So, I made it through today.  There were times when I wasn’t sure I would…  But I did.  Didn’t kill anyone, didn’t get locked up.  I’d say that’s an accomplishment.

Unfortunately, I’ve got to be on the road for Ithaca at 6:30 tomorrow morning.

We’re going to drive out there and install a VPN router…  Only one though, because the second site isn’t ready yet.  They don’t even have electricity at the second site yet.

And then we’ve got to visit the Utica offices to set up a terminal server…

And we’ve got to visit the Syracuse offices to do a site survey and take care of whatever odd things might pop up by the time we get there…

All of which is probably going to take more than just the one day, so we’ve booked a couple hotel rooms and we’ll be spending the night somewhere out in the Utica/Syracuse/Ithaca region tomorrow night.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’m looking forward to the next couple of days…

And I don’t even get the satisfaction of knowing the work is done and out of the way.  That second location in Ithaca is going to have to be set up eventually.  Which means I’m going to wind up going back out there at some point.

I do not want to be at work today.

It’s been a hectic weekend and I’m pretty worn-out from everything.  I was sleeping very well this morning and did not want to get out of bed.  It’s overcast and raining, and I’d much rather be listening to the rain in bed with my wife.

My stomach is upset.  I’ve been eating crap for several days now and my stomach is a roiling cauldron of acid.

I’ve got a meeting this morning, that I’m not prepared for.  Not entirely certain what is going to be discussed…  Not entirely certain what questions I’m supposed to be answering…

I’ve also got a list of things that broke last week when I was out…  And I’m the only person that can fix them…  So they’ve been broken for a few days now…

And tomorrow I’m supposed to head out to Syracuse/Utica/Ithaca for a couple days.  Assuming, of course, that everything is ready for us.  They were supposed to be running network lines to two seperate locations…  And we were supposed to be getting two static IP addresses…  And we were supposed to get a phone call with the addressing information last week, but we haven’t gotten that call yet.  So I don’t know if the lines have been run or not, or whether they’re active, or anything.  And I’m not sure which I should be hoping for…  I don’t know if I’d rather re-schedule this visit to a better time, or just get it over with.

My folks just rode off into the sunset…  Very literally.  They’re not actually leaving until tomorrow sometime, but I won’t see them again this year.  I’ll be at work when they get up, check out, and head off tomorrow.

It was a fun, if vaguely crazy few days.

They arrived on Wednesday sometime…  And stopped over for drinks Wednesday night.  We spent a few hours just catching up.  It was great to see them again.

Thursday I had to work half the day, but we all got together for dinner.

Friday was Christopher’s graduation.  My father was digging in our yard that morning…  Trying to put in some kind of drainage ditch thing.  And I had lunch with my mother while Christopher went to his rehearsal and Terri decorated the house.  Then we went to Christopher’s graduation that night.  Christopher’s father showed up, but Terri’s sister never even responded to any of our messages…  I’m really not sure what’s up with her.

Saturday we had Christopher’s graduation party.  Mike and Sylvia and Jake came over…  And my folks…  And our next-door neighbors came over…  Christopher got some very cool stuff.  My parents got him a nice Dell laptop, and we got him an iPod Touch.  Mike didn’t approve of him getting those goodies and had a bit of a tantrum.

Today we went over to the Shelbourne museum with my folks.  Very cool stuff over there.  We saw all sorts of old houses, paintings, things like that.  They had an exhibit on motorcycles, which was very cool, but looked kind of odd there.  And they had a very strange “modern” house.  Had a great time.

And now they’re off.  The odds are that we won’t see them again until next year sometime.

A reprieve, of sorts.

The Ithaca trip for Thursday has been postponed.  They suddenly decided they wanted two VPNs set up, not just the one.  So we’ve got a second ASA5505 on order and they’re trying to get a line run to the second location.

This isn’t a perfect situation…  We’re still going to wind up driving out to Ithaca – probably next week.  And since there’s some other stuff to do out in Utica and Syracuse we’re looking at doing an overnight.

But it does mean that I won’t be putting in a 14+ hour day on Thursday, when my parents are here.  So, if nothing else, I’ll be done in time to go out to dinner with them.  So, I’m pretty happy about that.

Fun week.

At work, all kinds of stuff is coming to a head.  We’ve got a VPN install that’s been varying degrees of stalled for about four months now.  We were waiting to hear back from the folks on-site about what kind of bandwidth they had…  Then we were waiting to hear from the IT people about when they could run a new line…  Now, all of a sudden, it is all happening at once.

The line will be run and active on Wednesday, and they need the VPN up and running on Thursday.  The problem is that this job site is about 5 hours away.  So I’m going to have to be on the road at about 6:00 AM…  And I have absolutely no idea when I’ll be home.  Even if everything goes 100% perfectly it is still going to be a long day…  And the odds of everything going perfect aren’t good.

We’ve also been working on installing an Exchange server for one of our larger clients.  They’ve been getting email hosted through their ISP for years now and it just isn’t working the way they’d like it to anymore.  So we’ve got a new server to install, Exchange to set up, all sorts of email addresses to forward/redirect/migrate, DNS changes to make, IP addresses to assign…  And, again, this has been varying degrees of stalled for months and suddenly has to be mostly done by July 1st.

We’ve got a new client, some big garment maker with offices all over the world.  We’re taking over IT support for their local office.  Part of that process involves meeting with their head IT folks from Germany and doing some training.  And those guys are only in town for a few days this week, so we’re having to squeeze their training in wherever we can.

In addition to all that, Christopher is graduating from High School this weekend.  Very cool, but it means lots of socialization, which is not cool.

My parents are coming up for his graduation, so we’ve spend the last week or so tidying up the house.  Lots of cleaning and scrubbing and vacuuming…  And moving furniture…  And drilling holes…  And cleaning animal cages…  And trimming the yard…  So I’m pretty tired from all that.

So I’m already looking forward to next weekend, and hopefully getting to rest and relaxe a bit after all this…