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Je t’aime

Posted In: Everyday life — January 30, 2005 @ 8:21 pm — Stephanie

A whole year has passed since Peter and I declared our love for each other on top of that mountain. The setting sun was glowing orange in the background, giving our panoramic view of the faraway city, the mountains, and the glittering town below, a warm, delicious glow. Of course, Peter and I only gave the scenery a moment’s pause of appreciation, because we were enrapt with each other. As we held hands, my heart was practically bursting from my chest. After nearly ten years with this person, the person whom I feel is as much a part of me as my arm or my liver, I never thought it could get better. The amazing thing is–it has! This past year has been so wonderful, and every day I am floored that this amazing, wonderful, gentle man loves me. Peter is the best thing that ever happened to me, and I’m grateful for his love every day. He’s not only given me his love, but also a home and a family. Although a cliché, it simply must be said that I am the luckiest woman alive.

For my love:

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were lov’d by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can in no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold I pray.
Then while we live, in love lets so persever,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Anne Bradstreet (1612-72)

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Scruffy

Posted In: Everyday life — @ 1:12 am — Peter

I really need to shave… I ran out of shaving cream the other day and am scraping the bottom of an old bottle of Kiss My Face shaving lotion. I’ll likely have to trek out to to Wild Oats or Vitamin Cottage tomorrow and get a new bottle. Have I mentioned how much I despise shaving? I would love to grow a full beard, but Stephanie won’t have it. Today Stephanie, Iris and I went out to play around in the hockey rink near where I work. It was fun to get Iris in the enclosed rink and toss her tennis ball around. She had some playtime before another person showed up and we played some one-on-one hockey. The guy was patient with me and gave me pointers throughout our game. After that we headed over to the Great Indoors to price some appliances. We are hoping that there will be some money left over from our tax return to get a few new items for the kitchen. The current appliances in there are quite old and it would be nice to get a full stainless steel set. I got tired of carrying Iris around the store pretty quickly, so we came home before it was dark…

Shortly after we came home, a police officer showed up at our front door. He informed us that there was another burglary in our neighborhood and was hoping we had noticed something suspicious. Unfortunately we were not home yet and didn’t even know it had happened. Between 3-5pm, our neighbor across the alley had their back door kicked in. I am not certain of any other details, but their house was not very secure. To be quite honest, if I had gone to take out the garbage and saw the back door open, I wound not have thought anything of it. During the summer they often left the back door open to ventilate the house and let their cat go in and out. Since the weather was decent today, I would have suspected that was the case. So, it seems our block is being targeted by a group of rather bold criminals that are brazen enough to strike during the day…

Tonight I got some homework done and then played scrabble with Stephanie. It was a very close game, she only beat me by 3 points! Tomorrow, actually Today, is our 1 year anniversary of being married. Although we consider October 4th to be our *real* anniversary, we will likely go have dinner and perhaps see a movie. We both want to see Million Dollar Baby. The reviews have been good and the trailer looked interesting. Earlier this evening Stephanie’s aunt called us. Her and her husband are going on a vacation and we will be watching their dog Shadow. This should be fun! Shadow is a female black labrador and seemed to get along with Iris okay when we went over there for Thankgiving. Stephanie’s aunt said Shadow is okay with cats too, so the dog sitting arrangement should work out just fine. If she behaves for the first few days, perhaps we will take her to the dog park.

Anyway, I am dozing off at the keyborard…

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The nomination of Dr. Rice

Posted In: Editorial — January 26, 2005 @ 3:19 pm — Peter

Senator Byrd - Speech

I heard this on KGNU this morning and thought it was a great speech opposing the nomination of Dr. Rice. While she will likely be walked right into office and any dissent will be cast aside, it is nice to know our elected officials are contesting her appointment. She is part of this gang of thugs that thinks we can bully ourselves to a sound state of national security. This is such flawed logic… The more muscle flexing we do around the world, the more people will hate us. The more nations we invade, the more insurgent uprisings with thwart our efforts. We need to transcend these primitive tactics and explore more evolved types of diplomacy. As long as there are massive groups of people living in poverty and squalor, the world will hate us. The US needs to engage in massive philanthropic efforts to rid the world of chronic poverty and hunger. If these conditions did not exist, it would be much more difficult for insane dictators to take power. Instead, we oppress the populations of third world countries by exploiting their labor forces, and ignoring issues of poverty that could be remedied with the same amount of spending we have allocated to the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Why are we willing to commit massive resources to these efforts for a false sense of security, when we could channel the same resources toward poverty alleviation and gain real security? This quote sums up my feelings best…

“Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.” –Abraham Flexner

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frustrating…

Posted In: Everyday life — January 25, 2005 @ 10:36 pm — Peter

Today was a crummy day… The system I worked on this past weekend is bowing under the pressure of the additional users that have been added to it. Today, our network was plagued by erratic behavior. The behavior was initially attributed to a virus, however, I continued to have problems with the bill pay system after the infected workstations were cleaned. Twice, IIS had crashed and all the sites were stopped. I was stumped at this point and suspected the web server may have a virus. I quickly installed the Trend Server Protect software, no virus was found… I spent the rest of the day harassing Dennis and Craig about the network, figuring something was causing the traffic between the web application server and mainframe to be periodically dropped. I should have contacted the software vendor sooner, since they seem to have some ideas about the problem. We had talked weeks ago about CICS sockets on the OS390 mainframe and how many would be required to support our userbase. The conversation ended with the experts feeling we had more than enough and it should not be an issue, but we should keep it in mind as our userbase grows. To have this be a problem now is quite surprising… Why were they not able to suggest an appropriate socket amount in the first place?!?

So, I was checking my email for the last time this evening and thought I would check my work email to see if anything was going on… To my surprise, I found a scathing email from a Credit Union member blasting us because our site was unavailable. I quickly tested the web app and it was functioning normally. I then spent about an hour debugging various aspects of the system, unable to find anything wrong. This is really frustrating… It seems the person is new to the bill pay system and is unsure as how to use it. Either way, I will work the problem until I figure out exactly what they were experiencing.

I am not too thrilled with being in a systems support role. From my understanding, I will only be the primary support contact until the entire migration effort is complete. After that point, the network operations group will be the primary contact and problems will be escalated to me when they fall outside the routine troubleshooting tasks. Ugh, I should not take the email this Credit Union member sent so personally, but they were pretty harsh. I have worked so hard on this project and to have someone think we are incompetent fools upsets me. I should get some sleep, I have a feeling there will be a conference call early in the morning to get these problems worked out.

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Common Sense?

Posted In: Everyday life — January 24, 2005 @ 12:18 am — Peter

I am quite confused how this situation has panned out. Our neighbor came home this weekend and has done nothing to improve the security of her home after the break in that happened on Wednesday night. It would be quite trivial to install a few timers on the outside lights to provide minimal security to the area that was circumvented. I can see out my kitchen window right now, and the house is completely dark and it seems it will remain like this for the coming weeks until she is done with her military commitment. At this point, I feel her house poses a security threat to our home. When criminals consider a target, it is likely they consider the possibility that neighbors might see them. With our neighbor’s home being obviously unoccupied, it sends the signal to criminals that nobody is around to report a break in of our home. So, what are we left to do? Should we confront her about this next time she is home? Should we offer to stop into her house and toggle lights to give the appearance of someone home during the week? I think we have earned neighborly trust by reacting so vigilantly to the break in of her home. I would be more than willing to tend to the house on a daily basis and would prefer it to a dark insecure house drawing criminals… Anyway, this is quite frustrating and I hope something changes soon. Perhaps next weekend I will have a chat with her and see if we can settle on something. In the mean time, I’ll glance over there every hour of so to make sure nobody is taking advantage of the easy prey looming next door…

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