A bit of flooding...

The storm that crawled through the Northeastern US this week left behind a LOT of water! There were flooded houses and roads all over the state of Connecticut. I have put a link to some pictures I took of the Farmington River as it passes near my house. The first few pictures show the water almost completely covering an old broken dam. The dam is usually about 5 to 8 feet above the water on the upstream side of the dam and 8 to 10 feet above the water on the downstream side of the dam. Some of the later pictures show an island that is a little ways downstream from the dam and usually has the highest point about 15 feet about water level...it is being washed over... Enjoy!

Oh... the pictures are streaming from my personal computer, so after about 10pm EST they might not be available until the next morning.

Viruses: Digital or Biological = Up ALL Night!

    So, as I said in my website, my daughter M was sick between Christmas and New Years. She was sick enough, with a virus, that we had to take her to the emergency room for 12 hours for oxygen and monitoring. So for about a week, my wife and I didn't get more than six hours of sleep each night.
    We had a week reprieve while M got better and we tried to recover from the holiday and the virus. We had tons of toys to put away (thanks to over generous grandparents and friends who spoiled our kids) and we had to try to clean the house from about two weeks of being too tired to clean!
    Then, believe it or not, M got sick AGAIN! Late last week, she started with a runny nose. By early this past week she had a mild fever. By midweek she had a 104.5F fever! SO, another week without sleep! This leads to the most recent virus...this time a digital virus. M's fever broke two days ago. I thought, FINALLY, we can get some sleep... Silly me! I should just accept that I won't get 'enough' sleep until either I retire or die!
    Last night I decided to go searching on the internet for a very specific...ahhh...thing...that I couldn't afford to buy. So I was looking for it on sites that took a lot of clicks (of the mouse) to get to...because I was hoping to find a more 'affordable' place to get this thing... Then it happened. Pop-up...pop-up, pop-up...virus warning, virus warning! This has happened to me a few times before, so I know what to do. Disconnect the internet...check. Click OK to quarantines of everything that comes up...check...uhhh...check again... and they just kept coming! At this point desperation says REBOOT! After reboot, virus warning pops-up again. But not multiple times, just twice for two different viruses!! At this point I thought I had gotten ahead of this. It was about 1am and I was exhausted. I started a full virus scan of the system and went to bed.
    I woke up to find that virus scan had not completed, that over 200MB had been transferred over the internet during the night and about 5 Internet Explorer windows were open with...let's say... things I'm lucky my children did not see!!! Apparently when I rebooted I forgot that my wireless connection was still on. After virus scan and spybot I have removed 135 infected viruses, two trojans, a keylogger and a bunch of registry entries! There were a good deal of files that had been added to my computer from the time I went to bed (as I said about 1am) and when I found the computer in the morning...I deleted all of these. I think I finally got ahead of everything (I have been monitoring the internet activity most of the day and nothing suspicious has happened).
    There were two lucky things that make me less worried about this event than I was first thing this morning. 1. After looking at the internet activity I see that most of the bandwidth was take-up with files coming into my computer (very little going out). 2. All of the files that I think are 'sensitive' on my computer are encrypted using a freeware encryption program. :) Finally, I will be formatting my computer as soon as I can find a few extra hours...just in case!
    The moral of this story is
        1. Kids get sick and keep you awake.
        2. Computers get sick and keep you awake.
        3. Back-up your data regularly and ENCRYPT any files that are sensitive!
        4. If a website's name is too long to remember, has a bunch of numbers and letters in the name, and takes more than two dozen 'clicks' to find...you probably shouldn't be there!!!!!

Rainy Day - Hair today gone tomorrow...

     It is a rainy day in Connecticut, the kids are in bed and my Wife is off to do some errands and hit the gym. I could be sleeping... but why mess with a good trend!
     My first daughter, C, is a thumb sucker. But, worse than that, she is a hair twirler. When she was younger, this was actually cute! As she got sleepy the thumb went into the mouth and the other hand went up into the hair for twirling. We used this as an indicator... sleepiness indicator, sickness indicator and uneasiness indicator. She had (notice the tense and you can see where this is going) shiny, long, blond, slightly curly hair. It was gorgeous.
     Now C is 2 3/4 years old. She is becoming an atheletic young girl...running, jumping, rolling and dancing. Unfortunately, with this athleticism she has become stronger and more capable of twirling her hair with such force that she either creates dreadlocks or tears it completely! This has only started happening over the last few months. It is amazing the effect this is having on her hair. Last week some people at the barn were asking if C had gotten her hands on a pair of scissors because her hair was all different lengths! I have attached progression of pictures to this blog so you can see what has happened!
     The progression ends with her haircut yesterday! I will attach that picture at the bottom. It was pretty traumatic for my Wife, but I think she looks cute! Ah, well. Hopefully the lack of hair will give her the chance she needs to forget about the twirling addiction and move on to something even more destructive!

Hello Blog-o-sphere!

     Since this is my first blog, I figured I would keep it short today. I wanted to let you know what you are getting into when you decide to read my blog. I will usually be talking about either politics or my kids...two things that are very different, but two things that are always interesting.

     I have gotten lots of complaints about the frequency with which I update my webpage, The Gobermans Menagerie II, so I figured I would start daily/weekly updates on this blog and use the Menagerie for pictures and stictly family news. I think the two will slowly start to intertwine if I pull this off right... you will have to let me know.


     That's it for now. I hope you enjoy Delsquabo's View...