Today was quite busy again.  And the rain has returned after having just a single day off.

Dominica and I decided to go out and get some lunch today.  So we went out to Pastel’s and got omelets.  They were yummy.  Liesl sat in a high chair at the table beside me and clearly had a look about her like she felt that she was being a big girl and was very proud to be sitting at the table instead of sitting in her car seat.  She was very happy all through the meal and was very engaging with everyone who passed by.

After lunch we ran out to Yorktown Heights to hit Clemente Cleaners to drop off our dry cleaning and to talk to their tailor about my newest suit.  The sleeves on my suit are far too long.  The tailor thinks that she can have my suit fixed by Friday which is important because I need it for the wedding this weekend.  I am having the sleeves fixed, a button moved and buttons added to my suit pants so that I can use suspenders instead of a belt.  Nothing from Casual XL Male has suspenders buttons in it which is really frustrating that a shop dedicated to larger sized men doesn’t accommodate the most obvious things that they would need.

Back to work once the errands were done.  Oreo and I stayed home while Dominica and Liesl went back to head to the post office, Kohl’s and some other shopping.  She had a bit of shopping that she had wanted to do so that worked out well.

The new drives for the Proliant DL185 G5 arrived today and I had a chance to finally get that server built and tested out.  I had thought that those drives would not be arriving until the end of the week and that I might not have enough time to get the server put together before we had to leave for the weekend so this was a real blessing.

I had a lot of work to do today and ended up working solidly until eleven thirty at night.  Normally I like to be in bed by ten thirty but there was just far too much to do.  I have been really wanting to play a video game for days and have not had the chance at all.  So tonight I decided that I was just going to do it anyway.  So at eleven thirty I popped in Oblivion on the PS3 and started playing.

Dominica stayed up with me and read a book on her Amazon Kindle while I played Oblivion.  I had a really good time.  I really missed having this downtime.  I played for four hours!

When I started playing I found that my last saved game was from February 4th!!  Four and a half months since I have been able to play anything at all.  Crazy.

In my four hours I managed to complete one entire new quest that was triggered right as I started playing (Lifting the Vale) which was pretty fun and I also completed one quest that had begun just before I had last saved the game (Spies).  I also raised my character from level five to level seven.  It was very good progress for one night of gaming.  Too bad I won’t get a chance to play again for a really long time.

It was three thirty in the morning when we finally headed up to bed.  Ramona is coming down to visit us tomorrow sometime in the morning.  She is expecting to arrive around noon or so.

For breakfast the family went out to Denny’s in Herkimer.  Dominica has been telling everyone about pancake puppies so we got everyone to go out to try them.

Today is Mother’s Day.  It is Dominica’s first Mother’s Day as a mother herself.  Liesl and I got her a card but, as always seems to happen, Dominica managed to see it yesterday because I didn’t have a good place to hide it and then today, because she had already seen it, I forgot to give it to her.

For mother’s day all of the kids went together with Dominica’s dad and got her mom a Kindle 2 from Amazon.  She was very excited and said that it was the best mother’s day present ever.

What is funny is that Liesl and I had decided that we were going to get Dominica a Kindle 2 for Mother’s Day as well.  We were not able to get it for her already because we are out of town and that would have most likely ended up in it being lost because we would have shipped it to the wrong place or something.  So it just has to wait until we are back in Peekskill and know that we will be around to receive it when it shows up.

I worked for the day as I am now on the Sunday shift.  It was a slow day at work.  Dominica and Liesl had a chance to hang out a really visit with everyone while I worked.

We had originally thought that we might try to make it to the Drive In in Perry tonight but had not really calculated just how late it would be when we got out to dad’s house.  There was no way for me to work a full day in Frankfort, drive to dad’s house and then go to the Silver Lake Drive In.  Not going to happen.

It was around six or six thirty when I wrapped up with work and we got on the road to drive out to dad’s place.  I can talked to Andy earlier in the day and he was spending the day visiting his family in Avon so he was going to come down to dad’s at nine or so because he had not had a chance to meet Liesl yet!

The drive out went well and we got to dad’s around twenty after nine in the evening.  Andy was already there and we all visited for several hours.  It was after midnight when Andy headed out to go home.  He and Liesl had a really good time hanging out together.  Andy held Liesl for an hour or two!  She is a very social little girl.

Andy also brought out an HP dx5150 desktop (Athlon64 3200+, 1GB, etc.) that dad is going to use as his new desktop replacing his old, Pentium 4 based HP d330 minitower that he has been using for years.  Maybe even for seven years.  It still works perfectly fine but just is not fast at all and only has 768MB of memory which is pretty crazy for a machine these days.  I find it rough trying to work with only 1GB when I get stuck with a machine with so little.  I am used to having 3GB on my desktop and I really would love to have more.  I plan to switch to 8GB when I get a 64bit Windows 7 system in a year.

So this desktop I will be rebuilding and getting ready for dad to use while I am in Peoria for the next few days.  Andy did the base Windows XP install so that we didn’t have to worry about that piece.  The dx5150 is going to go on dad’s desk and his old d330 is going to be moved to the basement to be his dedicated entertainment machine used for watching Amazon Unboxed and similar content on the basement television.

This week is going to be really tough for Sheep Guarding Llama.  Our schedule is completely packed and writing anything is going to be nearly impossible.

I worked tonight until one or two in the morning.  I don’t really remember exactly how late I was up.  Far too late.  That much I know.  Before going to bed I saw via Twitter that the Ralstons had left Virginia and were driving up to New York tonight and were expecting to be in Mount Morris before five in the morning.