Boston in the fall.
I jumped up in surprise at the sensation of wet and cold during the mundane act of taking my seat on the T. Water on the seat was the culprit. So I begin my second day of my conference. The weather is humid, but not hot. Yesterday evening I saw the harvest moon.
I’m staying with my second cousin Jenn. So far I’ve had some wonderful moments of visiting:
-Playing with Sarafina outside making up stories about princesses.
-Collecting acorns in a Tupperware container and pretending it was full of strawberries instead.Sarafina kept talking about having strawberries that her brother Jack was expecting real ones for desert.
-Jack, when he opened the lacquer, articulated robot I brought him, exclaimed, “Why did you bring me something I like so much?”
-Eating hot chocolate babka with chai tea while watching Gray’s Anatomy with Jenn.
-Having Clyde slide his head onto my lap after a long day at a conference. Clyde is Jessica’s black lab with silky ears and a mellow personality.
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Sara was vomiting again at 4pm. Mom is home alone with both girls. So currently,we’re barreling back to Seattle late in the evening listening to REM to stay awake. Mom let us have the day after calling us at 4am this morning. It’s always bad to get an early morning phone calls. It was about the same time Laura normally awakes, dashing my hopes of a night of interrupted sleep. Everyone slept for the next 2 hrs and Sara started feeling better. We proceeded with a day in Walla Walla.
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I’m on the road headed to Walla Walla, typing on the iPhone. What a cool device! I’m hooked. It’s easy to use and intuitive. How cool is it that I can do a blog entry on the road. Mom’s taking care of the girls. We saw fireworks just minute ago. It’s freeing to be on the road without the responsibility of the girls. Walking into a restaurant is easy. We stopped in Ellensburg for dinner. We had Mexican at Los Cabos (great salsa). More later. This device could turn me into a geek.
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Life is speeding up again. If you look at the time stamp on this post, you can probably tell that. I’m up and it’s close to midnight. Laura will be awake between 5-6am. I’m too jazzed to sleep. I’ve been working remotely at night and the issues spin around in my head. Work is chaotic and home is chaotic. At work, I found out that my position was going to be made a full time position. I decided to pass on that option. For a brief time, that meant I was without a job. Luckily, there was an opening and I’ll be working with Multiple Sclerosis patients in the same department and hospital on a part-time basis. I was reading my email and realizing I have to move my office THIS WEEK! I thought I had another week in order to do all that. Oh well.
Mom arrives this week. I’m going to Boston to go to my Academy meeting. I’m also visiting Aaliya, my college friend in New York for a day. Mom will be helping Wayne with the girls while I’m gone for 6 days. I’m worried Laura will stop nursing. I will bring my pump and try to keep my milk supply going, but we’ll see. If so, she’s 10 months old and it’s a natural time for her to wean.
Sara is sleeping for the first time without sucking a pacifier (her “ba-ba”). Every week, she visits our local toy store to “check on the animals” during our swim trips. She got excited by a stuffed animal horse. She knows that we’ve bought her toys for potty training goals. I offered to buy her a toy in exchange for giving up her pacifier. Excited by this idea, she offered to give up her ba-ba. She picked out a beautiful Gund horse she named “Rainbow”. It’s been a few days now. She gets sad a night before she goes to bed without her pacifier, but is doing ok. I put her pacifier away in a special place for a keepsake.
Laura has been going through stair training this week. We have gates in front of all our stairs. I decided it was time Laura got some practice handling stairs while I was spotting her. So I opened the gate. She got the hang of up quickly. Down is a little harder. My mantra is “feet first, belly down”. Sara sings it with me. Essentially, I help her slide down the stairs. Laura laughs and then tries to go up the stairs. She gets very excited when I open the gate now and crawls quickly to the gate when I call her. Today she even oriented herself so her feet went down first as she went down the stairs. See, training works.
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We here at wootens.net finally ditched our old ISP of nearly 8 years. It started out as Sense Networking, then was known as oz.net, that was then sold to The River and finally transmogrified into the beast know as Nationwide.
Lately the DSL outages have been fast and furious at Nationwide, they don’t seem to have redundant routing equipment. Calls to technical support have NEVER been answered. I was on hold one time for over 2 hours before hanging up. Fortunately the billing department did answer and quickly let me disconnect.
The new ISP is Zhonka! I like the name, but I like the service and pricing even better. This ISP might not be for the feint of heart, but they set me up with my new static IPs and told me to download the Cisco 678 router docs and left at that.
They had a nice set of instructions on how to configure the DSL modem/router and I proceeded to learn a lot about virtaul wan, ATM, DHCP, bridging, routing and general super geeky internet stuff. After some false starts, I thought I needed to be in bridging mode assuming their routers would handle the IPs, when instead they just handled the /24 subnet and expected my modem to route my static IPs, I was able to get things up and running via DHCP.
I learned an interesting fact that my sub-router, the DLINK 604 has problems picking up DHCP addresses. (sigh incompatible hardware sure make this stuff a lot harder) So I had to forge ahead and get static IPs to work. I typed in a command to turn OFF NAT and the router complained that NAT did not make sense in bridging mode, at which point it dawned on me that the modem had to route and not bridge. After that everything just fell into place.
Finally I had to switch the wootens.net domain over to the new IPs. Hopefully by this morning everyone can see wootens.net at the brand spanking new address.
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