Saturday, December 31, 2005
Happy New Year!
Just a quick post to wish everyone a Happy New Year!

May 2006 bring you health, happiness, and everything you desire.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:59 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Friday, December 30, 2005
Was that there all along?
I had been bemoaning to myself the loss of the section at the bottom of the "Posting" screen where you could set the time for the post you were writing. You see, I sometimes end up writing my entry for a day after midnight, which means that it shows as being written the next day. With being able to set the time, I can make sure it shows up on the right day (as I am doing with this post which is actually being written after midnight).

So it turns out that there is an option at the bottom "Post and Comment Options" that was turned off. I clicked on it and turned it back on and Voila! the change time and date option is back. I am just wondering if that had been there all along and I just missed it...

As for today: well I went to the Doctor's office today as one of my prescriptions was running out and I had to get it renewed. I was glad to hear that my blood pressure was 124/80, which is lower than it has been in quite a while. So that was good to hear.

Work was very quiet again, as most people that could took the time between Christmas and New Year off. I have explained already why I (and my co-worker) could not so I will not bore you with those details. But the one good thing with work being quiet is that it is almost as good as being off. The having to get up is definitely the one part where it is not as good as being off.

Got to talk to my wife today; she sounded really tired. She was going to go to bed early and I am hoping that she will be able to get a good night's sleep. She can certainly use it. Love you, sweetie!

I am all by myself at home tonight as both of my daughters are out visiting friends - my younger daughter is staying over at her best friend's house and my older daughter is visiting her boyfriend and there is no telling when she will be back. If I had to guess I would say that I will be in bed before she comes back. It certainly makes for a very quiet house.

I got tired of not being able to print from my computer (and I also managed to mess up the Java game playing from Pogo) so I decided to try out another Linux distribution. I guess one of the good things about there being so many distributions is that if one does not work for you another just might. So I am now running PCLinuxOS, and so far the important things (printing and Java games) are working. I still have to install the Citrix client so I can work from home, but that is a project for later.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:58 PM | Permalink | 1 comments
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Another humdrum day
As far as work was concerned, the day was pretty much non-descript. It was slow enough that I had time to look into Yahoo! Groups and set one up for our family. I will not mention anything else as it is set up as a private group so it will not do you any good to know anything about it :) Those who need to know already know...

Got my wife's replacement Palm IIIx as well as her extra medication shipped to her. I used XPressPost and they say it should be there in 5 days (that would be business days as I have been told before). So basically I would count on a week before it gets there.

I also renewed my wife's travel insurance as the one she got before she left expires at midnight tonight. Yes, you can infer by that that she was supposed to have been coming back - but she is needed more where she is.

Looks like I once again upgraded something on the computer that now prevents me from printing. I wish I knew what it was so I could stay away from it. Oh well, hopefully the next Release Candidate for SimplyMepis will solve the problem and I can just use that. Or maybe I should just learn to leave well enough alone...

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:27 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Drawback of having a car again
There is probably only one, and this is it: It is now entirely too easy to give up trying to fix something for dinner and just go out to eat something. When we were without wheels, we had to come up with something or it was go without food time. I'm afraid I am probably the worst as far as giving up on the trying to figure what to fix. I have to get out of that frame of mind.

I got up late this morning. It's not that I did not hear my alarm, because it rang at 7am and I remember turning it off. I just rolled over and the next thing I knew it was 8am. After taking a shower I missed the bus I wanted to take so I woke up my older daughter so she could give me a ride to the office. Soon after I got there my co-worker called to say she was running late and would not be in until 10am (about 45 minutes later than usual). That made me feel better as I was no longer the only one that had slept in.

Work was just the usual routine. We once again had a filesystem disappear on our busier Netbackup master server - this time it was 26 hours before it was noticed (24 of those hours were Christmas). As it was the last time, a reboot was needed to bring the filesystem back. Since this is the second time this has happened, a call has been opened with our hardware vendor. Maybe not coincidentally, the problems were exactly 1 week apart (within 2 minutes of the same time). Should be interesting to see what Sun comes back with.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:54 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Car problem is fixed
Well I guess fixed is too strong of a word, the correct word would be "bypassed". The car had a failed heater core and it was going to cost around $300 to replace the core. Since we will only have this car for a few more months, I did not think it was cost effective to spend that much money on a car we will be getting rid of shortly. So we went the "bypass the heater core route" which was much cheaper. The total came to $75.45: $60 for labour, $1.99 for the part, $4.20 for shop supplies, and $9.26 tax. So yes, it cost $75 to install a $2 part.

Good day!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 12:40 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, December 25, 2005
There really is a Santa Claus
I got up this morning to find my Christmas stocking full of stuff. My wife is out of town, and I did not do it - so there must be a Santa Claus!!!

I got a lot of chocolate (yummy!), a couple of Scratch and Win (make that Scratch and Lose as I got nothing from either one), a new toothbrush (who needs to buy a new toothbrush when Santa brings you a new one every year?) and a DVD of Mr & Mrs Smith (yeah!).

Thank you Santa!

Also, and certainly not the least, I got a CD from my daughters (Lifesong from Casting Crowns) as well as an iPod (well actually they are helping me pay for one - so they gave me their share - but yeah! anyway).

Thank you everyone!!!!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 1:46 PM | Permalink | 1 comments
Humbug Computers
Don't get me wrong, I like computers. As a matter of fact I would not have a job if computers did not exist (okay - so I would probably have another job) but sometimes computers do not make things better.

Case in point: In years past, you could forget about the worries of the world and enjoy a day with your family. Bills would come in the mail but you did not have to worry about it since mail is not delivered on Christmas - and this year it would not be until Wednesday! But with the wonders of computer technology and electronic billing, you bills can arrive anytime - just like my phone bill that arrived today - Thank you, Telus!

Have a Merry Christmas!

PS: I would not check my mail until tomorrow if I were you - but if you're like me you did that first.
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 12:56 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Friday at last
Okay, so it is Saturday when I write this entry but it is about Friday.

I got to chat with my wife briefly today (Love you, Gorgeous!) but since her brother and his wife came to visit she took the opportunity to go to bed early which means that by the time I got home she had already signed off for the day. Hopefully the extra rest will do her a world of good.

Called around to see if a mobile mechanic would come and fix the car. I probably mentioned that our usual mechanic had closed down his business, so I tried a couple of other places. The first had already closed down for the holidays and is not opening again until January 3rd. The other got back to me a couple of hours after I left a message on their voice mail system, "your call is important to us", and after chatting for a while he basically suggested that what we wanted to do - just bypass the failed heater core - can be done but it would be more cost effective to go to the local Canadian Tire to have them do it. So I guess I will be calling Canadian Tire (on Christmas Eve???) to see if they can do it. Fortunately for us, there is a Canadian Tire close enough to our house that we can probably make it there with the car before it starts to vent a lot of steam.

Most of the day at the office was spent getting ready to put and actually putting enough tapes in our 3 robots so that they will not run out of scratch tapes for the 4 day weekend (Government does not return to work until Wednesday December 27th). That meant putting in 280 tapes (200/40/40) in. The 200 tapes one took a good 2 hours to do. I had the cushy job of ejecting the media and inventorying the robots after the new tapes were put in - my co-worker had to lug all the tapes around - so I had the better end of the deal.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 1:05 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Earlier bedtime?
Well it should not be too hard to get to bed at an earlier time tonight - after all it was 1:30am when I finally got myself to bed last night (this morning?). And just as I was afraid of, I was really dragging myself around in the afternoon - hence the call for an earlier bedtime.

My wife got MSN Messenger to work! Yeah! If I heard right, she basically kept uninstalling and installing until it worked. I think that the method that worked was uninstall MSN7.5, install MSN6.2 which complained that she really needed to install a newer version of MSN and could it do that now to which my wife said "Yes" and it's working now. How long it works is anybody's guess. We really only care that it works until December 29th which is when my wife comes back home. Of course, I would bet that my wife would hope it would keep on working so she can video chat with her sister who is taking over the "nurse" duties from her.

Work was frustrating, particularly for my co-worker. There is only the two of us in the office until the new year - the people that joined our group all had their Christmas vacation approved at their previous location and they all had between today to Jan.3rd off. Not much we could do about that. Add to the fact that whatever she tried to fix today would not only not get fixed but actually get worse and you can guess what state of mind she was in when she left for the day.

I was not too happy with Kubuntu so I decided to re-install the version of SimplyMEPIS that was working for me (3.3.2test03). This is what I am using right now - and so far everything works. Hopefully I can keep this working. I guess nowadays working is better than newfangled.

Good night!

Update at 1:15am: Arrggghhh!!!!!!! Just as I was getting ready to head off to bed, one of the backup servers at work decided to crash and reboot! I have been trying to get things back to normal but so far I have not had much luck. Looks like the jobs will have to die on their own - I certainly could not convince them to die. More fun for tomorrow....
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:00 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
So I'm an idiot
Here it is 1am and I am still up. I must be crazy as I will most certainly be regretting it big time this morning. This is mostly due to the fact that I got tired of waiting for the bugs in this release candidate version of SimplyMepis to be fixed. In this version, printing to a Windows SMB printer does not work, and neither do the java games at Pogo. So I decided to do something about it and install another distribution. Since I like Ubuntu, I decided to try out Kubuntu here at home. Kubuntu uses KDE whereas Ubuntu uses Gnome. So here it is 1am and I am finally finished the installation. I am glad to report that printing works again and so does Pogo - although sound for the games does not seem to be working. Oh well, one step at a time.

Part of the evening was spent trying, unsuccessfully, to get MSN Messenger working for my wife down south. She had it working last night, and we voice chatted. But now that she has bought a web camera so that we can have two way conversation, Messenger refuses to work. I must confess to being out of ideas as to why it does not work.

Weird things continue to happen at work. This time, one of our media servers decided to reboot itself. The weird thing is that there is no indication anywhere on the system as to why it decided to reboot. Another mystery that I will not have time to solve. I spent a good part of the day at work cleaning tape drives as we were getting quite a few write errors. Then something else came up and we worked on fixing that. We did some stuff, but did not really change anything, and the problem went away. Weird indeed!

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 12:58 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, December 19, 2005
Cannot catch them all
I "lucked out" on Saturday night and stumbled upon the problem with the filesystem on the master server. That saved us from having no backups for that night. We were not so lucky Sunday night: one of our other master servers also had trouble with its filesystem and this time no backups took place during the night. It was not noticed until my co-worker and I logged in this morning and tried to check the backups - hard to do when there are none! Anyway, this time it turned out that the storage array where the filesystem is located rebooted itself; and since a reboot (controller reset is the accurate terminology) wipes out the event log, there is no way of finding out what happened before the reboot.

I got to talk to my wife on MSN voice chat tonight! She had just managed to install the latest version of MSN which enabled the voice chat capability. It was a one way voice conversation since she did not have a microphone - but she will remedy that tomorrow so we will be able to chat back and forth without using the phone. Hurrah!

Played with Yahoo 360 today. It was fun to set things up - but I guess it really is very similar to LiveJournal to cite but one example. I am not moving my blog there - as a matter of fact I link to this blog (as well as my other blog) in the feeds section of the page. You can check out my Yahoo 360 page here.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:32 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Another late night
Well shortly after I posted the previous entry, I went to check on the backup environment at work since I am the one supposed to check the backups this weekend, and I had just glanced at it earlier in the day. Turns out that our main backup server had lost connectivity to the filesystem where the image dabatase is located - this basically means that no backups would be taking place as all of the backup executables are on that filesystem.

So I packed up the laptop, stopped by the office to pick up the badge that would let me into the datacenter and headed downtown to check on the status of the server. Fortunately, my initial fears were not realized; I thought that the disk storage must have lost a disk (which was the problem the last time we lost connectivity to the filesystem). The problem seemed to be limited to the server not being able to "see" the disk. Since it was already 1am and with a dwindling backup window I decided to take the quick road and just rebooted the server. The disk came back online and everything looked good.

I headed back to the office to turn the badge in and to make sure that the backups would resume. This is where the fun started: the jobs in the queue seemed to just be frozen there as there was nothing happening. I decided to stop the backup software (Veritas Netbackup). I had to wait for one process to finish its purge as we have been told that killing that process would result in corruption in our database.

After restarting Netbackup, the jobs that were frozen earlier all died and new jobs started. But of course, the fun did not end there. Our main media server was mounting tapes for everyone but itself - the mount requests were just being queued. So I had to restart Netbackup on that server as well and then finally backups started behaving.

It was 3:30am by the time I got back to bed and I only got 4 hours of sleep before I had to get up to get ready for church as we had a special breakfast taking place at the church where my daughters were playing special parts (Mary and the Innkeeper). So when we got back home after church and lunch I took a 3 hour nap and felt much better for it.

I have not done much else - although I did get to talk to my wife on the phone (YEAH!) and it was good to be able to do that.

Well I better close as I have to get up early to take my daughter to her work (5:35am - yuck!)

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:58 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Busy Saturday
My wife and I managed to miss each other all day today. (For those just stumbling onto this blog, my wife is down south taking care of her dying mother). I did not get online this morning until about 11am (I had trouble going to sleep, it was 4am the last time I looked at the clock). My wife was not there at the time, and then just before 12:30 we left to go to the church to help with getting Wheeley Hall ready for the "Breakfast in Bethlehem" event which is to take place Sunday morning at 9:30. I was not back home until 4pm after dropping the girls off at Silvercity; my wife was marked as "Away from the computer" then. I worked on the Powerpoint presentation for church until it was time to go pick up the girls from the movie - they actually had gone to Wal-Mart. Met them there and did some minimal grocery shopping - then went out for dinner. Came back home just before 9pm only to find that my wife had tried to phone us just after 8pm. I guess we were not meant to communicate today. Still miss you and love you tons, though!!!

Not much else happened - I pretty much covered it all in the previous paragraph (which probably should be broken into multiple paragraphs - but I never deemed myself very good at grammar).

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:45 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Upgrade purgatory
I forgot to mention that there has been a new version of the distribution I run on my Linux computer - SimplyMEPIS. This distribution has been very easy to use and to install so I figured I would upgrade to the latest version. Unfortunately there has been a couple of glitches with the new version. One is that the Pogo Java games do not work with the version of Firefox that is installed - I have had to revert to an older version (v1.07) for things to work again. And more seriously, printing no longer works. There has been a lot of talk about those problems in the MEPIS forum but it seemed like the problems had been addressed. Well there are problems left as printing does not work for me. I sent some logs to MEPIS which hopefully will help them figure out what the problem(s) is(are).

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 1:02 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Slacking off
So much for trying to have a daily entry in my blog. I am not going to make excuses, but I just have not felt like writing.

I decided to go ahead an rent a car for the weekend; there are a lot of things that we need to get done this weekend and I just could not see how we were going to accomplish all of it without a car. We probably could have arranged rides for the church stuff, but the rest would have been too much trouble. On the plus side, it is kind of nice to have a car that just works, and not have to worry about whether or not we are low on this and that fluid.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 12:28 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Car "fun"
Well it turns out that having mornings off is only half great. The good part is that I get to sleep in - the not so good part is that I still have to go to work. As I lay in bed this morning I was berating myself for choosing this particular method of burning off my extra vacation time - since I still had to get out of bed and get my buns to work. Oh well, next time I will know to take full days off and not half ones.

Our car had been releasing small amounts of steam through the dash vents. It was a little annoying but not unmanageable - until today. Well now copious amounts of steam pour out of the vents as soon as the car reaches normal operating temperature. And since that only takes about 5 minutes, the car is pretty much undriveable now as it is really hard to see where you're going when you have a jet of steam in front of your face fogging up the windows. So I put in a call to our trusty mechanic - it would appear that he has closed down his TNT Automotive business. I left a voice mail with him asking him to suggest/recommend a new mechanic; I am still waiting to hear back. I am toying with the idea of renting a car for the weekend so we can do our errands - but that might be a little too expensive for my taste. We'll see what develops.

Just another crazy day in the Thibodeau household.

I'll be thinking about you all day, Trish! (so same-O same-O :-) )

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:33 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Happy Birthday
Today was my sister's birthday, so I am wishing her a Happy Birthday! I guess it should really be Bonne Fete! Of course, I wait to enter it until her birth day is over (well it is where she lives - still a couple of hours here).

Talked to my mother-in-law tonight, she sounded in good spirits. My wife on the other hand seemed stressed. Hopefully the time off she is planning on tomorrow will help (Love ya, sweetums! :-) ).

Work was work. I managed to arrange to have the mornings off for the rest of the week. The reason behind that is that I am only allowed to carry over 35 hours of vacation to the next year, and I still have 45.5. And since I did not want to have those extra hours archived (which means I would not see them again until I retired) I had to take them now before everybody else goes on vacation.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 9:31 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Anybody got a few hours to spare?
Because I could certainly put them to good use, and when I say good use, I mean use, and when I say use, I mean I would probably waste them like I wasted the previous few hours of this evening. I was going to make my blog entry early, and by that I did not mean early in the morning, but I somehow got sidetracked and never got around to it.

Okay, actually I guess I did not really waste the evening - but the end result is the same. I updated the software on the computer and that took most of the evening. I also folded and hung up the clothes I had washed last night and dried this morning. So by waste I guess I mean I did not do the things I had planned on doing.

I did get to quickly chat with my wife today (mucho hugs & kisses! [virtual ones now, real ones later]) but did not get a chance to really connect. Fortunately, she sent an email with the events of the day so I am not really that out of the loop. So I am reciprocating by making this blog entry to show what a productive evening I had. Pah!

Work was fun (the sarcastic definition - as in not). One of our robots decided to go on a vacation part way through the weekend and had to be forcibly brought back Monday morning. I am sure the you-know-what will be flying for that one. But since they do not pay us to be on call, I do not feel bad about it one single bit.

Well I better close since it is quarter to one and I should have been in bed hours (okay well at least an hour) ago.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 12:35 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Ahhh! Saturday...
For the first time in quite a while, I was able to sleep in today. Usually, something always came up that I would end up getting up early and not getting the extra sleep that I hoped I would get. But not today - I slept until at least 10:30 and then just lounged in bed flipping through the channels on TV until noon. It was great!

Last night the girls and I went to see Aeon Flux. Not the greatest movie I have ever seen, but certainly an enjoyable way to pass the time. Afterwards we went to Wendy's for dinner. I only mention it because they have changed their menu. Nothing earth shattering, but their meals used to come with Biggie fries and medium drink, but now they come with medium fries and drink. And if you "Biggiesize" you meal, you now get Biggie fries and drink whereas before you got a biggie drink but Great Biggie fries. I just have to lower my expectations I guess.

I actually got to talk to my wife (Hey there, gorgeous!) tonight. She supposedly called for "technical support" as she could not get the internet working on the computer, but of course it was working when she got to talk to the support person (me!). She sounded more relaxed for some reason, probably because she got some time off as her mother had someone come visit for the afternoon giving my wife some much needed time off.

I have spent most of the day working on the Powerpoint stuff for church so there is not much else to say.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 9:35 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, December 08, 2005
I have no idea
I mentioned in my other blog (what can I say I have no life) that our choir director has submitted her resignation effective at the end of January. I had hoped that we would hear her reasons at the beginning of tonight's practice. However I had to work late at the office, and missed the first 20 minutes of the practice. I therefore have no idea what the reasons were or if the subject was broached at all.

One of our customer lost a 700Gb disk and had to restore the data. So we told him how the restore would work best and they called right back saying that it just didn't work. To make a long story short, 5 hours later and after opening a "server down" trouble call with the vendor we were finally able to start the restore. I expect it will run overnight and will hopefully be finished in the morning. Solution: the STREAMS file had a zero instead of a timestamp for the G: full and incremental.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:58 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
No course for me
I was supposed to go on a course for the next couple of days, but since I might be called away very soon when my mother-in-law passes away my co-worker had to cancel her course on the 19th and 20th of December and is taking my place in the course. That way she does not get to miss the course, and she will not be away from the office on the off chance that I might be gone then.

It was a pretty busy day at the office. We updated the client backup software on a few servers and they suddenly all decided to misbehave. We are hoping that it was because we installed a base version and not the most recent version. We have now pushed the most recent version to those servers and, since we ran out of time to do some testing (due to our having trouble during the change window), the regular backup tonight will have to act as the test. I sure hope this fixes the problem.

Talked with my wife again today (miss you, toots) and I wish it could be possible for me to be there with her to provide support. However, that is not to be so long distance support with have to do. Oh well...

Went out for dinner with my daughters. They picked me up from work and after dinner went to a bowling outing with co-workers. I spent the evening quietly at home working on Pogo badges. One down, and more to go.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:17 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Another day apart
Pretty standard day, not much to report.

It has now been a week since my wife left to go tend to her dying mother. I can feel that the stress is wearing her down, but there is not much I can do from this far away except be available to chat on the phone and IM when she needs it. It goes without saying that I miss her terribly.

I told my co-worker that I would be going down there for the funeral. The people situation for the Christmas season is pretty bad as everyone that joined the group in the last year had their vacation approved by management at their last position. It turns out that they all have time off for the Christmas holidays. This left my co-worker and I as the only two people left to man the fort. And now I will be going away for a while as well. She said she would manage. I wish her all the luck with that.

Anyway, better go to bed since I am actually going to take the bus tomorrow. No joke!

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:58 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, December 05, 2005
Humdrum day
I have been staring at the screen for the last little while trying to think of something to write, and really nothing stands out as worthy of mention.

I enjoyed IMing with my wife; but of course I always enjoy doing that so it's not like it was any more special today than any other day. I do feel for her though - all the work she has to do with taking care of her mother as she slowly fades away. She is a very strong person to be able to do that.

And today once again I worked from home for part of the day, waiting until my older daughter was going to work to go to the office with her - saved me having to take the bus. I guess the real reason is that I didn't want to walk to the bus and back and I wanted to have the car.

Had a meeting at church this evening so nothing much happened at home because of it.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:45 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, December 04, 2005
Microphone frustrations
My wife and I seem to keep missing each other - at least on MSN. We did get to chat earlier, but somehow we missed each other later in the day. Just in case we don't connect again today: "Love you and miss you!"

I am having trouble still with this one microphone at church. I may have mentioned that I have rented this mixing console so we could have more microphones to use. Everything is working great as far as I can tell, with only one problem. The microphone on the podium refuses to work with the mixing console. I should mention that all the XLR connections at church are reverse than what it is on the mixing console, so I had to buy some adapters. The store was out of Male/Male adapters so I have tried to get around that by getting a XLR (M) to 1/4" adapter. First I got a TRS 1/4" connector and that did not work. Then I saw that they had a cable XLR (M) to mono 1/4" adapter and I thought that this had to work. Well it did not. Now I am thinking that maybe the microphone uses phantom power and it will only work when I get the correct XLR (M)/XLR (M) adapter. I guess I better track one of those down.

Otherwise the day has been pretty quiet. It would appear my son is without internet access for the next little while (and has been for a while as well?) so that explains why there has not been any updates in his blog. He phoned today to let us know - of course he phoned while we were at church - and he sounds fine.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 8:45 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Friday, December 02, 2005
Another work week over
Here I am sitting at home, enjoying the fact that another work week is over. Not that I was eager for the weekend to arrive - after all I thought that Thursday was Friday...

I had forgotten that we were being taken out to lunch by a vendor today so I brought some lunch with me. I brought it back home and hopefully I will remember to take it with me on Monday. Lunch was okay - I ordered the special "Grilled Ham & Cheese sandwich". Hard to mess up I so it was good. Of course, we had to endure a vendor presentation but it was something interesting.

Heard from my wife, apparently she has convinced her sister to return home early. She says she is a glutton for punishment but I say she is just a very nice person. As I may have mentioned before, she is now staying down there until December 29th. Her sister was going to stay until the 21st, but I guess not anymore. Oh well.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:25 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Twice in one week
Here is a rarity for Victoria, BC: two snowfalls within 3 days of each other. Usually, we get about 2 snowfalls per year so this is kind of weird. Of course, the typical Victoria pattern kind of stayed true: snow, followed shortly thereafter by rain, and then there's no snow left. So even though we have had two snowfalls (of at least 3cm [about 1 inch] each) there is no snow left on the ground to show for it.

I (I should really say "we" as all of us were there) got to talk to my wife today - on the phone this time! We did do the IM thing as well, but it is always better the phone way. The bad news (for us anyway) is that she will be staying in Houma longer than first thought - until the 29th of December. Someone asked me if this was going to be the first time we would not be together for Christmas, and I think so. We might not have been together for our first Christmas as we were living apart then (my wife had to complete her tour of duty with the Navy Reserves) but I cannot remember (hey, it was 26 years ago!).

Work was work. I found out that our union had people sign up for strike pay while I was sick (we were out for one day when the teachers picketed our building) so everyone but me got a strike pay cheque. I wonder if I can still do it after the fact - I doubt it but there is no hurt in asking.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:41 PM | Permalink | 1 comments