Is it telling that it is good when a doctor is accountable but bad when an accountant is doctoring?

The alarm went off super early this morning which did not make me happy.  I am on the early shift this morning after having worked until after one last night.  Hardly any sleep at all and today is a long day too.

I worked from six thirty until a little after nine.  Not too bad of a morning.  I love this shirt because it is slow and relaxing and that is exactly what I needed this morning.  It gave me a chance to catch up on a few things before we had to hit the road.  Like packing up all of the converted CDs and DVDs to take back to dad’s for storage so that we can take back another giant load with us.

We spent another hour, from nine till ten, packing the X3 as quickly as we could.  There was a lot to squeeze in there.  An HP DL380 G2 server, an HP dx5150 desktop, a bin of media, two suitcases, tons of baby and doggy supplies, a bit stroller and more.  We actually barely fit everything into the X3.  Good thing that we didn’t go for something smaller.  What would we do?

On the drive Dominica and I started listening to Garrison Keillor’s new book “Liberty” which is due out in paperback next month.

The weather was good for a long morning driving.  We were on the road around a quarter after ten or so.  We drove up to the traffic circle on the north side of Peekskill and swung into the Dunkin Donuts there to pick up coffee and breakfast and fuel up the SUV.  Then it was back onto the road.

Liesl was fussy so we stopped into a rest stop on I87 north on the south side of Albany.  I grabbed a small bite at the McDonald’s there.  Dominica was not hungry so she skipped eating to save room for dinner.  Liesl ate and was slightly happier when we left.  We lost forty minutes at the rest stop.

It was about a quarter after two when we rolled in to Frankfort.  I hopped right online and got back to work.  There is a ton to be done today and I am way behind from having been offline for so much of the day.  People were covering me but just catching up on email can be quite the challenge.

A big thunderstorm moved in this afternoon.  Liesl has never really been out in the rain so I took her out and held her standing on the porch so that she could watch the storm with me.  She seemed to enjoy it.  Every so often she would shake when some mist would blow in on her face.  She was not afraid of the thunder or lightning at all.

It was a very busy day for me.  I worked like crazy all afternoon and into the evening.  Because we are going to be gone tomorrow I have to do a lot of tomorrow’s work today which is tough.  So I worked until a quarter till ten this evening.  Then Dominica and I took a quick trip out to New Hartford to go to Barnes & Noble’s because I had forgotten to bring a book with me on the trip – along with other important things that I forgot.  So we picked up the “VMWare Certified Professional Exam Cram” and “History’s Worst Decisions – And the People Who Made Them”.  That way I will have something to read for the next several days while we are out of town.

Then we went to Walmart in the same parking lot to get baby formula and prune juice.  Nothing exciting.

We got back to the Dominica’s parents’ house and I got right back to work.  There was so much to do that I ended up working until around three in the morning.  How awful.  This is really exhausting.  At least I was able to get a lot of work accomplished today.  I will be mostly off tomorrow.  I still have to work all day on Sunday, however.  Then drive to dad’s house after work is done.

Dominica discovered that the rental’s front right tire was flat this morning on her way into work.  It had been a little soft when we got the car yesterday and the Nissan’s flat tire warning was on but it wasn’t very soft and it was a short drive home so we didn’t worry about it.  It was making some rattling in the front right corner, though, as if there was a suspension problem.  So we are pretty suspicious that someone had a minor accident with it and didn’t tell anyone.  So she had to deal with another flat tire this morning while our car is in the shop with its flat tire being fixed.

My morning was incredibly busy.  I started just after seven and was caught doing deployments as quickly as I could until well after noon!  What a day.

I had plans to have lunch with Ronak today but I was stuck for so long that we had to cancel those.  I was really disappointed as we were planning to go out for rava dosa which I haven’t had in months and then I was going out for coffee and gelatto with Katie for afternoon tea.  I was looking forward to being on Wall today and getting some different food but instead was so busy that I never got to leave home.

I also had to deal with the DL145 G3 today.  It came sans hard drive and power cable and some screws.  The harddrive wasn’t too big of a deal as I was planning to upgrade to larger drives anyway and the screws… are just screws.  The power cable, though, was $115.61 to get replaced from HP!  Wow, was not expecting that.  So that was rather a pain with which to deal this morning in addition to everything else.  It also keeps me from being able to work on that server for another several days.

I got scheduled to work tomorrow morning.  Originally I had some work to do tomorrow but it was on my own schedule.  Most of it I managed to complete ahead of time anyway so it was not a big deal.  The plan was that I would work late tonight and then sleep and then drive up to Frankfort in the morning.  Now I have to work at eight in the morning so we have to drive up tonight and get almost no sleep.  There is every possibility that I won’t be done until after eight tonight.  The constant requirement of one group to make me work very, very late and another to simply expect me to work very, very early even on weekends without any warning is getting to be a bit much.  I am just exhausted.

I did finally work out the issues with the server and we are getting reimbursed by the company that sold it to us.  It took lots of emails and phone calls to make that happen.  I didn’t need more stuff going on today.  I also had to pay some bills and send out the mail.

It was around one o’clock when I finally made it out to look for some lunch.  I decided that I needed to try something different so I went to Nicki’s on Mulberry.  Still just one block away.  I got a fried flounder sandwich and some hummus and pita bread and sat there alone reading “Attila”.

My afternoon wasn’t quite as bad as the morning but it was still very busy.  No time to relax.

Originally we had hoped that we could have gotten our tired taken care of last evening while we waited.  Dominica had called the shop and they had told her that it would take about an hour.  Then, when we got there, it couldn’t be done yesterday evening and we had to wait about an hour just to get a ride back home.

Today, Dominica spent the whole day just trying to figure out when the car would be done.  She had been hoping to have been able to have picked the car up on her lunch break because there was no good way for her to get the car after work because she had to pick up Oreo from daycare.  I called early this morning and they were going to “look into it”.  Then later Dominica called and they didn’t even remember that they had our car.  She waited an extra hour before taking lunch but they did not get to her car by that point.

Then, Dominica was unable to get an answer at a quarter after five, after she stayed late in the office to get a hold of the shop, as to whether or not the car was going to be done for the weekend.  So she had to leave work late and drive to the dealer just to find out if she could pick up the car or not.  So even if she doesn’t manage to get the car she is stuck in rush hour traffic on a Friday night when we need to pack and get onto the road to Frankfort before it gets too late.

I did a little packing before Dominica got home.  Mostly just getting my CPAP ready.  Not much but it helps.  We are only gone for two days.  There is only so much to pack.  I put all of my electronic “stuff” into my laptop backpack to get that ready as well.  My BlackBerry is out of power so no Twitter updates from the road this evening.

Dominica and Oreo got home around a quarter until seven.  Then Dominica set to getting us ready to travel.  After getting us packed she and Oreo took a nap to wait for me to wrap up for the evening.

I wrapped up my work around eight.  I am going to post before we leave Newark this evening so that you get an update before morning.  I will not be getting online when we reach Frankfort tonight – just going straight to bed.

I am hoping to discover that the load noise being produced by our car recently was caused by the horribly degraded tires.  It is quite possible that the car will be quiet again.  That would be nice.  We are sad that we had to get new tires before moving to Westchester as the New Jersey road are just terrible for our tires and really rip them apart quickly.

WordPress freaked out on me just as I was posting tonight.  I hope that I did not lose too much of the post that I worked on today.    Once in a while it logs me out but does not tell me and lets me keep working on my post. Then when I click “publish” it does not publish but goes to the log in screen instead and my work is lost.