I am "a-Pa"

Well, the "Papa" from last Thanksgiving only came out once. After that it was back to Trenton naming everybody around him, "Mama", "Dada", "Nana", "Uncle" ... but when they asked him  who I was he would just smile and look away. My guess is that it was too hard and he didn't want to mess it up.

But last week it went up to "Pa", and now it's "a-Pa".  "Papa" can't be far behind!

A couple of swimming lessons ago, there's a large pool cleaning machine that was sitting in a corner over at the Mac.

Trenton does NOT like vacuum cleaners.  And this machine looks like the vacuum cleaner from hell.  

He kept a wary eye on it the whole lesson, becoming more and more uncomfortable.  Finally, after about 20 minutes, he let his thoughts be known.

"BYE!" he said loudly.

So he got to get out and dried off by Nana and then we left.  Took him and Kristin out to dinner at Rio Grande.

Yesterday, Kristin said he didn't even want to come to the pool.  I hoped that the pool cleaner would be gone, but it was still in the same place.  I took him over to it and beat my hand on the tank.   He touched it himself, but was still more interested in getting away from it.  So he got in the pool with mama, and I draped my towel over the machine as much as I could.

He still kept looking over there, but got more and more comfortable as time went on, and he had a pretty good time this time.

Oh, and I also got a Thomas the Train DVD to supplement Bob the Builder.  Mostly for us adults.  You know, a little variety never killed anyone.

Ghost of Work Past

Eight years ago today, I apparently rewrote a popular song so that it would apply to a fairly complex process I scripted to move people's mailboxes from one site to another with the University system (Columbia, Kansas City, St. Louis, Rolla, and between faculty/staff and student domains, or "sites").

It was a perl script that used an oracle table and tweaked a couple of others to integrate it withs some other scheduled stored procedures someone else had written, while running command-line programs to export mail, copy it elsewhere, and import it from there when the new id got created .... it was a piece of work.  Maybe one of my best.  But it was not without it's frustrations.

Margie was digging through old emails and found it and forwarded it to me.

Site Moves
Words and Music by Rob Spleger

It was a little too small
Could've used a few bytes
Got my mailbox moved to another site
It was a flashy new server with big hard drives
With quotas all its own way up firm and high
Way up firm and high
Got a new ID, then AD got heavy
Another email alias, well I have a bevy
Workin' on mysteries without any clues
Workin' on our site moves
Tryin' to make some email movin' news
Workin' on our site moves
In the winter time
In the cold winter time

It wasn't movin' fast, oh no far from it
My record got stuck, in the queue dad-gum it
There's a duplicate in another domain
It's such a pain
And we'd poll AD every chance we could
Hopin' it'd go away, if it ever would
I had two ids
But neither one cared
Both just sittin' there
Workin' on our site moves
Tryin' to lose those records stuck in queues
Workin' on our site moves
And it was summertime

And oh, can you relate
We saw the delete
And we waited on the create
Waited on the create

I awoke last night to the sound of thunder
Had the queue dislodged I sat and wondered
My mail's been sittin' there since 1962
Ain't it funny how the site moves
When you just don't seem to have email to use
Strange how the site moves
With MSX-2K closing in
Maybe I should try again....