Andrew and Karla's Place

You get a knock on the bathroom door at 6.15am while in the shower and a little voice saying, “Daddy, I wet myself. It was an accident.”

So the week starts, beside the drenching rain outside.

I had a good Dad response of course, “Go and see your mother.”

Soon Mum was back advising me Jessie was waiting to get in to the shower and Sophie decided it was a good idea to start screaming out to let us know that she was awake as well.

So had a shared shower this morning with Missy using her Mums shower cap, she thought this was funny.

So while we were on schedule first off this soon was no longer the case. Besides cleaning child and doing a quick load of sheets, thank God for mattress protectors.

While dropping Karla at the station we noticed that there were several Police cars and then a few ambulances near the station after dropping her off. Turned out that someone decided today was a good day to take on a train. This also stopped one of the main lines to the city so Karla had to wait for several trains until she was able to get on to one. Then they had to go past where the poor person was as well. She’s a little upset by the experience. (Fatal incident causes long train delays)

She called me several times and said it was best to either go to Granville and try and get a train from as trains from Parramatta weren’t getting through. So I decided to go to Parramatta to work there for the day and get the girls in the afternoon. Of course life is not that simple is it. So checking the some 400+ emails from the few days I didn’t check them from home, I find that I need to go in to the city for a meeting at 2.30pm to 4pm. One that I can’t get out off. So l’ll be going in do the training course / meeting then leaving at 4.15ish to come back and grab the girls from daycare.

Of course I also left my network token on the desk at home so I can’t work while on the train today either. Oh well I’ll just have to read something or listen to some music on the way in and out.

Hope your week has started better than ours.

Yeap I should also be working as well…

Yes another weekend gone, not sure where to.

Saturday just went, I can’t even remember what we did, nothing I think, we are all stll recovering from the previous weekend and the week. Karla’s been not 100% Sophie started to get unwell again, I’m still not better and Jessie is coughing a little and insists on that she is ill as well. (Doesn’t want to feel left out.)

Everyone except myself was passed out in bed by 7ish. I stayed up trying to get somethings working and watched a few saved shows on FoxTel, really sad old reruns of Star Trek Voyager and some new stuff.

Sunday Jessie and I went to swimming as Sophie was not well enough to go so she stayed home with Karla. On coming home we had a quick bite then back out to the Doctors for Sophie, myself and Karla to get checked out. Jessie decided she didn’t want to be good and was a pain the whole time there.

After the Doctors off to Westfield Parramatta to go clothes shopping for me and Karla. Again Jessie decided this was no fun and decided to let us all know about it for many hours.

Finally a stop for some food then home, both kids really tired so both off to bed, then house stuff.

Karla’s at home today with Sophie and I guess I will be home with her tomorrow when she is back off to see the Doctors again in the afternoon.

Did I forget to mention that Jessie decided to come in to our room at around 1.30am as her legs were sore. Then Sophie decided to wake up and scream out at around 3~3.30ish and play with her light switch. Then again at around 5.15am decided to wake up and not go back.

Karla also found Sophie playing with a biscut container from the kitchen in the lounge room this morning. Appears Miss Jessica took my custard creams from the kitchen and ate them in the morning and hid the container under her  kitchen sink.

This morning she also filled her bag up with various toys and took those to daycare without us knowing. It wasn’t until Karla saw her showing Emma all her stuff that she was found out, needles to say her toys were collected and returned home.

Just a quicky advising that I have been able to get everything back up and running after the upgrade to the server from a few weeks ago.

Problems seems to have come from old WordPress plugins, the update to PHP5.3.2.

Performance and stability seem to be back where they were, so no more hours of searching through to find the problems until I go changing something else.

We’ll lots doubt I remember most of it now.

Sophie has been home sick for the past week with a bad cough and chest infection. She’s been on medicine at night and then ventolin 4 times a day. I’ve had something similar and stayed home to look after her for the week trying to get work done in between.

Karla has been working in her new role for her first week alone at Westpac as the EA to the Global Head of something. She’s been finding it challaging as the girl she is replacing for 9 months had to leave early before her full hand over. She is also having fun getting all her accesses in place to all of the systems she needs to use.

Jessie has been Jessie, she is really in to reading things now and spelling, every work or sign we go past she calles out various bits of it or asks how that spelt etc. She has been writing her own name now for a little while and seems to enjoy doing this.

Karla and I managed to get out the first time in ages (before Sophie was the last time) and saw Ross Noble at the Enmore theatre the other weekend. He was good and we both enjoyed the show. One of our friends Denis (and Christian) looked after the girls for us, apparently Jessie tried every trick she could to stay up and have a girl chat with Denis on the night.

Only bad thing was Denises car was smashed in to at around 12.30am by some idiot and has been written off, luckily Denis and Christian weren’t in the car, they would have been if it was a little later as we were literally walking out of the door to go to the car.

On Friday / Saturday I worked from 11pm to around 8.30am on our DRP for work, we then went out and had our family haircut outing and grabbed some fish and chips for diner that night. Around 6.30pm I logged back in to work to see how the DRP was going and things were just starting to happen after a huge delay from the night before so I helped out the guys until around 9pm. Needles to say I was pretty tied by them as I only got 2 hours sleep the night before and had been going all day.

On Sunday Karla took Jessica to swiming for the first time this season it’s about week 4 or 5 now. (We’ve all been sick each of the other weekends) She and Jessie had a good time toghter. I stayed home with Sophie as she still has some coughing and I was also not 100%. While at home I bathed Sophie and got her to have a little bit of a sleep as we had a birthday party to go to at 2pm for Jessie.

The birthday party was for one of Jessie’s friends from Day care, it was a ten pin bowling party and it was great fun all of the kids loved it they all behaved themselves and no injuries. Jessie now wants to learn her Mum how to bowl. (Yes she uses learn although we keep telling her you teach someone) Sophie loved all of the noise, lights and other kids running around the place.

After the party we had a look around and decided to go to a noodle place for diner, the food wasn’t quite what we thought it would be it was ok, but not the greatest. Karla felt a little sick afterwards but I was staving so I happily ate away. Sophie decided one of her crayons was better to eat, so we had to dig the end of it out of her mouth. I swear we only turned around for a second before she managed to eat the end of it off.

So another week startes, kids both at daycare again and Karla and I are back at work for another week.

You may have noticed that the site has been coming up and down or has been very slow over the past couple of days. Well I updated to Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS  over the weekend, this sort of went smoothly but I’ve found a few issues along the way.

1. Apache goes very slow or stops responding altogether.

2. APC no longer works with Apache.

3. Postfix-Dovecot SMTP authentication no longer works.

The first one is a big problem as it brings the whole server down, so nothing works and you are required to hard boot the box to get back in. It appears to be a problem with the update from PHP 5.2.6 to 5.3.1 there are issues with the Gallery plugin that I use on the site. So after some investigation I have disabled that plugin for now, until I can find a solution to fix the issue.

The APC should work but again does not want to so I have moved back over to Memcache for OPC caching on Apache for now.

The Postfix problem is a real pain, I spent many hours getting this set up in the past and while receiving emails is working I’ll need to go back and redo the other outward configuration again. Unfortunately as I spent some much time getting just right I can’t remember all of the little things that I changed, but looking at these things now I do so with a much better understanding than when I first tried.

The Gallery is still there and working, but linking pictures back via the WPG2 plugin is not working.