CaseyAndKelly.Com

I’ve been gone for most of the day. First to yoga, which I’m still really enjoying and feel like I’ve gotten a full body workout. Strangely enough, even though it’s very low impact, I get all sweaty from the poses. It’s gotta be working then, right? Then to the second half of my pre-op exam in Chevy Chase MD. Lucky for me, the Metro can take me up there but unfortunately I had to haul ass from yoga to get back her and get Stoli out and change clothes before walking to the Metro.

I can’t read when I’m on a train or car. I guess it has something to do with the world whizzing by in my peripheral vision or something. So I sit back with my iPod and just kinda zone out. During my zoning today, this guy sat there and nonchalantly (not discretely) picked his nose while reading the paper. Ew, I’m sorry but even scratching your nose near the openings is kinda gross in public, let alone digging for that oh so elusive booger.

Although the appointment today was only supposed to take 5 minutes it ended up taking an hour because the prescription they got from my exam yesterday was slightly different from today and they didn’t see any astigmatism yesterday and the Wavefront machine saw one in my left eye and then I guess my current set of glasses (2 years old) show me having an astigmatism in my right eye. So she said after I’m all doped up before surgery they’ll do another scan just to check things out and the traditional method of finding a prescription is more faulty than the Wavefront and the laser will correct whatever the Wavefront sees. She assured me that the Wavefront machine will get my true vision defects and the laser will correct those. Hopefully, she’s right – this isn’t something to guess on. My surgery is scheduled for next Thursday and is late enough in the day Casey won’t have to take any time off work. I can’t wait until this is over with. I’m tired of not being able to wear sunglasses and go to all these appointments.

Casey’s been working past midnight the past two nights so I’m behind on my TV viewing. I cheated this afternoon and looked at the CBS website to see who was left behind at the last rest area – Lynn & Alex. Yay, these whiny bitches were always trying to get Rob & Amber and weren’t quite fabulous enough. I’m waiting till Casey finally gets home at a decent hour to catch up on all this. Good thing we have a 200 hour TiVo! Off to the library now, to drop off/pick up holds .

Its almost a quarter to one and I’m still at my desk. I did manage to get quite a bit done today, including implementing and testing some of the new features on Exchange 2K3 (Recovery Storage Groups). This will be the only time I will get any overtime this year probably so I’m not really complaining to much, and it coudln’t come at a better time with Kelly getting ready to get her eyes done, and me getting my braces or whatever.

Sometimes I think I complain about my job a lot, but I actually like it a great deal. I have gotten to play with so many kool toys such as the CX500s / Exchange 2K3 / MirrorView, things that I hadn’t much interaction with before, but now consider myself fairly capable. I’m still looking forward to the next contract though. Working with someone who knows their shit and likes to get things done makes the job so much more enjoyable.

Whats this we might be going home now……. but only to return in less then 6 hours…. yay.

Just got home from my LASIK consult AND pre-op at this other place. The place I went to for the consult last week was really nice (in the offices inside the Ritz Carlton) with a price tag to offset their rent. The pre-op I had was the most thorough eye exam I’ve ever had. They gave me the usual eye exam, then number my eye to gauge cornea thickness by shining some blue light on my eye which might have touched my eye but I couldn’t feel it, and then dilating my pupils to the size of SAUCERS (my pupils are already 7mm in dark conditions) then gave me more drops that stung to undilate them. My vision was all blurry to try and read stuff that was too small. I met Casey and we had Subway in the park and he commented on how lovely my eyes were – that they looked like I was on speed. LOL. I decided to give this place a try because (a) they have the same technology as the last place I went (b) we’ll save $500 and (c) it’s right off the Metro so it won’t be as difficult for Casey to take time off to get me since I’ll be drugged up. I have to go to Chevy Chase tomorrow to get the Wave Front measurements done which should take all of 5 minutes and then they have availability as early as Tuesday (in a week!). I’m a little nervous but I’m sure the Zanax or Valium will take care of that.

Stoli got her stitches taken out yesterday which wasn’t easy. Poor thing remembered what happened last time she was in there and made me carry her into the vet’s office. Then she wouldn’t leave me and so I was able to go with her to get them removed. She’s such a Mama’s girl, she hid under my chair anytime the staff was around. Apparently, as high maintenance as she already is – she has allergies too and her skin infection hasn’t cleared up so we’re starting another round of antibiotics and antihistamines. As a reward we went to Petco (I’m a Petsmart girl but Petco has their PALS program and if you buy 10 bags you get 1 free as well as other freebies, Petsmart doesn’t give me anything) to put Stoli on a new food. Her breeder had her on Purina One which according to the ingredients isn’t that bad because corn is like the fifth ingredient down but Purina isn’t known for having the best food. So I switched her to Science Diet yesterday and got her some more treats, a travel water bottle/bowl, a raincoat, and some freeze dried peanut butter ice cream. What a spoiled girl, who needs kids?

The weather has been great the last few days and I’ve enjoyed breaking out the flip flops and tank tops. I even have the air on today so Stoli and Casey doesn’t overheat. Me, I like to sweat out the calories. That’s about all for now, getting to the end of the semester and lots of things are coming due. Ugh but at least I have the summer off!

I’m gearing up for a big LAN Party this weekend, James invited me to join him and some friends of his that he was in the AF with. Ironically most of these people attended tek skool at the same time as I did, perhaps even basic training. Friday I picked up a new Antec Sonata case and 1GB or PC3200 DDR for my aging system. I was sick of listening to my computer with its 8 80mm fans blowing at full speed all the time. So I picked up the Sonata which has room for 2 120mm fans and a nice PSU. I stuff all of my hardware into the case and it booted up on the first shot……..

I should have finished this post yesterday, but I just got back into work this morning after doing 16.5 hours last night…. getting home at 12:30 and getting up at 5:21 to start it all over again….. yawn…..yawn…..coffee.

I know I bitch about work a lot but seriously, the ass-clown that designed this system had shit for brains. After implementing what was in the documentation I sat down and looked it over really well and made a few changes. In the Veritas install in particular I was able to go from a 30% success rate and a 20 hour backup window to 96% completion rate and a total backup time of a little over 11 hours. When I told this to the organization leads yesterday I swear they shit their pants, really. They asked why wasn’t it designed like this initially, I just shrugged my shoulders and told them I didn’t know. And then the came back and said “Well it must have been for a good reason”. WTF? The management was totally scared/ amazed of the Engineer that was in my place before I, they thought he was a genius, nobody questioned his motives and designs. I have had to reengineer half of this whole design, I simplified it, made it more robust and fault tolerant, and I get little to no gratitude for the effort. I implemented MirrorView on the pair of Clariion CX500s that we have at our sites and set up a full LUN replication at a block level ensuring that if one site was to be removed from the face of the earth all data would remain intact. The entire system uses about 8-12Mbps at load and next to nothing at idle time on their 100Mbps MAN that they are using between the facilities, and they moan and complain that perhaps we should have implemented the pervious solution. We are using a synchronous replication that ensures ZERO data loss and a minimal RTO, in the previous implementation we were taking snaps of LUNs and then doing a full LUN replication on a 4-8 hour schedule. Meaning that every few hours we were copying an ENTIRE LUN across the network instead of just replicating the changed blocks. Again WTF?

Anyway I finished up most of the hard work and we are approaching our Pilot date (Tuesday). I’m really hoping to have another contract lined up in the month or so following our Pilot and then Main Rollout, perhaps I can design the next system from scratch and not have to deal with other peoples asinine mistakes.

OK my rant is done

I posted a pic of my new license plates and Stoli’s pre and post op pictures.

Stoli’s back home again. Her surgery went well and she seems to be in good spirits although groggy from the anesthesia and pain killers. She’s been sleeping almost non-stop since we got home at 6:30. It breaks my heart that she only lays there and is so docile and sedate, unlike her usual spunky self. We have to carry her up and down the stairs for the first few days (thank God we’re only on the 2nd floor). We got back tomorrow for her follow up to check her temperature and see how her stitches are doing, she won’t be getting them out for another 2 weeks. Agh, I don’t even really remember when Tasha got spayed, the only thing I do remember is she had to wear a cone on her head so she didn’t lick the stitches but Stoli can’t reach that far so she doesn’t have them. Also, she has a bacterial infection on her chin 🙁 we think it’s from her running down the stairs too fast and skinning her chin repeatedly. So she’ll also be on antibiotics, I just feel so bad for her. I know she’ll sleep well tonight.

Yoga starts tomorrow and I’m glad to see how that’ll go. So I’ve decided that I just NEED to lose weight. This extra weight I’ve been carrying with me since moving to L.A. (not D.C. so it’s been awhile) is pissing me off. It’s only about 7 pounds but still lots of people have goals that are about the same. I have this addiction to food and can’t seem to get up the motivation to exercise so I bought some more TrimSpa. I bought some while in L.A. too but got freaked out and stopped using it, even though it worked at suppressing my appetite, because there’s a warning label that says if you don’t drink enough water directly after it, that you will choke and die a horrible death. Well it doesn’t say all of that but it does warn that you can choke if you don’t swallow enough water. Present day: I’ve decided that as long as I have a beverage close by and down most of it, it should be sufficiently passed down my throat. Unfortunately these pills are the size of horse pills but if Anna Nicole can take it and lose the weight off her hefty ass then I can too!

I got an early start today (well for me it was) to get ready and get Stoli to the vet for her spaying and microchipping (I’m leaving in 5 minutes to go pick her up and bring her home). I got all of the cleaning out of the way that scares her so I won’t traumatize her anymore than she probably already is. NOTHING was on last night because of the effin’ Mork & Mindy behind the scenes documentary, how could that get better ratings for NBC than Las Vegas & Medium? We watched Cold Creek Manor instead which blew. We haven’t seen a movie that has actually been good in awhile, Harold & Kumar is the only one that’s almost good but still not good enough to buy. Justin, you need to finish your screenplay and get something good pumped out of Hollywood.

More pictures of Stoli posted in the gallery – can ya tell we love her?!

We’ve been quite productive this weekend with movies. I borrowed 7 movies from Rachel on Friday and most of them we watched yesterday. We’ve seen Ladder 49 (sucked and then after watching this huge build up to end really badly), Big Bounce (sucked), The Ladykillers (dullest movie ever), and Little Black Book (sadly the best of the bunch and pretty cute in a romantic screwball comedy way). Casey was wanting to go see Sin City this weekend but of course we didn’t make it our life now revolves around our daughter and we would rather stay home with her or take her with us, although 3 hours sitting in the car waiting is cruel and to make him want to see the movie even more – a ton of people we know went to see it – Marla, Justin, Jen, Nicole and probably others that have reported in yet.

I signed up for a yoga class which starts on Wednesday. I’m committed to going for 12 weeks to get my ass in shape and meet people. Hopefully this will kickstart a new exercise plan and get me motivated to use this free gym that we save $75 a month in gym fees to have for free.

Stoli’s getting spayed (finally) on Tuesday. We decided on the microchip as opposed to the tattoo because it holds more info and we’ve heard that like on people letters and numbers can become ineligible. I do still want to make her an ID tag at Petsmart though. Our vet wants to keep her at the office overnight, hopped up on painkillers for 12 HOURS alone. Yeah no thanks, we’ll take her home and bring her back the next day so you can verify she’s ok. She hates being away from us for any amount of time as it is (you should see how excited she is when we get out of the bathroom) and for something like that it’d surely scar her for life.

The end of this semester is FINALLY getting closer. I can’t wait to not have the pressure and responsibility of schoolwork anymore for those that are graduating this year (Randi, Marla, Jen) you guys suck for leaving me behind!