Made it back home just fine - short 16 minute flight from Flint to Detroit and crazy bumpy flight from Detroit to Columbia though. And we were delayed getting out of Detroit for loading bags and stopping to deice the plane. Ended up getting home a little before 1:30am, didn't get to sleep until after 2:30am.
Still, no sleep is much better than the stomach bug I got while I was up there. Tasha's sister Pam's kid was sick and I think it spread from there. Me, Tasha, Pam, etc... just glad Christina didn't catch it too. Other than Christmas Eve and Christmas I was not feeling too great. At least I wasn't getting physically sick like the others were, but it was touch and go a couple of times there. A bit better today though, only a little off sometimes, not sick.
Anyway, nice day of rest today before we get on the road to drive down to Tampa to see Christina's family and go to the bowl game. Busy, busy holiday season this year for us.
Took lots of great photos while we were up in Michigan. Carson is as cute as ever and it was amazing how much he's changed since August even. Haven't had time to go through the 200+ photos today yet so nothing may be posted until after we get back from Tampa. Going to be a crazy 3-4 weeks of work once we get back too, so I'm sure posts will be few and far between during that time.
Christina went to Kristi's 2nd annual cookie exchange Friday night and brought home lots of goodies. And lots of them were peanut butter based (like her own were) so I get to eat those. But I deserve them this year because my baby mama was so nauseous the day she had to make her cookies that she couldn't even take the smell so I made them for her. Peanut butter chocolate star cookies again because of high demand - everyone loved them last year.
Anyway, while the girls did whatever it is you do at a cookie exchange the husbands got together and bitched about Carolina football and watched Hellboy 2. Pretty decent movie, it'll be interesting if they keep cranking them out since the first two movies were good.
We all decided also to do the Lights at the Zoo again this year. We've gone pretty much every year since I moved down to SC, but it's fun to take kids to see it too. Prety cold last night which is better than going when it's in the 70's - kind of kills the Christmas vibe when it's that warm. Here are the photos from last night:
Tried a new workout routine tonight at the gym. Dave and I let someone work in sets while we were doing bench press last week and he said to mix up his routine he does 5 sets of 5 reps at a given weight. Said when he can get 18 or more, he adds 5 pounds next time he goes to the gym until he can't get at least 18 of the 25 reps total.
We started with 225 - the most I've gotten at that in an one set is 9 so I didn't think I'd get 5 sets of 5 reps, but both Dave and I did. It was a really good workout and a really good day for a workout for some reason - everything was easier. Even flies and I hate flies.
Going to be a busy week. I'd say we have around 100 Outlook installs out there in the wild with around 250-300 to go I guess counting resource accounts. Not too many hitches so far - hopefully everything will be ready for our migration day January 12th. Ended up not using SMS or SCCM to roll out Office 2007 to everyone because we had way too many odd exceptions and too much variance in versions out there. So, I'm just using an admin install point from a share and having folks run a link to update their Office software. It's all hands free and then Group Policy cleans everything up and fixes Groupwise in the interim. Still, lots to do between that and putting the new computers in the student computer lab between now and our last day this year on the 23rd of December.
Had good escapes from work though - been going to lunch with friends a lot and that hour away from the office is a very good thing. LOL. Also had more than enough after work too - still working on the nursery and getting a little better at coping moulding. Made good progress in Gears of War 2 on the Xbox also. Ordered a pair of guideposts for the boat trailer to make it easier when I pull it out of the water one of these weekends to winterize it. Bunch of yard work blowing and munching up leaves in our front yard.
So, busy. Busy at work and at home. Guess that's good, but it certainly feels like there aren't enough hours in the day lately. Hopefully after our holiday travels, this email migration and following clean up, and getting the house in order we'll have a break around March or so...
Thought I'd take a few minutes on lunch today to post an update so folks know we're still alive.
No further break in attempts thankfully. Of course now we have a pair of new motion sensor porch lights so I'm sure that helps. They are the kind that have a photocell in them so they burn dim all night and go to full brightness when they detect motion... pretty clever.
The drama that night though started a chain reaction of erratic sleep patterns though. Up until 5am that night, worked from 8-3:00 the next day since they let us go early for break. Up the next morning for a trip to Atlanta for Thanksgiving day and a trip back to Columbia that night. Up at 3:15am the next morning for Black Friday. Up early on Saturday to get some stuff ready and go to the store before heading over to Tim and Kristi's for Thanksgiving Dinner Part II and that miserable excuse for a football game. Then Sunday I spend the day working on the nursery - Christina and I painted and I learned that coping moulding sucks. Installing a chair rail around the room and I could just throw that new little coping saw away it pisses me off so much.
Anyway, between that and being busy every minute I'm at work with this email migration and a slew of other support requests, it's been and felt non-stop for a while. Could have used two more days of Thanksgiving break.
Speaking of work, it's a long time coming but I'm officially Director of Information Technology for the School now. They couldn't quite get the position to what I asked for, but they did pretty well considering the current budget issues at Carolina. I guess I should be happy to have a job at all with the way to news is every night. Just hope when the budget improves that the School re-evaluates it and also re-hires our 4th position which won't happen right now. They did get us a grad student assistant who's pretty good for 20 hours/week so that is helping out.
And our email migration day is January 12th, so once we get that mess behind us things will calm down. Now that everyone's on our domain finally we've been able to do a lot of the migration steps like installing Outlook and fixing Groupwise via shares, Group Policy, and ADM templates so that's made things a little easier. But when you have ~450 accounts to go through it's still going to be a tight deadline to get everything ready by January 12th.
Anyway, work is work - day in and day out. By far more exciting is planning for the baby and working on the nursery and such. We bought a furniture set on Black Friday because if you bought the armoire and dresser/changing table thing you got the lifetime crib for free. So we were first in line at 4am at Babies R Us to buy furniture and a bunch of diapers and wipes. They had their cases of diapers that are normally $23.99 on sale for $10 each and wipes that were normally $12.99 for $5 each. My how times have changed where Black Friday was about deals on electronics and now I'm lining up early for diapers... sad, sad. But I have been taking photos along the way as we've worked on the nursery (big surprise there, eh?). I'll post up some of them when the room is closer to done.
