Making boats on Fourth of July eve. Mykala found this origami boat-making kit at Target for $1 and we got waaay more than a dollar’s worth of fun out of it.

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Rash decisions always feel like sure bets before you act on them: I recently went “you know what, upgrading this server’s Ubuntu LTS won’t be a big deal — I’ve done all these package updates for the past few years with nary a hiccup… I think I’ll just purge my PPA repo (since ffmpeg is officially back in 16.04.1), open a screen session, and get going! And, for a multitasking win, I’ll do it in between seeing patients!”

That did… not go well.

Of COURSE I ran into a package bug that caused MySQL to fall over during the upgrade. Normally, MySQL dying wouldn’t be an issue, since my site is served from either an APCu or memcache cache, but HEY what’s this, PHP moved over to 7.0 and none of the extensions it wanted had been installed yet. So, the entire site was down.

Suspecting anything and everything was borked up, I did some diagnostics (aka panicked which commands to see what was still installed) and found it wasn’t too bad. The upgrade had completed with one exception, and had some unintended, un-researched complications. So, it wasn’t as bad as when I tried to upgrade my Joyent Accelerator years ago (Solaris… and the last time I’ll pick the obscure OS option) and was left with only the shell session I was currently running, trying to figure out how to get wget back on the machine so I could get gcc so I could START to reinstall things. Leaving my laptop powered up, connected to that one SSH session, praying the internet didn’t hiccup while I went to dental school classes, then rushing back home to debug some more—THAT was truly un-fun. So this was better than that.

But wait, the DSA (ssh-dss) keys I generated years ago were now disabled by default. Which, of course, that’s the last thing I would ever think of when trying to debug ssh problems. In this case, LISH saved me as I was able to generate new keys, add them to the server, and once again establish new SSH connections.

Then it turned out my stats program Mint was totally disabled. It was written like 12 years ago, last updated some years ago, by a great programmer who is now a busy father and has moved on to other things. It was time to dig in and fix someone else’s PHP, only to learn that MySQL’s default sql_mode is now far more restrictive than it used to be, which caused queries that used to run perfectly to fail. That took a little while to figure out.

The easiest were the fixes to my own code, because I know where (many, not all) of the gremlins live. Sometime in the middle of it all, John left a comment on this site, so that was a good sign. Luckily, it must not have required him to answer the security image challenge, because I found out that was broken, too. Fixed!

Looks like I won’t have to upgrade Ubuntu until 2021. If I do it before then, I’ll make darn sure to research it first.

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Our little family took a trip last weekend. Essie’s longest road trip thus far, to Wisconsin Dells, to the Kalahari Resort. Mykala had dance competition obligations, but since the hotel was connected to the convention center where the competition was held, we got to see her on each one of her breaks, and got to see Ess go to a waterpark for the first time. We expected a reaction from our nearly-two-year-old when she got in a giant kiddie pool full of swings, a miniature lazy river, giraffe sculptures, baby elephants squirting water out of their trunks, and colorful slides with water running down them. Ok, we thought, this could go one of two ways: she’s going to let loose and splash everywhere, analogous to her at home when she goes “run run run!” and then just runs around. Or, in contrast, she’d get really chatty, like she does when she’s sitting on the front of Mykala’s bike and watching the world go by. Hidden option C: Ess did neither of the things we guessed, instead going into some kind of Zen state of total focus and relaxation. Just staring out, happy but not gleeful, calm but not sad. We were taken aback. Then, Mykala took her down a slide. Did she like it? “MOE MOE” she said, and when I picked her up “NO-MAMA”, her favorite way to specify whom she would rather do the thing at hand with her. I think Ess had fun.

We slept Ess in the same room as us, but the pull-out couch squeaked every single time we moved. It was a series of naps strung together, which is what they say the first night you sleep somewhere new (something about how only half your brain sleeps at a time the first night in a new place). However, Ess made it all the way through the night, probably owing to her extremely short nap in the car on the way. We’re thinking Ess could come with us to Chicago sometime soon. This is exciting.

So, anyway, we got home and now it is time for Essie’s second birthday party very soon. We left to find a patio umbrella recently, and I got to sit in the back of the car next to Ess on the way home. She sometimes demands this, and there’s nothing like being greeted by an excited toddler when you get into the back of a car. Typically, she quickly goes back to what she was doing before I got in the car, and I get to see up close the way her mind is turning over and fitting and re-fitting pieces of the world together. She’s combining thoughts and experiences and colors and numbers and injecting the mix with her own creativity. She thinks sometimes we should call her “wiggleworm” so we do. She thinks every stuffed animal needs a nap and/or a potty-break diaper-change, so we tuck-in and ‘clean-up’. She thinks pats are very important to help you fall asleep, so we pat. She thinks her mother goose should have a salad of Ikea stuffed vegetables, so we put a bib on her and lay out a meal. And when you are doing something right or just-so or aren’t coming quickly enough to see something, Ess can get pretty upset. Then you find yourself feeling exasperated, like, I’m trying her kiddo, give me a second! And then she tucks herself in and you say ‘you can close your eyes’ and you watch as she squints them shut, still learning how to get them to hold closed, and she holds them this way for a moment or two until she cries ‘wake up!’ and she sits bolt upright and runs off to do more stuff.

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Preparations on the morning of Christmas in June.

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Mykala threw Christmas in June at the precise halfway point between Christmases for her family at our house. Lights, decorations, Christmas movies, egg bake, French toast bake, and of course, sugar cookies! This is Ess helping to cut them out the night before the festivities.

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Ess likes me to sit in the “bach” of the car with her sometimes.

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