Liesl and Dominica got up around ten and came down to see me.  I vacuumed the living room carpet that was shampooed last night so that we would be ready to move all of the furniture again and clean the other side of the room.

My work for the office went for quite a long time today.  Not totally unexpected but it was more than I would have guessed.  I didn’t get a chance to wrap up completely until almost three in the afternoon which is pretty late when you consider that I started at seven in the morning.  That is a full eight hour day and I did not even take a lunch break long enough to eat with Dominica.  I shoved my tofu dogs down, took three phone calls then went back and quickly at my cold vegetables and returned to the office again.

An N Scale boxcar from Micro Trains arrived in the mail today.  It is my first boxcar of the Genesee and Wyoming Railroad.

The postman keeps putting these Priority Mail boxes into our mailbox that are too big.  They are just the perfect size to be inside the mailbox but they are larger than what can come through the front of the mailbox due to a flange that meets the front mailbox door.  Because he puts the mail in from the back of the mailbox unit he is unaware, I assume, that the front flange reduces the size of the front opening compared to the back opening.  So twice now I have had to cut open a USPS Priority Mail shipping box, remove its contents and smash it inside of the mailbox in order to retrieve it.  It is very strange that the USPS made a shipping box of such a precise size as to fit in the back of the standard USPS community PO Box and to not fit out of the front.  This much be a problem all over the country.

After I wrapped up work with the office I had a chance to begin the process of moving web sites over from Scranton to Toronto.  I managed to get all of the sites that I control and that do not use a database moved over almost immediately without any incident.  That went really well.  I am very excited to see how much faster the page load times are from Toronto than they were from Scranton and Scranton had been a nice improvement over Geneseo which had been an improvement over Washington, D.C.  It has been a process or steadily upgrading over the years.

At four we finally had an opportunity to really get busy with cleaning the livingroom carpet again.  Dominica and I moved all of the furniture while Liesl slept.  Then Dominica red up packing materials while I did the first round of vacuuming with the Kirby.  Then we did the spot cleaning with some soap and a brush to tackle the worst of the stains.  Then the real shampooing.

The shampooing went much more smoothly today.  Yesterday was our day to learn how the shampoo attachment for the Kirby works.  After doing two rounds of shampoo last night we are pretty good at it now.  Doing the work today was a breeze.

The shampooing and basic cleanup was completed by five thirty.  Not too bad considering what a large space we had to do.  The tough part is, of course, once the shampooing is done the entire north half of the living area – that portion where the dining room table goes, is now wet and we can neither use it nor can we move our furniture back into that space.  So now we are stuck with a wet room on one side and a room crammed full of our furniture on the other with Oreo hiding on his pillow as far from us as he can get.

Dominica and Liesl went down to the basement and spent a few hours just hanging out down there on the sofa that we have there as it was really the only available space in the house where they could sit and be dry.  Oreo went down and sat on the sofa as well.  I received a few phone calls and was on the phone for a while and so went upstairs and paced around the large, open space that we temporarily have available in the dining room area.  The pacing in my socks helped to squeeze out the excess moisture and helped to dry the carpeting more quickly.  While I was on the phone I hooked up a fan to blow air across the floor which helped a little.

Once my phone calls were done and Liesl was falling asleep I took a trip into the attic and we loaded it up with all of the stuff that we have been waiting to store up there.  That took half an hour or more but cleared up a lot of space from all over the house.  Hard to believe how much stuff we had waiting to go up there.  Only a small amount of it came from dad’s last delivery of stuff for the house.

The carpet actually dried faster than we had thought that it would so by late in the evening we were able to begin actually putting the furniture back where it was going to go.  We had decided a few days ago that the rooms were really set up with a very different use in mind that what we actually ended up using the rooms for.  Originally we had put the furniture where it was when Liesl had not yet been born, when we had no video game systems but the Wii which we never used and we had only a small television near the fireplace that we were not even sure was going to stay in the living room area.

Now we have come to learn that Dominica and Liesl really spend their time in the living room and that it is the hub of all of the household activity.  We really needed to rethink the way that the furniture was situated based on the fact that the big television over the fireplace is always on and something is always going on on it, that there is always a laptop in use in the living room and that Liesl will always be hanging out in the living room and that she will need a permanent changing station there.  We also admitted that the dining room table was not really used for eating dinner and that it should not be set up in the way of other things in the hopes of eating dinner either.

The dining room table is now much farther into the corner so that we can still use it but it takes up much less space than it did before.  The lamp still needs to be adjusted.  The worktable where we have been doing the model railroading goes along the wall by the dining room table and can be moved to the back of the love seat like a console table so that I can sit in the dining room and work while facing the television and see over the love seat.

The recliner now faces the television almost directly head on rather than at an awkward angle so that when it is used for feeding Liesl that you can actually see the television rather than cranking your head far around to the side.  The two individual chairs have been moved along the western wall near to the deck door and are mostly just used for when we have company visiting us and for seating at the “changing station”.

We are very happy with how the room reorganized.  Now the living room and dining room are not separated by the wall of the large recliner and it feels much more like a large, open space.  It makes it far easier for us to hang out as a family and to use the four things that we actually use in that room – the television, the laptop, the modeling table and the changing station.  Originally it was laid out as a sitting room and formal dining space which are two uses for which the area is never used.

Last night I topped 2,000 Tweets on Twitter.  That is a lot of microblogging.  Originally I didn’t think that Twitter and microblogging in general would be all that interesting but I have found it to be quite cool.

Through Twitter I have come across the new blog, Trains and Bricks, which is written by Linda Smith and is chronicling her adventures in starting in the model railroading hobby.  Linda, like Dominica and I, is into N Scale model railroads (they are the coolest, as you know.)  Linda received a Kato starter set on Valentine’s Day from her husband and seems quite excited.  She must as she has a blog about it.  Linda is also very much into Legos!  It is neat to have Linda getting into N Scale model railroading at almost exactly the same time that Dominica and I are getting into the hobby as well.

The hobby is not new for me and not quite new for Dominica but, as of yet, Dominica has never had a running train but has done a bit of actual modeling that is extremely advanced for a beginner (foam benchwork, plaster-cloth on newspaper terrain, ballasted flextrack on cork, weathered buildings, etc.)

The weather turned very cold today and there is a solid dusting of snow on the ground that is determined to not be going anywhere.  Oreo took only the shortest of walks today to minimize the time spent outside.

I was not really all that busy today at the office, not for a Friday, but somehow I ended up being quite busy around lunch time and missed taking a break for lunch at all.

The new server got hooked up early this afternoon in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  We are all extremely excited about this.  We have had so many problems with the network stability and power stability of the datacenter in Scranton that we are really looking forward to seeing what we get out of Toronto.  I am saving a bit of money by going this way as well.

There was a little bit of configuration work that needed to be done to get the email system actually online and working but it took very little and things started working like a charm almost immediately.  Many of the issues that we had seen earlier this week were, as we had guessed, caused by the temporary hosting on a consumer network and vanished as soon as we were on the commercial backbone network.

Dominica did get a chance to do another segment of her class today.  This second course in her four course series has several fewer objectives or segments than the last one did (this one has ten compared to nineteen, I believe) but each one is much more involved and difficult so instead of doing two or three at a time she is pushing had to be able to finish one in the tiny amount of time that she is able to get without Liesl causing too much of an interruption.  Any progress is good progress though.

Not long after lunch Liesl actually fell asleep and Dominica, being exhausted from yesterday, fell asleep as well in the recliner in the living room.  They both managed to get really good, several hour long naps in and did not get up until around seven in the evening when I was wrapping up my work for the office.

For dinner Dominica cooked a “Mama Mia Casserole” which is a baked spaghetti dish.  We watched some Murder She Wrote during which I had to make constant trips to the basement to check in on the office.  I had some amount of work that continued until about half past midnight.  Nothing major but I had to stay in contact.  No rest on a Friday night for me.

I decided tonight, because they were both sitting in just the right place to make this easy, to pop in the two dead DVDs that we have just to be absolutely sure that they were unusable.  The one DVD, which we bought many years ago used from Hollywood Video, was Magnolia. The DVD never once played, to any degree, in any device that we owned.  We’ve kept it more out of principle than anything else.  We bought it so we figured that we should keep it.  So tonight, when I popped it into the HP external DVD drive that I have on my Windows workstation and it read the entire disc without an error I was completely taken by surprise.  We now have a three hour long movie that we did not have yesterday.  Very cool.

I then took the Build Design Dream DVD that Model Railroader sent to us in the mail as an advertisement – that showed up as being blank on every DVD player that I put it into – into the DVD drive on Dominica’s laptop and it too was able to be read without a single error.  It’s completely crazy.

So now we have two more things to watch that we already owned without spending a dime.  Nice.

We did get some time to relax until Liesl dropped off and was happily asleep around ten or so.  Then the real work began – shampooing the living room carpet.  We moved all of the furniture from the south side of the living room (by the deck doors) to the dining room area so that we had roughly half of the room completely clear.

I did a hard-core vacuuming job with the new Kirby and got all of the loose stuff up and off of the carpet.  This will be our first time doing a full shampoo.  We (I) bought the Kirby because of its shampoo capacity but it is such an undertaking, especially with a baby and a dog, to relocate all of the furniture and to have the carpets be wet that we have not done it yet.

It took two full loads of Kirby shampoo liquid to do that portion of the living room.  It took us a while to figure out how to do the shampooing since it was our first time.  We had to spend some time with the manual and only I ever saw someone use it in this way before so it was all new to us.

Overall, I think, the shampooing went pretty smoothly.  It was a little bit of a learning curve but not too bad.  It was almost one in the morning when we wrapped up.

Tomorrow I start work at seven in the morning (less than six hours from when I managed to go to bed) so I am going to be a bit tired.  I have deployments starting and seven and disaster recovery testing starting at eight.

I also need to get up tomorrow and vacuum the carpet that we shampooed tonight after it is completely dry.  Then, once that is done, all of the furniture that is in the dining room area has to be squeezed into the living room area on the south side so that we can shampoo that portion of the carpeting.  Most of that section was not touched during the Kirby demonstration and is still loaded with stains from the previous owners of the house.

I got up before nine to get to work.  I went down to the office and Oreo followed a few minutes later.  He made it down to his pillow but didn’t get a chance to lay down before he got his look of panic and suddenly had a big accident on the floor.  I hate when this happens because I never know if he just drank too much or if something is really wrong or what.  It might be nothing more than he was cold and hadn’t moved in a really long time and then didn’t have time to figure out that he needed to go outside.  So my first job was to clean that up which is very hard in the basement, I have learned, because of the poor lighting and the type of carpet that as have which doesn’t allow anything to sit on top at all.  Within seconds I was unable to even determine where it had happened!

So I decided that one of my first projects is to get a serious floor cleaner.  Dominica and I have been talking about it for two weeks now and I figured out this morning that Kohls has a sale on them going on right now.  I hope to be able to run over to Kohls today to see if they have one that will work well for us.  I prefer to shop at Kohls over Walmart if at all possible although it isn’t relatively rare that they have the types of things that we need.  This will actually be my first time setting foot into a Kohls if I actually make it out.

Work was incredibly slow today.  I was expecting there to be much more to do than there was.  It is good as it gives me a chance to do other things around the house that need my attention.  There is much that can only really be done when I am home alone so this week is my chance.

I set about re-enconding the first episode of LieslTV this morning in the hopes of getting a copy that will work correctly with the AppleTV.

Here is an interesting bit of news, Josh Silver from the UK has invented a new type of eyeglasses, designed for the third world (at this point,) that use water instead of glass for the lens.  Instead of going to an optomitrist the wearer can self-adjust the lens until everything is crystal clear and then “set” the lens at that point.  In the developing world there is very little, if any, availability of eye-doctors and the cost of seeing one (no pun intended) is prohibitive even if the cost of custom-ground lenses was not.  These spectacles are very inexpensive to mass produce and need to special training to use.  Very, very cool.

I managed to get the last of the Christmas pictures edited (in Picasa 3) and uploaded to Flickr this afternoon.  Not too many new ones, about a dozen.

I did pretty well at getting household chores done today.  Obviously the big task was just moving boxes and items around the house, up and down the stairs, mostly from Christmas stuff.  Liesl has a ton of stuff that has to be moved up to her nursery and stored in the closet plus there is a lot of stuff that just has to be readied to be placed into the attic the next time that I take a trip up there.  I did some basement cleaning getting boxes emptied and stuff put away.  Wires being the biggest obstacle down here.

I did the dishes, cooked me own food (I know, everyone thinks that I am forced to order in when I am home alone,) unpacked delivery boxes, sorted mail, cleaned the kitchen, unpacked stuff from dad’s house like our “new” Midnight Sun servering stuff that Dominica bought from Pfaltzgraff like a year or two ago but that went to dad’s and directly into storage.  So this is the first time that we have unpacked them.

I worked until five thirty.  I spent a bit of the afternoon on the phone with Andy.  It was the perfect day to talk to Andy since Dominica wasn’t here to be ignored while I was on the phone.  I put on my hands-free headset and walked around the house doing cleaning.

While I was on the phone with Andy I thought that I heard the doorbell ring so I went down to check the front door.  There was a woman asking if the Kirby demonstrator could do a free carpet shampooing with the Kirby to demonstrate the product.  I decided that it was awfully fortuitous that the Kirby demonstrator showed up just as I was about to get off of the phone to head out to Kohls to buy a carpet cleaner so I decided to take her up on the offer.  This was around six in the evening maybe just a little later.

She came in and we talked a little about the Kirby and the demonstration.  She called and set up the appointment and vacuumed the upstairs using our existing Eureka vacuum which I had just gotten out to do some vacuuming myself.  This really was good timing.  I spent a few minutes moving boxes around so that there would be room to clean.  Then she left around six thirty to go set up another appointment and I had some time to make sure that work was all set without me (they were) and to get the floor cleared up for the demonstration.

At seven, her husband, Kelly, came by with the Kirby vacuum system to demonstrate it for me.  We spent several hours first vacuuming and then shampooing the living room and dining room areas.  I have to admit, the system was incredibly impressive.  The vacuum portion of the display really pulled an amazing amount of dirt and grit out of our disasterous living room carpet (this was a vacuum demonstrator’s dream assignment – this carpet was a mess even after being vacuumed just half an hour earlier.)

There was a lot of moderately impressive stuff that I don’t really remember.  Lots of attachments, ergonomics, etc. that did not interest me very much.  There was an interesting demonstration on mattress cleaning that makes you think!  I, for one, will be vacuuming my mattress from now on, that is for sure.

Then the coup de grâce, the shampoo feature. This is what I was waiting to see.  I have always heard that the Kirby is a great vacuum but that was hardly going to sell me as we have two decent vacuum units already.  The attachments weren’t going to do it for me.  Today I am interested in a way to shampoo the carpets.  Our carpets are in desperate need of a good shampoo and I was about to go spend between $150 and $250 to get a halfway serviceable shampooer as it was.  If I was not impressed with the shampoo-ability of the system then it wasn’t even going to be a consideration as I was not about to spend crazy money twice in one day.  That and I gave up my only shot at the Kohls carpet cleaner sale to watch this demonstration.

The shampooing went really well.  I was really impressed with how well it dealt with our nasty, grimy, greasy carpets that were left to us by the previous occupants of our house.  The carpets were stained and disgusting.  We have become increasingly disgusted by them which is why I had decided that I had to get a carpet cleaner tonight.  It just couldn’t wait anymore.  I want Liesl to be able to play on the floor.  I want to be able to walk across the floor without making my socks all gross.  You know that it is bad when the carpet makes the bottoms of your socks more gross than walking around outside on the sidewalk does.

All in all the complete demonstration, following discussion, negotiation, agreement and wrapup took a total of six hours!  From the first doorbell ring a little after six until Kelly finally left at a quarter until one in the morning.  What a long day.  I can only imagine how tired he was as he does this all day.  We haggled for quite a while on the Kirby.  The “full” price (which I hope no one ever pays) is $2,495.  The price that I was going to get all discounts considered (we qualify for a lot of the stock discounts being a single income home, paying cash, etc.) was going to be $1,759.  Keep in mind that a Kirby has a lifetime guarantee so it is a home cleaning investment.  Ha ha.  Anyway, it is a serious cleaning device and competes with the best vacuums and shampooers and a good shampoo unit alone can hit $999.

In the end, after two hours of just discussing the price, I finally agreed to buy the Kirby at $1,215.  It is an incredible amount of money but I am figuring that $250 of that price is knocked right off by the fact that I was going to spend that much tonight anyway on a carpet cleaner that was only a fraction of the quality (long term and short term) and that I didn’t have to buy it until after Kelly had cleaned the entire main floor area and that I had seen that the stains had come out – the Kirby made our carpets look so much better.  And it has a lifetime warranty and is easy to store.  So I am planning on donating the Eureka vacuum (before the end of the year)  and maybe even the little hand-held shampooer that we have and reclaiming the amount of space that they were taking up as the Kirby is relatively small.

Was it a good decision?  I have no idea.  But I was impressed with the demonstration and I liked the sales guy.  I’ve read mixed reactions to the Kirby vacuum cleaners but got a lower price than what I have found people online saying that they have received.  There are tons of consumer complaints about the Kirby but all of them seem to be against devious shops doing the selling – which we will see if that affects us in this case.  The Kirby company definitely does nothing to protect its customers from bad distributors and since Kirby doesn’t deal with customers directly the distributors, for better or for worse, are the face and voice of the Kirby company.  So if one rips you off – it is Kirby authorizing you being ripped off.  The vacuum seems great but the real question will be about the ongoing service.  Overall reports seem to be very positive about the vacuum itself.  So I decided to be risky tonight.  Meh.  The carpets needed to be cleaned and that was done.  If it dies and we can’t get it serviced, well, at least I have a voice online and can let lots of people know about it (more than the Kirby company lets know about anything since they totally ignore the entire world online) and I can survive the loss of the money.  It would suck but hey, you have to take chances.  But tons of places say that the vacuum is a good deal at far higher prices than I just paid.  So maybe, in this case, I get to be the evil neighbour who got the really good price instead of being the one who overpaid.

Probably not.

It is one thirty in the morning and I am going to go ahead and post.  I have not even had an opportunity to get myself any dinner yet!  This was a much busier day than I had expected.  I think that I am feeling good about my massive purchase.  I didn’t really have a means of consulting Dominica and she wasn’t still awake when Kelly headed out so I will let her know tomorrow.  We had been talking about spending a bit and getting a really amazing shampoo unit and this really seemed to do a great job shampooing so that is all that I really care about.  If this thing can keep the carpets looking good then I am happy.  These carpets were really nasty before and now I feel good about them.