It was pretty foggy for the first hour of the drive but that turned to rain for the rest of the drive which was not nearly so bad.  We only had to make one quick pit stop on the drive and we arrived in Frankfort around eleven thirty.  Not as early as I had hoped but not too bad.

We unloaded the car and visited for a little while.  I worked from my BlackBerry for a little bit but then had to log in and work until half past midnight doing server checkouts.  We tried going to bed but at one I was paged out again and had to log back in and work for another ten minutes.  So much for sleep.

I didn’t fall asleep right away, as you would imagine, after driving for hours, drinking caffeine on the drive to be safe and then working once arriving in Frankfort.  I dozed off for a tiny bit but definitely saw the clock at a quarter after one and again at three in the morning so could only have gotten an hour in there at best if that.  I was completely awake and out of bed around six thirty because Liesl had gotten up.  So my entire night was only five hours long with me being awake for a good portion of it.  It is going to be a long day.

I got right to work as there is a lot to do this morning.  It was a very busy morning.  And, of course, in addition to having tons of work to do this morning I was working on four servers that I have never touched before and know nothing about which always causes a number of problems.  For example, I was not told their names correctly so we lost some times while I tried to figure out why they were not accessible.

Just to make my morning more stressful I discovered early on that both Scranton and Peoria Heights were down while people were trying to use them.  After a bit of work to figure out what was going on I found out that Scranton had lost power due to an electrical system upgrade and Peoria Heights had just lost power altogether since four thirty in the morning.

Between the never ending morning deployments and the power losses my morning was very long and very stressful.  I really hate power outages.  They are not like losing network connectivity because then you are just down and waiting for things to turn back on.  But when the power goes out you are disconnected waiting for the power to come back on to find out what burned up that you did not anticipate.

InformationWeek had an article yesterday about the demise of IT industry legend Silicon Graphics or SGI.  SGI is famous as the manufacturer of super high-end RISC-based graphics workstations.  SGI products were famous for powering the early days of Hollywood’s three dimensional movie rendering.  SGI also made Irix which, at one time, was one of the big UNIX players.  SGI was also a pioneer in RISC and 64-bit computing with their MIPS line of processors (most famous to consumers as the processor in the Nintendo 64.)

Also in the news today is the rumor that IBM and Sun may announce their merger as early as Monday.  Unlike SGI who is already an almost forgotten piece of IT history Sun is still a major player as the fourth largest server maker in the world and one of the few companies still designing and making their own architecture – the Sparc processor.  I work with Sun equipment every day.  It will be strange to see them vanish as their own, independent entity.  It will also be interesting to see how IBM handles the integration of the Sun product line and customers into its already existing family or products and means of service delivery.

My morning work just went on forever.  Today ended up being a full day of work which is quite unusual for a Saturday.  Normally I put in a half day or a three-quarter day at most but today I really put in the hours.  And they aren’t light hours like you often get to put in during the week.  This is the eating at your desk, wife bringing your cup of coffee after cup of coffee, eyes bugging out of your head, multitasking as quickly as you can kind of overtime.  Saturdays are definitely the day of the week when I do the most work.  Maybe that is because there is so little communications and nothing to do but work.  Very few distractions.  You just sit at your desk and go.

We were extremely pleased to found out from our accountants today that our taxes are pretty much done and they already know that we are not getting a penalty this year!  In fact we do not even owe any taxes.  We have overpaid.  What a relief.  These taxes have been really hanging over us.  We were so sure that we were going to owe and were going to have a penalty.  We have been dreading dealing with the whole thing.  We should be getting back a nice chunk now.  Enough to be a decent investment considering how little we have been able to put away recently.  It will feel good to be saving something for a change rather than just spending.

My work ended up going until after seven thirty this evening!  What an incredibly long day.  I was completely wrecked by the time that it was all done.  Luckily it was not stressful work.  I was not feeling stressed at all by the time that the day was over just really worn out.  Knowing that the taxes are done and that everything is okay with them is making me feel much, much better.  And the work today was low stress while adding a lot of overtime which also makes me feel better even if it does mean not getting a day off.  Not even the remotest semblance of a day off.  But, I suppose, that today was actually kind of a good day to be incredibly busy because Dominica and her mom had Stephanie’s bridal shower to go to for the bulk of the afternoon and this kept me working rather than watching television.

After I was finally done with work (the poor guys who had to do the application check outs are seven hours ahead of me so they were working at two in the morning after putting in fourteen hour days and having to work tomorrow as well) we all drive out to the Kitlas Restaurant for dinner.  Dominica and I both got the potato and crab encrusted halibut which was awesome.  Today was a bad day for my diet!  I need to get back onto the wagon tomorrow.

After dinner Dominica and I drove to Herkimer and went first to Hannaford to get some food for lunch tomorrow (so that we are not tempted to just eat loads of starch as we are having a “belated Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixins” since everyone missed Thanksgiving because we were in the hospital as Liesl was being born) and then we drove to Walmart to pick up some formula.  Then back home.

We got back and watched Speed Racer on television.  The movie was completely awful even though it was loaded with good people.  It was like an experiement in surreal cinematic art that failed horribly.  The entire movie was bluescreened and felt like actors sitting on a sound stage.  It felt more fake than The Wizard of Oz where you really feel the people are walking around on a stage.  This felt like people in a recording booth.  They didn’t even try to make you get drawn into the movie.  The race scenes didn’t even look as good as relatively modern video games.  I was really hating the movie and then they pulled a major twist on me.  They had Ben Miles as one of the race announcers on the Gran Prix!  Ben Miles!  That is so awesome.  So now I love the movie.  The many musical interludes based on the original Speed Racer theme were quite good as well.

As soon as the movie was over it was time for bed.  That was around midnight but I didn’t fall asleep for another hour or two.  No work planned for tomorrow.  We have the Palm Sunday / Thanksgiving dinner at noon and then Dominica and I are driving down to Scranton to pick up some servers from the datacenter.  Then it is back home to Peekskill.  We hope to be home before eight in the evening.

Once again I am backed up on email.  One busy day and everything falls apart.  It took me days last time to get caught up on all of the mail.  It comes in so quickly and so much of it is something that I need to keep for one reason or another.  I find the constant flow of it to be pretty frustrating.  Even with all of the diligence that I put in attempting to read everything that pertains to me the levels of SPAM that we have – internal SPAM that is, not external – completely overwhelms us and forces us to automate huge swaths of email reception so it is extremely easy to miss something.  I must spend two hours per day just managing the email.

I had a very busy morning with tons of requests coming in even before my morning started and while I was on the train in to Manhattan.  My entire morning was spent just completing incoming requests as quickly as I could.  Very draining.  I am going to be doing a lot of catch-up work tomorrow – if just to get my mailbox back to a state in which I can manage to take care of people without missing critical things!

For lunch, Katie and I went out to Financier Patisserie on Stone.  It’s Friday so that sandwich of the day is the hot smoked salmon and Gruyeres which is amazing along with their crap quiche which I have not had an opportunity to try before.  Lunch was excellent although it is always so crowded down on that part of Stone – it can be rather uncomfortable to attempt to eat there.

My real shock of the day came in the early afternoon when my consulting firm called me to tell me that not only was I going to receive an “out of the blue” paycut but that it was going to be 15.27% and that it was effective immediately – starting Monday morning (today is Friday.)  I was originally told, by my consulting firm, some month or two ago that there was a cut but that I exempt from it and not to worry.  This news, apparently, is actually the news that caused this disaster to happen.

So my day went from busy to insanely stressful in a moment.  No warning at all that something like this was going to happen.  Blissfully going through my day thinking that everything was great and then “blam”, humongous paycut and a hearty muhahahaha!

Most of my afternoon, somewhat obviously, was spent panicking about what was happening with my pay and my job and my consulting firm.  What a mess.  I finally reached my boss out on Long Island and was able to talk to him and then administration and the staffing department.  The company for which I work was not happy to find out that I was getting  a massive paycut, without warning and for no reason.  Their recommendation to me, that I had also come up with on my own, was simply to not accept the new offer.  On Monday morning, in theory, there will be some serious renegotiations and very likely a change of consulting firms.  We are going to see.

So, somewhat nerve-wracking, I am officially unemployed this weekend.  Monday morning is going to be interesting.  The company at which I work is thinking that things will be okay – but it is still stressful as there are so many variables and changes and potentially bad things that can happen.  For example, this could really impact the 401K that I have been investing into as I am not completely vested yet.  I hate that companies can take away your vestment simply by lowering your rate or firing you to protect themselves.

I was at work until seven this evening.  This is going to be a long weekend as we wait to see what will happen come Monday.  I hate that so much of my career involves major disasters in the eleventh hour and then having to wait while no one is available to see what is happening.  Completely inappropriately, my manager at the consulting firm is both on vacation all next week and decided to just leave in the middle of the afternoon so that I had no one to reach.  I reached out to her backup manager to whom important things are supposed to go when she is not available and that person’s out of office email message said that they were on vacation and that people who needed them needed to speak to the person that I tried the first time!  Circular out of office hand-offs.  How professional.  Argh.

This has been an ongoing situation for me over the years.  I cannot count anymore how many times I have been given incomplete information or have received major changes in plans or have gotten disasterous news on a Friday afternoon (I seriously believe now that this is planned so that people don’t have to “deal with it”) and then absolutely anyone who could be involved leaves the office early and hides.  This has often occurred when work scheduled for a Monday morning gets cancelled and no one wants to admit that they never had a contract for the work.  It is very common.  A consulting firm should never have a circumstance where people are not available over the weekend.  I even left a voicemail for the entire consulting office, before five o’clock which is well before the end of the working day, for just anyone to call me back as it was an emergency and not one person bothered to contact me knowing that I had an emergency and that both of my managers decided to stop working today.

Something that “non-contractors” seem to forget is that in “business time”, a Friday night and a Monday morning touch each other.  There is no work over the weekend.  Not real work anyway.  There is no HR, staffing, managers, etc.  If something is left unresolved on a Friday night that means that it is unresolved over the weekend and on Monday morning.  Did my consulting firm really forget that when they said that Monday morning I had a new rate that that meant that it had to be completely dealt with before I left the office today or else we had no resolution and no contract on Monday morning?  It isn’t like they can get into the office (or will bother to go into the office) early on Monday, contact me before I am supposed to start work and make a deal with the company at which I work and coordinate with the “pass-through” consulting firm all before I start needing to work around seven in the morning!  They aren’t prepared to deal with this situation in any way.  They just run home, stick their collective fingers into their proverbial ears and go “la la la la – I can’t hear you” and hope that the situation resolves itself, magically, without their intervention.

Why does every company find it so important to make going to work everyday and doing a good job incredibly stressful?  It takes real effort to make things have this much stress.  This doesn’t happen naturally.  It took a minimum of four or five people at my lowest level consulting firm alone completely failing to do their jobs to get us into this situation and they aren’t even the company that initiated the whole problem!  It took a lot of screwing up to get here.  How come all of those people aren’t getting major paycuts?  I put in a lot of effort this afternoon trying to find a way to keep my job.  Apparently neither of the consulting firms cares whatsoever if they lose me as a consultant (and, as we approach the end of day – perhaps lose the company at which I work as a customer.)

It’s no wonder people go out drinking so often!

It was after eight when I finally got home to Newark.  When there is this much stress, though, it isn’t fun going home.  You want to stay in the office and get things fixed.  You want resolution.  That’s what makes me the most upset.  That so many people can just knock off for the weekend because it doesn’t directly affect them is outrageous.

So I got home but it is pretty hard to relax on weekends like this.  Ryan came up from downstairs and we ordered in Brazilian Pizza from a place the Dominica and I had never heard of before.  The pizza was amazing.  Min and I got a corn and cheese pizza which was delicious and we all shared a chocolate and cheese pizza for dessert which, sounds awful, but was amazingly good.  Mozzarella, chocolate, cherries and cinnamon!  We will be ordering from this place a lot.  They have like fifty different pizzas.

It was around midnight before we actually got to bed.  Busy day tomorrow.  Working all day and then going to Katie’s house on the Hudson for a riverfront party in the evening.

The move happened at two in the afternoon without warning.  We were told that there would be warning and boxes delivered for our stuff to be moved in.  But no, just people who showed up and told us to leave immediately.  What a mess.

The move actually went pretty quickly and I found my new cube pretty quickly.  Because I had so little to move (literally two monitors, a computer, the cables, mouse, keyboard and the phone) I was done quite quickly.  The new cube is in a decent location but it is in an area that is designed to be exactly what Lister and DeMarco point out as an example of a company run by bad managers who aren’t thinking at all – a space for knowledge workers kept uncomfortably warm with harsh overhead lighting keeping us from being able to use our computers efficiently and with nothing to block the sounds of people talking all over the place.  It’s everything that corporate space planners do wrong that even a monkey could figure out doesn’t make any sense.  It’s not about saving space – it wastes lots of space.  It is about making work uncomfortable and inefficient.  Why would they want to keep us from working at maximum efficiency?  I have no idea.  But the focus of my job totally shifted today from “getting tasks done” to “socializing”.  The new floor is nothing but a continuous party.

Oreo seemed to be in pretty good spirits when I got home.  Bored out of his mind and very lonely but again he didn’t seem to have panicked at all.  I am home with him tomorrow so hopefully he can make it through Friday and his week will be over.

I was burned out from too much work all week and too much stress.  Nothing stresses me out like politics at work.  But I just have to remember that being inefficient and getting less done doesn’t get me paid less – it actually gets me paid more in the long run.  It isn’t my money being wasted and I shouldn’t be concerned about it.

I ended up having to put in another super long day today working long after I arrived home.  I did fifteen hours on Monday and fourteen today.  Just a normal ten hour day yesterday.  I can’t wait until this week is over and I can catch my breath.

I gave up no even thinking about homework tonight.  What little free time I had between eleven, when work completed, and midnight, when I fell asleep, Oreo and I spent watching the seventh season of The Cosby Show. Oreo appreciated the break from me doing homework.

Today I have a Hewlett-Packard “show” in Tribeca at lunchtime running all afternoon so I decided, rather than going to downtown and then having to cross town to the show that I would just work from home until the show. It saves almost an hour of total travel time as getting to Tribeca is easier than getting to Wall in the first place. It is a good thing that I did that because I ended up having a very busy morning and did not have the time to waste traveling unnecessarily.

As it was I got stuck working until forty-five minutes after I had wanted to leave for the show so there was no way that I was going to make it on time. Then, right as I arrived at the Tribeca office, I got a call and was on the phone for half an hour or more before I could even go in.

The show was good and valuable. I always enjoy these technology “catch up” events. We got cool stuff at this show too like really nice polo shirts and big flash drives. I’m all into industry swag.

After the show, which went until five, I went down and worked for a little while off of the Tribeca trading floor before heading for home. It ended up being a pretty long day.

I got back home to Newark a little before seven. I decided to skip dinner. Dominica just made herself some pasta. I have a very busy evening planned out so she just watched some Internet TV and went to bed.

I settled in, by seven, to a long evening of working on a Red Hat exam. I ended up putting in an entire eight hours on continuous starring at the screen working on the exam. I didn’t wrap up until three in the morning! Boy was I tired. but I really wanted to get this work out of the way before I switched gears to work on my big Java programming project that I have to turn in in ten days. I am so much more efficient when I am not task switching more than necessary as well as when I don’t have big workloads hanging over my head. It was a long night but I did some really good work, learned a bunch of stuff as well and am feeling very happy having all of that work done and over with.

Bahrain on our usual Saturday morning deployments. This is really an extension of the Friday night deployments.

I had other, non-deployment, work to be done as well for the office. Never a free weekend for me. I am really looking forward to my four day vacation at the end of the month. What a change that will be!

Dominica slept in this morning. She was pretty tired after staying up so late working on her homework and assignments last night. This is going to be a really long weekend for her as she attempts to complete her final project by Sunday night so that she doesn’t have to take an incomplete in her class. This is her last class for the summer as she is taking the semester off. She is really looking forward to the break.

I worked from before eight in the morning until three thirty on work for the office. I took time off for lunch in there but there was quite a bit of work to be done. It is amazing how much work ends up needing to be done on the weekends.

Another Amazon shipment arrived today. Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals: Fasta Pasta 1 arrived today along with the web design classic title “The Zen of CSS Design” which I am looking forward to reading.

I did coordinate another day of Handbrake compression work. Boy do I work these computers hard. All day and all night they work at maximum capacity. No one can convince me that we have reached the age of unlimited storage and processing power. I need orders of magnitude more storage and processing power than are commonly available today. It will be many years before systems prepared to handle my workload are commonly available and the workload that I will have at that time will be much greater than what I have now. I am taxing my overall system I/O, network capacity, drive I/O and CPU. It’s really amazing.

Most of my afternoon and evening were spent either working on some certification consulting work that I am doing which is extremely intensive or a little bit of my homework that is due this weekend. Mostly that is going to be handled tomorrow as I need to coordinate with my project partner. Doing team based work for online classes that are only ten weeks long is quite difficult. We don’t have enough time to really set up good collaboration tools and get into a routine. We work together a handful of times and have to do all of our work based off of that.

We went to bed around midnight.

Unfortunately because of the short notice Dominica and I haven’t had time to contemplate a vacation at all. This year is our five year anniversary and her thirtieth birthday and it would be a perfect chance to travel a little and actually take some time off. We really wanted to go somewhere for our anniversary this year but everything will be incredibly expensive doing it at the last minute. So we have no idea what we are even going to attempt to do let alone be able to do. Dominica does not have any vacation time saved up at work so it will be extra difficult (and expensive) for her to take time off. So we have no idea what we are doing.

Tomorrow is the Microsoft 2008 Release Event here in New York City. I got approved to be able to go to that a month or two ago. So I will be at that tomorrow up in midtown all day. It will be a nice change of pace. I haven’t had an opportunity to go to any of Microsoft’s sessions in the last two years. I used to go to these things all of the time. Although this is the last really big launch event since the 2003 Launch Event which I felt was quite valuable.

I stopped in at Airlie Cafe on my way into the office this morning and grabbed a breakfast sandwich as well as a salad to have as my lunch. That is all that I managed to eat all day and I was really hungry and tired by the end of the day at the office.

Dominica and I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out what me having two weeks off means. Does it mean that we should go on a vacation – a vacation with no money and no time to plan and without any firm details? Because we didn’t know until this morning that I was going on furlough she doesn’t have any vacation time saved up with causes additional problems. We thought about going to Europe but with the US dollar in such horrible shape against the Euro that seems like an extremely bad idea. So we are talking about maybe going to Mexico. But we really have no idea.

If you like Star Wars you will love “Star Wars According to a Three Year Old“.

I ended up getting stuck in the office quite late.  Much later than I had anticipated.  Some schedule work that I had from eleven in the morning got rescheduled until one thirty and then didn’t actually start until after three and took four and a half hours.  So it turned into a long day quickly on me.

I got home and Dominica cooked a really cool new dish that involves corn muffins, sautéed vegetables and baked acorn squash.  It was delicious.  We ate out dinner and watched the first two episodes of A Different World, the Cosby Show spin off about college life.  Boy did that show bring back memories.  I had totally forgotten about that show and I must have watched it all of the time.

We only got forty-five minutes of relaxation or so before I was paged out and had to work for another hour.  It has really been a long day now.  So that took me until nine thirty before being really done at the office.  Then I took half an hour to do some consulting work for a certification exam that I am working with but that took very little effort.

Dominica spent the evening alone playing MySims that I got for her for Christmas.  She didn’t even play it once for two months but has been playing it a bit the last few days.  I went to bed just after ten and we watched one more episode of our show while falling asleep.  Tomorrow is a very early day for me so I will be rather tired.  I will also be away from the office all day.

Today was my chance to check and see how SGL did in the month of February with my first full month of Google Analytics data. The most interesting things to note are that my technology articles are by far the most popular things that I write and that people from sixty countries read the blog just during February. I is amazing to think of how many people from all over the world are interested in SGL. Here are the countries, in order of visits, that have come to SGL this past month: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, India, Australia, Malaysia, Sweden, Ireland, Netherlands, France, South Korea, Mexico, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, South Africa, Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Netherlands Antilles, Denmark, Romania, Turkey, Finland, Thailand, Azerbaijan, Spain, Austria, China, Brazil, Hungary, Trinidad and Tobago, Serbia and Montenegro, Belgium, Singapore, Dominica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, French Polynesia, Sri Lanka, Greece, Cyprus, Chile, French Guiana, Czech Republic, Costa Rica, Taiwan, Kyrgyzstan, Estonia, Ghana, Iran, Norway, Luxemburg, Israel, Philippines and Argentina.

Here are some additional interesting facts about my visitors: Firefox beat out Internet Explorer as the most popular browser. While Windows was clearly the most popular operating system to visit SGL, Linux visitors neatly doubled the presence of Mac OS visitors. Solaris even made a reasonable showing at .4% more than doubling visitors from the Sony Playstation Portable. Somehow the hideously small 1024×768 was by far the most popular screen resolution. About one half of one percent of our visitors see the site as ScottAndDominica.com and not as SheepGuardingLlama.com.

Dominica finally pulled herself (and therefore Oreo as well) out of bed until four minutes past noon. Thirteen hours of sleep for the two of them. She was happy to wake up to fresh, warm Food for Life. We haven’t managed to get ourselves breakfast from there in a very long time. It was a special treat.

I didn’t have much time before I had to do a one o’clock conference call for the office which took about an hour. That ate up quite a chunk of the afternoon. I only got a little bit of time to relax before Dominica and I got to work taking care of all of the things that just have to be dealt with today. For both of us that is a bit of homework. Me for my Project Management class and her for her GPS and the New Geography class. She is getting anxious to get her Associates degree out of the way. It is crappy that she has so much that she has to do that it is going to end up taking her almost two years to get an Associates degree when she already has a Bachelors from the same university (State University of New York – just two different colleges) but there is just so much work between where she is and another Bachelors that it is worth getting the AS along the way. It will be at least another year or two after that before she could get her second BSc. degree. If it is even worth it after having an AS and a BSc.

I lost a lot of the afternoon as Oreo was having one of his “needy” days. We aren’t sure if this happens just because he really needs a lot of attention or if it is because he is feeling sick or if he really just needs a lot of different things all on the same day. But it meant a couple hours or more of just feeding, walking, playing, scratching, holding him and trying to figure out if something was wrong or if he just felt alone. But he was right with both of us all day so I doubt that.

I have several servers that I need to build for the office this weekend which is keeping me extra busy as well. My day just flew by as I attempted to get everything done that needed to be done. In between everything I did some big updates to my own servers moving all of the Red Hat 4 series machines up to version 4.6. I also did a lot of work, continuing from yesterday, of getting SSH keys distributed and automounted home directories from my Solaris NFS file server and stuff like that. Mostly background work but a lot of it. I may be swamped but I am also quite productive.

Andy and I spent about an hour or more on the phone this evening. We haven’t had a chance to really talk in probably a month. The whole mid-December to mid-January craziness really takes its toll. It is impossible to “stay on target”. If only we had one of those little targeting computers that did that work for us. “Luke, what are you doing with your eyes closed?” “I’m using the force.” “Open your eyes, use the targeting computer. That’s what it is for – for hitting small objects at great distance.”

Ramona called around eight and came over around nine or a little later with ice cream and the makings of major sundays. I had too much work to do to be able to hang out with her and Dominica so they settled in to watch “girl movies” while I worked. They started with High School Musical 2. Which is probably cute and entertaining but I do not exactly have any urge to watch it which is strange as it is normally more my kind of movie that most peoples’ but something about the massive popularity of it doesn’t do it for me. I have lost all interest in “mainstream” life.

My work ended up going pretty late.  I was still working after midnight when Ramona headed back to the Ironbound to go home.  I took Oreo for a walk so that he would be ready for bed.  Dominica went to the living room to keep reading in the Drizzt Cycle.  (Ramona returned the Icewind Dale Trilogy that she borrowed a few days ago so I might be back on track with reading those soon myself.)

Work went until well after one in the morning.  No rest for the weary I guess.  Slow day planned tomorrow.  Work, of course, plus a meeting with Pam’s brother who might be interested in dungeon mastering a game in which I could actually get to play (Dungeons and Dragons that is) and then dinner with Prashant and Kriti down in Iselin, New Jersey tomorrow evening.

Bed didn’t come until long after one in the morning.  But I wasn’t really getting tired until then either and Dominica was quite content to keep reading.

When I wrapped up work it was approaching noon and Dominica and I had a lot that we needed to do before we were going to be ready for people to come over for the D&D game.  We need to clean, take care of Oreo and I have to prep for the game which takes quite a bit of work.  We also wanted to generate Dominica’s character before we started to play and that took almost an hour.

We weren’t able to get as much done as we had hoped that we would but what can you do?  Ramona, Winni and Kevin all came over around three thirty and we set to generating everyone’s characters.  That took several hours as is to be expected at the beginning of a campaign.

Between getting characters set up, Oreo needing to do his routing again and then ordering in dinner from Mi Pequeno Mexico and a sushi place in Newark (who knew) it was around eight thirty at night when we finally got around to getting the game actually moving.  But there is little that can be done.  D&D requires a lot of concentration and it is such an immense task that the initial setup for a campaign just takes a lot of work.

We ended up playing from eight thirty until after one in the morning.  We didn’t get real far into the adventure but, then again, that is under four hours of actual play time.  So it really wasn’t all that bad.  I am thinking about setting up a “campaign blog” to follow the storyline of the campaign.  I think that that would be interesting – to see the adventure unfold a bit more like an adventure’s journal.

We decided to get together again tomorrow and continue the campaign since we didn’t get a lot of actual play time today and everyone is anxious for more.

From midnight until one in the morning Oreo lay on his pillow in the living room not sleeping and I practiced my guitar. I wasn’t happy about being up so late but at least I got some practice time in. I went to bed around one and Oreo came to bed sometime between one and two. Must be nice to be Dominica and get to sleep through the dog asking to do things but it keeps me awake. Just him walking around the room wakes me up.

My alarm went off at five thirty this morning but I was not about to get up and start working as tired as I was with just three and a half hours of sleep or so. I plugged in my office BlackBerry and checked my mail. No one needing me just yet. I slept a little while longer, but not long, and kept checking my mail every ten minutes or so until I was asked to deal with some issues for another team.

So by seven I was up and working. I wasn’t expecting to have an issue this morning (who does) so I ended up getting stuck working from home for the day as one issue piled up against another and I never had a chance to leave. But I got a lot of work done today so that worked out well.

I was busy enough that I decided to skip lunch and just eat something from the kitchen. There isn’t much in the way of food in the house so it was yoghurt and Smart Start cereal with vanilla soy milk for me. Cheap and healthy though.

Dominica ran out to Target over her lunch break and did some shopping. Just staples and some television on DVD. She realized today that it is 2008 and that later this year she will be turning thirty! But, of course, Danielle is turning thirty-two tomorrow. And luckily for all of us, she will always be older. But not as old as Francesca.

There was a lot of work to do around the house today. We have been falling behind since Christmas. I did two loads of dishes today and took no less than six loads of trash out to the trash and recycling room. I managed to make a good dent in the house though and it is looking much better.

Dominica got home and we had order in pizza from Tony’s. We watched What I Like About You – the 2002 television show with Amanda Bynes and Jennie Garth. I have never seen the show before but we are both big Amanda Bynes fans so we were confident that it would be a good show.

We ended up watching half of the first season, which wasn’t long, by the end of the night. We stopped watching at nine thirty and I went back to the living room to get back to work. Things have just been too busy at work for me not to be putting in lots of extra time right now.

Dominica went to bed when I went back out to work. I am hoping to be to bed around ten. After last night I am really exhausted.

I did manage to sneak in thirty to sixty minutes of playing classical guitar throughout the day. I am sounding much better.