The Official Post-Christmas Blog

Howdy! Well since my goal of a full night’s sleep failed (bed by 10:30 up by 4am - 5 1/2 hours) - I figured what a better time to sit down and actually blog a bit about the whole Christmas time, as I have only posted blips and flickr links.

Christmas Eve - We went to Barry and Michelle’s for the evening feast, not feeling my best (read: Lack of Sleep) I only had some potatoes and ham, but hey it was tasty none the less - we had some fun, the dogs came in after dinner and we got some fun pictures of them, Beth took over the camera after a while as my head was killing me, and she got some fun shots. Jordan called in from Iraq to wish the family a merry Christmas - was pretty special for them.

So after things wrapped up there we came home and after a while my headache calmed down, which left me awake, so from about 10->12 I worked on developing some of the pictures in Lightroom, great thing to have digital negatives for is a dark room, so cleaned up various levels from the negatives and printed out some to fit in a set Mom got for Beth and Michael, so Christmas morning we could present them, it came out nice, the ol R340 still works like a charm, of course now it’s low on 4 colors, but that’s to be expected with the photos I print that are 8 1/2 x 11 - not being able to sleep I worked on some gift wrapping for my mom, and eventually got to sleep, then woke up early for the next phase. Christmas Waffles.

Christmas Morning - We had fun, another year @ Beth and Michael’s for waffles, freshly cooked bacon (turkey and pork) as well as tasty sausage, then there was the piles of waffles. I had 6 total, delightful. So the fun continued, Cousins were there, and Dave and Jo, so lots of fam, twas fun! Then of course it was getting late thus it meant Mom needed to get to Work to do her Christmas Givings as well as prepare for the afternoon.

Christmas Afternoon - The plan was originally in my mind 4:30, but it turned out to be 2:30, but I am getting ahead of myself, at around noon I get server alarms that a customer server is offline, however - the server is online, so at first I am thinking “phew false alarm” then I get to looking, their primary server is offline (100+ sites) so my worry is to get investigations going at the DC on Christmas day could mean a long outage - well the response time was 5 minutes for them to reboot it, then took a little longer to run a FSCK on the drives. Logs show it was simply as I predicted “Out of Ram” so I am going to drop off a upgrade path for them Today - but thats another story.

So with my expected nap not going to be possible I printed up song sheets, as well as made copies of the music I was playing, and then headed off with Dad to the mini-Christmas service at the nursing home - Beth and Michael came to lend their voices, and it turned out pretty good, was still a tad rocky from the lack of sleep, and forgot that in practicing I lowered 2 songs down an octave as they were un-godly high lol. So when I looked at the song and tried to lower em in my brain, it half worked - ah the joys of the piano.

Christmas Evening gave me a chance to get some sleep under my belt, and most of the day after Christmas was sleep as well, so really I am getting my body some rest finally - but I still have pending orders that of course came in on Christmas day, but I figure since both are from current customers, and I sent out the newsletter explainin it was the holidays, they’ll be good waiting till today.

All in all a fun Christmas, it really wraps up on Friday with Ron, Harm, Goofball - coming to Bakersfield for Christmas BBQ (Burgers! Yum!) I also am planing one way or another to do the Lights at Calm on Friday so need to send out the invites to folks, but it has been a great week - I got 2 Wii games (Pirates of the Caribbean and Meet the Robinson’s) as well as 2 Shirts - and my favorite The Muppet Movie! - been wanting to see that for some time, and it was in my batch of Mom gifts. Good stuff.

Anywhoo - lots to do, going to try and get a lot of work done today across a lot of projects, as well as get some things around town done so hopefully today will be as productive as I have laid out in my head, if not, well there’s always Friday (hehe) Hope you all had a good Christmas, and soon we’ll be in 2008, craziness. Have a good Thursday folks!