Midwest Geek

This time next week I will be in Hawaii…and not here.

Work:

Several months ago I was given the assignment of building new mail servers for our group of four. After reading a couple of books, hundreds of webpage’s, and pulling out my hair, I performed the task as needed. To my credit, I am now able to reinstall the servers in about 40 minutes, should a major problem arise. After writing the documentation so that someone else could rebuild them, incase I get hit by a bus, I was given the fun task of making sure they are totally redundant, and that we can move to the secondary servers with the flip of a switch. While it’s somewhat nerve racking, it’s nice to be given a task that I have so much interest in, and something that I can learn so much from.

The one thing I am happy about is the fact that I don’t have to deal with the majorly shitty Child Porn reports I have to send to NCMEC. For some odd reason this week, we have received more notices then we have over the last 8 months. Once we receive a notice, we have to verify the site is real and online*, notate what we saw and submit special reports to the Center. Over the last 2 days, both my Lead Engineer and I have had to look at about 40 sites filled with that garbage. I hold the unfortunate privilege of having the most experience with this stuff in my group, spending the better part of the last five years dealing with this crap and working with my friends in Law Enforcement and the Center to put people behind bars. It will be nice to go on vacation and forget all that crap.

Vacation:

We have most of our vacation mapped out and should be finishing up the rest this weekend. Since we are going to be on four islands and in six large cities over a ten day period, we have had to lay out punch-list of things to do. While I am generally the one that doesn’t want to plan anything, simply listing things to see, this time we have a very limited schedule in each city and on each island. A perfect example is that one of the islands we are going to is the second wettest place on earth, so making sure we have a backup plan incase we get flooded or rained out is a wonderful thing.

Some of the fun stuff I am looking forward to include; Lava, Snorkeling, seeing my first Rainforest, and hiking all over the place. I have been reading at least an hour a night on different photography websites, and making sure that I really know how to use my camera. If I can take good photos is another story, but I’ll at least understand all the buttons and have the fundamentals down.

Next Vacation:

I think D.C. is out, or at least currently down on the list. I had requested a few ideas on what we should do on our next vacation, and while I myself had mentioned San Francisco and Seattle, Staci (whom I have no link for) had suggested Redwood Forest. Now, if you look at a map, it’s on the way to Seattle if you are in San Francisco. Or vice versa if you think driving South is cooler then driving North, which it’s not. Either way, Monk liked the idea of flying to SF, spending a couple of days there, and then driving up the Pacific Coast Highway (via Redwood) to Seattle and then flying home from there. We are big road trip people, so this works very well for us, and it’s a lot cheaper then it sounds.

Family:

We still don’t have a baby cooking, and at the end of February it will have been one year that nothing has happened. It will be at that time that we will have to visit a fertility doctor. It’s not something that I want to do, but it’s the next step in figuring out what’s the issue is. We are guessing that it’s because Monk has been on the pill for the last 10 years. We both have heard are fair share of co-worker stories where the woman took 2+ years for the drugs to leave her system and everything to get back on track.

We did find out that under the laws in our state, our health insurance companies have to provide two infertility treatments should it come to that. While we want children, and we are willing to go to a fertility specialist, we do not want to do anything that we will cause us to have multiple children. Not only could we not afford 3-6 children, it puts mothers at a huge risk and personally we both view it as a form of child abuse. We are going to take some steps, but if children are not in our future, that’s just the way it is, and Daddy will buy Mommy a BMW instead…and a puppy.

After all that there is not much time for anything else, I am horribly behind on my reading list, the site redesign, and know there are others things that I can’t even think of, because I have a bad case of Vacation on the brain. Plus I already know that Monday through Thursday are going to be the longest working days ever.