few.  Pittsburgh, of course, I will always miss.  A great city, an adventure and tons of work without any real politics.  Just a chance to do great work and be appreciated for it while getting to explore and discover what, so far, remains to be my favourite place to live.

Since I have time to muse – my favourite cities, in North America at least, would be Pittsburgh, Ithaca, Halifax and Montreal.  I miss them all.  I wish that we didn’t have to live in New York City.  Manhattan is great – it has a lot to offer but it isn’t our style.  We are very excited about moving up to the Hudson Valley in the next several weeks, though.  That is really going to change our perspective on the whole experience.  Perhaps not for the better – time will tell.

The process of updating the email system took just forever.  I gave up on any chance of finding food or getting to bed with enough time to get any sleep tonight, but better to just push through and get this done now rather than leaving it for some other time to get exhausted and have it ruin my night.

I had a deployment that needed to be done tomorrow morning and was going to get me up around seven in the morning or earlier but since I was in the office so late I was able to verify before leaving that the package had never been released and so there would be nothing for me to do in the morning.  That will let me sleep in at least half an hour longer now that I was going to be able to do before.  I am going to need it.  Tomorrow is going to be a very long day indeed.

I am posting as I leave the office.  Check the posting timestamp to figure out when that is.

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.

I started working at seven thirty this morning.  My morning really was not all that bad.  I worked for about two hours getting everything caught up and in good order.  There was work to do, but I would not classify the morning as being necessarily busy.

I grab the train and headed off to Wall Street at what seemed to be the most appropriately slow time of the morning when no one was likely to require my attention for a little while.

Friday lunches are always an adventure in Manhattan.  Today, Katie came up from the waterfront and met me on on Stone to eat at Smorgas Chef, an upscale Swedish eatery there.  The food was excellent.  I had warm goat cheese and beet salad to start and my meal was Norwegian salmon and scrambled eggs on toast.  Very tasty. The one thing that was weird was that because the lunch rush was so busy we had to share a rather small four person table with two other people.  It was rather awkward.

Afterwards we hit Financier for coffee and take-home goodies.  I definitely love the food choices that working in Manhattan provides.

I was smart enough to grab take-home treats from Financier Patisserie for Dominica too. You can’t get food like this in New Jersey.

Tomorrow I have an extremely busy day scheduled.  My morning deployments start at eight in the morning and an all-morning conference call supporting a storage migration starts at nine.  In addition to five hours of already scheduled work I also have quite a bit of anytime work to do tomorrow when I have the opportunity.  I am going to be working a full day most likely.  Because I have to spend so much of the time on the phone we decided that I really needed to have a new phone before tomorrow if at all possible.

We shopped around a little and decided to get a Panasonic DECT 6.0 wireless phone system with three handsets and a speakerphone feature – which is actually the most critical feature at this point.  Our old Uniden wireless phone system died some time ago and we have been living with a $10 Walmart special bare-bones phone for the last two years and it is pretty awful.  We will be very happy to have wireless, speakerphone, CallerID, headset, etc.  It will make our lives a lot easier.

We really have to have a new phone soon either way as we will not be able to live with just a single, non-wireless phone once we move into the new house in Peekskill.  Having three floors and a baby will make that just impossible.  We will require there to be phone access throughout the house.

For those who are unfamiliar with the DECT 6.0 standard in wireless phones – this is a 1.9GHz frequency band standard (1.8GHz outside of the US) with a new standard designed just for voice communications.  This frequency range is nice because it does not interfere with the 2.4GHz band used for 802.11b/g/n that we normally use for our WiFi equipment in the house.  The 1.9GHz band also gets greater range than the higher frequency bands get.  If you are using WiFi, and who isn’t these days, and you still need a legacy phone system then DECT 6.0 is a very good choice.  It is also less expensive to manufacture due to the lower technical challenges of making transceivers in this range.  (We do not use a legacy phone system outside of the house, but our Vonage VoIP telephone system comes into the house digitally and then is transferred into legacy in-house analogue wiring.  It is a strange system but it is simple and straightforward.  I would prefer all digital but Vonage does not offer that in any useful form yet.)

Today involved more “trying out” of Twitter.  I am able to use it from my BlackBerry now.  I started using it via the web browser but that was pretty painful.  So I discovered and installed TwitterBerry to see if that would work a bit better.  That makes the Twitter updating process a million times easier and quicker.  Now I might do it all of the time.  I even got Dominica to sign up for Twitter today.  Now she can keep everyone up to date on her comings and goings.  She has tried blogging in the past but was unable to keep it up for any length of time finding it difficult to figure out what to write about.  Maybe with microblogging and having access from her BlackBerry she will be able to stick with it.

So far I had only put a single application onto my BlackBerry 8830 SmartPhone – an SSH terminal application used to access UNIX servers remotely which worked worlds better than a similar application on the sad Palm PDA that I had before the BlackBerry.  After trying TwitterBerry I realized that there is a world of useful handheld applications that I am missing.  So I downloaded the BlackBerry FaceBook application as well.  I am becoming more and more mobile as we speak.  Although we aren’t really speaking.

My evening was quite busy.  There is nothing “special” going on at the office which means that the developments are all running full steam ahead getting deployments ready making my night quite busy.  The more upheaval at work the less work there is for me.  When things are quiet is when I get really heavily loaded down on Friday nights.

My night became a very late one.  At one point I really thought that I would be leaving the office a little before six in the evening.  That was not to be.  One of my deployments ended up keeping me in the office until well after eight at night – constantly dangling the carrot of hope before my eyes thinking that the software to be deployed would be available any minute.  We didn’t end up getting to even begin the installation until ten past eight in the evening.  Dominica was already home and well into watching 27 Dresses while I was still preparing for the work to begin.

I was in the office so late this evening that they shut off the lights on me and, as far as I could tell, all but one other person from my entire floor had left.  It was very lonely, reminding me of my days working at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. where I would often work late into the night in an office where everyone had left hours before.

I got home at a quarter until ten!  What a late day.  I had just enough time to call Emily and to wish her a happy birthday.  For her birthday we bought her an 8.1MP Samsung digital camera.  She has been a bit of a photographer for a while always stealing her mom’s camera so we thought that she should have her own.  She is the same age that I was when I got my first camera.  My first camera was given to me by my parents while on our way to Bar Harbor, Maine for my first ever vacation there.  Emily just got back from her first trip to Maine a few days ago.

It was pretty much straight to bed for us after eating the goodies that I brought home from Financier.  I have to be up early tomorrow to go back to work, unfortunately.