It’s been a little while since I’ve posted. I’ve been getting a little overwhelmed and the dam burst yesterday morning. It felt good to get some things that had been bothering me out into the open. Liz and I are now much better. We’re going to do a minimum of one night out per month for the two of us. We haven’t scheduled next month yet, but December is set. We’re going to go see Bryan Adams at the State Theatre in Minneapolis. It should be good. I’ve never been to an acoustic performance nor have I been to one of his concerts. In fact, it was only a few nights ago that I found an acoustic performance of his out on YouTube. We’re really looking forward to it. We determined that we hadn’t been out to “a show” since before Laura was born, when we went to see RENT. We also decided that Liz is going to get at least one day a month to herself without having to worry about the kids.
Work has been kinda topsy-turvy. Successes. Frustrations. Meetings. More meetings. Did I mention meetings? I think I did. I tried working from home on Wednesday with mixed results. It appears that if I am going to do that, I need to hide myself down in the basement otherwise Laura expects more attention. Wednesday was not a good day for Liz to put it mildly. Anyway … work has been kinda topsy turvy. I’ve got a few projects “on the stove” … campus web cms project … mailing list server … fighting back phishing attempts … active directory project. Two of those hit a wall this afternoon, at which point I decided the Lord was telling me it was time to go home. Thankfully my boss agreed. Yesterday actually ended on a positive note though since I hacked a webmail plugin to make it work the way we need it to. I just need to remember to document what I did as well as update the documentation on what plugins we’re using (since I noticed that was out-of-date).
This coming week I hope to get more done (though I wish I was spending less time in meetings). I should be able to make some headway on both of the “roadblocks” that I encountered this afternoon. I’m also going to look into doing a major software update on our spam and virus filtering servers. Speaking of email … a coworker and I buckled down and finally knocked out disabling the horribly out-of-date software on two of our smtp servers this week (since it is not needed with previously mentioned filtering servers in place). Server load went from 50-80% cpu most of the day down to an average of around 1 or 2% cpu … with “spikes” to 10%. I joked with one of my coworkers that if she heard snoring coming from the server room, it was just the mail servers.
On the home front, we got the lawn mowed for the last time this season last weekend. Liz actually did most of it after I made a pass around the outside and mowed some of the more challenging parts (e.g. the ditch). After she finished mowing I did a thorough cleaning of the deck, including taking it off. I did a little re-arranging and got the snowblower pulled out. I think one of tomorrow’s projects is going to be finally changing the oil in that little beastie, since it’s not been changed since before I got it from its previous owner and I know it *really* needs it. My parents are hopefully bringing down some fenceposts this weekend so hopefully I’ll be able to put up a snow fence this year so that the lower part of the driveway doesn’t drift so badly. This is particularly important since Natasha (our Impreza) doesn’t have quite the ground clearance that Nell (the Outback) has … and take a guess which one I’m driving to work.
I get to see family again this weekend. Warren is being baptized on Sunday. It should be a good time. I have to help serve Communion but thankfully the people who are helping assist are good with cleanup afterwords. We’re going out to eat afterwords since serving a meal at our house for 12 people makes things kinda nuts. Good times will be had though.
p.s. for those who wonder about the name of my journal … it’s intended to be a geeky reference.
