Brian and I were pretty much all set to be on the road at seven thirty when I got an email from RIT telling me that I had to deal with some immunization stuff immediately or risk being automatically withdrawn from my classes.  This is a pretty big problem as I have no means of getting this information.  So I lost an hour this morning just trying to get a hold of RIT to find out what the deal was and why they waited so long (three years after my first enrollment) to even inform me that there was any requirement at all let alone that they didn’t feel that my records were up to date.  Springing this on me on the day that I am leaving for work in Canada is pretty crappy and considering that we are moving to Texas on Monday this is near impossible for me to deal with at all.  Dealing with taking my one class is more than I can handle and this is going to be more work than that, I fear.

So it was just after eight when we finally got onto the road heading to Canada.  This trip is just one unexpected delay after another.  Brian and I are seriously exhausted today.  Seriously exhausted.  This is not going to be easy.

The drive from Peoria to Niagara Falls was not bad at all.  It was a nice morning for driving.  Normally we would cross the border at Buffalo which is slightly easier but Brian has not seen Niagara Falls since he was a little kid, like around three years old when he used to live in Buffalo, and wanted to see the falls as he did not remember it so we went up there to take the Rainbow Bridge which provides a view of the falls as you cross the border.

Brian has only been to Canada once, long ago when he was a kid, and just got a passport last week allowing him to go on this trip.  So this is a bit of a treat for him – going into a foreign country.  We drove right from Niagara Falls up to Mississauga where I was stopping by the office to see everyone there before I left the area for good.  The Mississauga office is being “phased out” in the next few weeks so most of these people will not be around for me to see in some alternate location in the future.

Just before crossing the bridge into Canada we stopped at Tim Horton’s and got some coffee to kick start the day.  We had skipped getting coffee earlier due to a lack of time.

We made it just in time to partake of the free pizza that was available to the team for Christmas.  Everyone was attempting to go into one office or another today for the free food.  Canada was a bit of an unexpected location for me but it worked out well.  I got a chance to get coffee and pizza and visit with the Canadians for a while.  It worked out pretty well.

From Mississauga we went into Toronto proper and met someone at Tim Horton’s.  We’ve been to Tim Horton’s a few times today already.  It is definitely a Timmy Ho’s day.

After our coffee meeting we went to a meeting just up the street.  We had thought originally that this meeting would only take about thirty to forty-five minutes but it ended up running to three and a half hours.  Way longer than we had accounted for but the meeting went well and was really valuable so we are glad that we took the time to have it.

We had meant to be out of the meeting and out of Toronto long before rush hour started but because the meeting ran over we were stuck trying to get out of Toronto during the height of rush hour.  Not good.  We had very limited time as it was.  Our goal was to be out to Cayugo, Ontario at six thirty for the very first meeting of SpiceCorps Golden Horseshoe but there was no way at all that we were going to manage to do that.  The travel time out to Cayuga from Toronto is roughly two hours and it was about six when we got into the car in Toronto!  Oh boy.  What a day.

We drove like crazy trying to get out to Cayuga.  What a drive.  You drive out to Hamilton and then you head south into the wilderness and go all the way down to the shores of Lake Erie.  We definitely gave Brian a wild tour of this portion of Canada.  He is not going to be looking to return to this part of the world again for a long time after this.

Luckily we were able to reach someone in Houston who was able to post to the SpiceCorps group on SpiceWorks to let them know that we were on the way but running insanely late.  They then emailed us from the meeting with contact information so that we could call them and coordinate.

We raced as quickly as we could although we were stuck in completely stopped traffic much of the time.  Toronto is notorious for its rush hour gridlock along the lake front area, especially heading out west where the bulk of its suburban population lies.

It was just after eight thirty when Brian and I arrived in Cayuga for the SpiceCorps meeting.  Luckily everyone was able to wait for us.  It was a small group, just five people in addition to us.  The meeting ran for another hour, till nine thirty, and then almost all of us went out to a bar called “The Back Forty” and hung out for about another hour or two before everyone started to head for home.

The group was small but we felt that it was a really good group and that the meeting was pretty valuable.  Getting IT professionals together, especially in the SMB space, is really important.  We are hopeful that this is going to grow and be a vibrant group.

Brian and I were definitely not looking forward to the long drive back to Peoria from Cayuga, Ontario.  In theory the drive is only supposed to be another two hours but that has not been working out too well for us thus far.  We’ve already done six or seven hours of driving so far today after doing nine or so yesterday so we are quite sick of being in the car.

Our first stop was the Tim Horton’s on Route 3 in Cayuga – more coffee!  This was our fourth stop at a Timmy Ho’s just today.  That is a lot of Tim Horton’s coffee.

The drive from Cayuga to Buffalo went fine and crossing the border back into the States was easy.  But once we were to Buffalo we ran into some horrendous snow and the relatively short drive from Buffalo to Batavia was horrible.  We were so fatigued from crawling down the Thruway that we stopped at a rest stop which, of course, had nothing open except for a Tim Horton’s where we got some really late dinner and coffee making it our fifth TH stop of the day.

From Batavia to Peoria was the worst driving at all.  We were struggling to hit thirty miles per hour and had no visibility of the road whatsoever.  The whole drive from Cayuga to Peoria was supposed to be just over two hours but ended up being well over four hours.  It was about three thirty in the morning when we arrived.  Talk about being exhausted.  All of that driving on just two hours of sleep was brutal.  We are so thankful that we had decided that tomorrow we were going to take the train from Rochester to Croton on Hudson – we need the chance to just sit and do nothing.

I forgot to tell this story yesterday so it gets squeezed in today.  Yesterday afternoon I was taking care of Liesl while Dominica was eating her dinner.  I was talking to Liesl about how yesterday when I took care of her she spit up on me almost a dozen times and how Dominica had been taking care of her today and she had not spat up a single time.  I made a comment to her about how she had better not spit up now or I would think that she was out to get me.  Then, at the very moment that I stopped saying it, she spit up getting me on the head, in my eye, on my glasses, etc.

This morning the world was covered in snow.  It snowed heavily all night long and there is a lot of it today.  I do not think that there is as much as they had been predicting but there is definitely more than we would like to have at the beginning of March.  Oreo was definitely not pleased.

My conference call was really something today.  It started at eight thirty this morning and they finally let us off at just before half past noon!  I was so sick of being on the phone by that point.  It is definitely a Monday.

Here is something interesting: readership of Sheep Guarding Llama has more than doubled in the past year.  In fact, much more than doubled.  Practically tripled.  I can’t believe how many people are coming here every day.  Thanks everyone.

Today was a total disaster for the global economy.  The Nor’easter that pummeled the northeast US with snow was apropos when you saw how Wall Street performed today.  Today we are at our twelve year low and we are looking to be dipping lower quickly.  The Dow Jones Industrial Index fell to well below 6,800 points today – a truly incredible number.  It seemed for quite some time that we were safe in that it would not dip below 8,000 but now that number would be considered a massive recovery.

Citi hit a low of just $1.15 today and closed at $1.20.  Unbelievable for a company that was at $40 per share in 1977 and was, just a year ago, not only the largest bank in the world but the single, largest company.  What a year this has been.

I have to say, I am thankful that I have been working in finance since 2006 because I have gotten to be right in the middle of the action during such a turbulent and historic time.  Of course, this will historically just be seen as part of the normal economic cycle but it is a bit more exciting than many of the cycles.  I was right in the heat of things during the infamous Dot Com Bubble Burst and now this which is many times bigger.  History in the making.

After work, which ran fairly late today, I was able to go upstairs and hang out with Dominica and Liesl for a little bit.  We hung out and relaxed for a little while but Dominica and Liesl fell asleep around ten thirty or so just snuggling together in the recliner so they went to bed on the early side.

I spent the night attempting to clean up after LikeWise Open scrapped one of my Linux servers.  Turns out that like a dozen or so files were backed up properly but then were not restored when LikeWise was uninstalled.  Argh.  Then, after rolling back all of the config files, /etc/pam.d/system-auth was still loaded with lsass references which were causing PAM to die on me so that I could not log in.  What a pain.  Got it fixed, though, and everything was okay when I went to bed around two in the morning.  I would have left it for tomorrow, but then it would have been hanging over my head.  Best to just have it fixed and out of the way.

Dominica and I have nothing at all scheduled today so we are taking the day to just relax.  We entrenched ourselves in the living room with Liesl and Oreo and did our best to do pretty much nothing all day.

I worked on the continuing struggle of getting Linux (Red Hat) to integrate with Active Directory running on Windows.  That is always a big pain no matter how you attempt to do it.  Today I am learning about installing LikeWise Open which is basically a large package of a bunch of standard Linux components all set up to work together to handle AD integration with ease (in the same way that Zimbra packages a bunch of products to make email work in the same way.)

LikeWise ended up being a total breeze to install but doesn’t completely meet my needs so I ended up installing it to give myself some time to consider the alternatives and to think of the limitations or workarounds that may apply.  After a lot of research into methods using WinBind, Microsoft’s UNIX AD Extensions and more it does look as though the LikeWise approach is probably the way to go but I am still not one hundred percent sold.  I wish that I could do some simple ID mapping to make the two really work well together.  I am also experiencing some bizarre home directory behaviour that seems to go against the stated behaviour in the LikeWise documentation so I need to look into that more as well.

Most likely what is going to have to occur is a manual UNIX GID migration to match Windows.  That will be a pain but I think that it will work fine and the home directory problem is something around which I can work without too much of a hassle.  I really want to get all logins everywhere to authenticate to a single backend instead of having one system for email, one for desktops, one for UNIX, one for websites, etc.  That is far too much to remember.

Dominica got the chance to do one of her Linux Administration classes today.  That completed her seventh of eleven classes in this module that she is doing.

We watched a bit of Netflix OnDemand today.  Mostly Murder She Wrote and “The Seeds of Death” episode of Doctor Who from like 1967.  It is one of the old, awful black and white (shades of grey) episodes that was likely pulled from BetaMax because the BBC lost the original.  It was a six part episode.  All of those episodes are so cheesy but they are still fun.  I can’t wait until we work up to the mid-seventies and the eighties.  Those are the episodes that I really liked growing up.

Around eleven I got paged out.  Not for something quick either.  I had to hop right on to a conference call that lasted for quite a long time.  Of course the day could not go by without me having to work.  But we really need the overtime these days so I really cannot complain.  It is quite the blessing to be able to book another couple of hours after Liesl had already gone to bed.  I am not missing any baby bonding time and I still get paid.

When I started on the late conference call it was still clear outside.  Only a few flakes of snow were beginning to drift down although Katie had reported from South Jersey that they were getting a blizzard already.  By the time that I was wrapping things up long past midnight I took Oreo out for a late walk and discovered that there was an inch or two of snow already built up!  The rumor is that we can expect to see as much as thirteen inches by morning.  Everyone is already talking about working from home tomorrow.

One of the guys working with us on the phone conference was working from his car and actually had it catch fire and burn up while he was on the phone.  He dropped off of the call suddenly and never got back to us.  It turns out that he had left his BlackBerry in the car and it burned up with the car.  He managed to call back from the ambulance while on oxygen to let us know what had happened.  He was expecting to have to go to the ER to be checked out.  It did not seem like a matter for any serious concern, but it did lend a bit of excitement to the late night conference call.

Well I get to book a few hours even if I did end up missing out on watching Johnny Be Good with Dominica.  She ended up going to bed without me since I was stuck working so late.  It was around one in the morning when I was finally able to head off to bed.  Not too bad.  We often don’t get to go to bed until after that.

Good luck dealing with the snow everyone.  Tomorrow is going to be a fun day.  All of the kids are definitely having snow days as are many of the adults!

Here is something interesting: as of last year I have now been blogging for a quarter of my life!  That does not seem possible.  One out of every four years is recorded in SGL.  That does not include any of the “looking back” stuff that I do where I go back and fill in old details either. I have not had a chance to do very much of that but I hope to get to that more in the future.  That is harder to do because I really need a list of dates of when things occurred to know when to write about things.

Dad was the first person to whom I spoke that saw the snow.  He had gone over to Geneseo in the morning and got caught driving home in the snow which came up much quicker than he had been expecting.  It was quite bad there very early this morning and heading towards us out here in Peekskill.

I was on the phone with people in Ithaca much of the day and about an hour after dad reported the snow in Peoria I was hearing similar reports from Ithaca.  It is going to be a big one for Liesl’s very first snow storm.  There have been a few flakes here and there and once there was enough snow to leave the ground a mixture of green and white for two to three hours but nothing more.  This is going to be real snow and might mean a white Christmas for Liesl’s first Christmas.  If there is snow here then there will be lots of snow up in Frankfort.

The Grices are traveling today from Houston to Frankfort.  They left after work and school and are planning to drive straight through because there is another snow storm expected on Sunday and if they don’t make it to Frankfort before the storm hits then they will be stuck somewhere or stuck driving in a snow storm.

The snow started here around eleven thirty.  At eleven there was no snow and everything was green.  By eleven thirty the ground was white and it was coming down rather quickly.

We were extremely glad to learn that Chapel Hill here in Peekskill does amazing well with snow management.  The instant that the snow was coming down there was a huge crew out keeping our internal roads and driveways clear.  They even had our sidewalk clear within an hour or two.  For the entire rest of the day after the snow started I never once looked out the window and didn’t see the guys out there keeping something cleared.  Extremely impressive.  The complex has several different snow removal trucks with large plows, bobcats, pickup trucks, etc. plus a crew of hand shovelers.  They even have their own salt trucks so that all of our roads are salted.

We didn’t attempt any driving.  I had to work all day and there was no pressing need to try to get out to a store.  We do need to do some Christmas shopping but that will simply have to wait.  It is really crappy that Dominica bought one of the big Christmas gifts from BJ’s Wholesale Club, paid for it and then a day later they emailed to say that they no longer carry that item and that the web site was wrong.  So tons of planning had gone into that item (it was one of the really hard ones) and now we are stuck trying to find something at the last minute, with a snow storm hitting today and another on Sunday, while everything that we look for online is out of stock and won’t be available until after Christmas.  Argh.

After work this evening we just relaxed around the house.  Oreo had an awful day.  The snow was so deep that it is up to his chin even when he holds his head up.  Walking outside is so cold for him and the snow is so deep that he doesn’t know what to do.  This is when it would be so nice if he knew how to use his doggy potty that we have sitting out on the back patio.  After he finally does his business I have to scoop him up and carry him back to the house as quickly as possible as the snow makes him so cold that he can no longer walk.

After working I showered and got ready to go to lunch with dad when he got back from teaching Sunday school down at Union Presbyterian Church in Leicester. We drove over to Geneseo and ate lunch at the Omega Grill. On the way over we remarked as to what a fine day it was turning out to be and what perfect driving weather Dominica and I were going to have on our way down to Newark this evening.

We got back from lunch and I had to log in again to the office and do the Sunday afternoon work which isn’t a lot but it does take a little while.

After work my afternoon was spent getting the Mazda PR5 loaded and ready to go back to Newark. We had a lot of stuff at dad’s house that we wanted to take back with us. Dad took apart a lamp / table combination piece of furniture that we have that we really like so that we could bring that down to Newark with us. It perfectly matches our Newark furniture set even though we had original purchased it for the office in Geneseo when we had the house on Hawthorn Circle.

There was a lot of stuff to go into the car.  We are moving quite a load around in this trip.  It is our first trip in a long time with the PR5 and it can carry many times as much as the BMW can.

At four thirty dad ran down to the York Deli (York Landing) and grabbed some cold subs for us for dinner which we ate just before I had to leave to go meet the Toccos in Henrietta to pick up Dominica from them.  While dad was out I had to do some more work for the office but got it done just in time to eat with him when he returned.

After eating it was time to head out.  At this point the weather was still looking okay.  It was ten after five in the evening when I set out from Peoria.

I met the Toccos at the Henrietta exit from the New York State Thruway.  I only beat them to the meeting point by about ten minutes.  Just long enough to get the last bits of the car situated and to read a few pages in “The Crystal Shard”.

It was a little before six when Dominica and Oreo climbed into the Mazda and we headed south on Interstate 390 to head for home and the Toccos climbed back onto the Thruway to continue on towards Frankfort.

We made our first stop on the trip at the gas station that we always use on the south side of Dansville just off of the southern Dansville exit off the highway.  We stocked up on drinks and snacks and topped off the fuel so that we wouldn’t have to worry about it later.

It was between Kanona and Corning on Interstate 390 when we started seeing some bad snow.  We didn’t think too much of it but called dad to see what we should be expecting.  It looked as though the southern route was clear while Interstate 86 / NY 17 was seeing a bit more snow.  So we continued on our intended path down Interstate 99 / US 15 towards Mansfield and then to Williamsport, Pennsylvania.  But even by Gang Mills, New York the weather was getting increasingly bad and by Mansfield, PA we were getting pretty concerned about the driving conditions.

The snow worsened and the road conditions deteriorated continuously all of the way from Kanona, New York until Tannersville, Pennsylvania.  Once we crossed the Delaware Water Gap and came into New Jersey the snow turned back into rain and we were able to drive mostly normal again.  A trip that normally takes just five hours ended up taking us eight and a half hours!  Much of the trip was spent at no more than thirty miles an hour.

Luckily we had Sue Grafton’s “T is for Trespass” along with us and we managed to make it through quite a bit of the book during the trip.

It was about two in the morning when we finally pulled into Newark.  We had to walk Oreo and it took two trips up to the apartment to unload the car.  We were exhausted but unfortunately Oreo had gotten into something along the trip and he had to have a bath before being able to go to bed!  What a night.