Remember having to write an essay in school with that same title? I do. Had to do it a few times… no longer, but it makes for a nice nostalgic title so let’s just go with it.
Today was my first day “back” after three weeks of holidays. It was definitely a nice three weeks… went by too fast, as all things do, of course. Some nice and interesting things happened over the course of those three weeks, however.
The first week I spent some time setting up a server to donate to the school my daughter goes to and my wife is the secretary at (Faith Lutheran School). It’s a decent system, AMD64 3200+, 2GB RAM, dual 250GB HDDs in a 3U rack case. Installed Annvix on it to be a headless backup/subversion system; what it does is mounts a samba share to their Windows domain controller (which is also their file server) and then does daily rsyncs of the data on that share to the local system and then commits those changes to a subversion repository. Very slick, works well, and is a headless system. Access is available to it via samba and ViewVC. The possibility of it doing more in the future is real also (I’m thinking internal wiki, custom MySQL-based mailing database (they still think they want to send my wife on a course to learn MS Access… I’d be laughing very hard if I wasn’t the one she’d be pestering with questions).
So that was the first week. The second and third weeks the girls had off as well, so we were all home and of course that falls with Christmas. So Christmas Eve we spent at home doing our own thing, spoiling our daughter as usual. Christmas Day we’re at the in-laws with far too many people (my sister-in-law figured it would be nice to invite her boyfriend’s daughter and her boyfriend as well), then we have the aunt and uncle also, and a friend from my mother-in-law’s work… not to mention the two grandparents, my wife and her two sisters and brother, her sister’s sons, and one sister’s husband (the other has the aforementioned boyfriend with kids). All in all, a full house and plenty noisy. Lots of avoidance and Guitar Hero that day.
The next day, Boxing Day, we do Christmas at our place for my side of the family, largely because that happens to also by my dad’s birthday. Much quieter (well, much less people… my nephew is one, my daughter is six, and my brother’s daughter is 12 so there’s a definite range of noise anyways). Luckily, I have one brother and that’s it, so the family size is much smaller. It was pretty nice.
The rest of the week I had planned on “resting”… you know, doing a whole lot of nothing, reading my new Bourne books I got, however on the Thursday after we ended up at the SPCA just going to “check out” the kittens (we’ve been discussing a new kitten for a few months now as for the last year we’ve only had one cat (we had 3 cats a few years ago). Well, my daughter fell in love with one and we brought him home under the mistaken impression he was a quiet cat. Well, he was quiet for the first day. Not a peep out of him. Then he gets comfortable and you can’t make the little thing shut up. Oh well, he’s black, he’s 4mos old, he’s cute, has definite spunk, and is totally attached to my daughter. So she made a good choice. My cat, on the other hand (who is 15.5 years old) is still not impressed.
Beyond that, not much else happened. I did manage to pick up a copy of Rock Band last week Wed or Thurs, can’t recall which, but my observations on that are fodder for a future post.
All in all, definitely a nice holiday. A little disappointing to come back and see the increase of the workload that needs to be dealt with, but such is life. If nothing else, there’s plenty to keep me busy until this stinking cold leaves, and there’s not much to do outside other than to shovel snow to distract me, so I should be pretty productive over the next little while, not lacking for anything to do. =)