Productive (nesting?) - no baby

The title of this post pretty much sums up our day. I was very productive and got a lot done and we still haven't met our son. Kristen had a lot of contractions last night, but they slowed down a lot when we got up and went to breakfast this morning.

I believe this was the fourth week in a row that we've been to the Ball Square Cafe for breakfast. Today I tried something new; one of my favorite breakfast is the Broadway Blues which is mashed and grilled hash browns, a grilled blueberry muffin, bacon and a small cheese omelet. I never get the bacon and I don't like their veggie sausage or turkey sausage, so I asked for fresh fruit instead. With an egg whites instead of regular eggs, it almost felt like a healthy breakfast.

After breakfast, we came home for a couple hours. I cleaned for a while, then we went to Harvard Square to walk around and run some errands. We stopped by the camera store and picked up a neoprene sleeve for our small camera, the bead store for some craft supplies and the book store simply to browse. I picked up Lance Armstrong's biography (used) and we got The Baby Wisperer (also used). We stopped by Diesel on the way back to grab a decaf mocha for Kristen, then it was back home for more chores.

I pulled the grill out of basement, moved our bed to make room for the pack-n-play next to Kristen's side of the bed. Since the pack-n-play has a bassinet, we'll be using that initially at night. It was just a couple inches too wide to fit next to the bed, so I had to take both matresses off, shift it by 4 inches, then undo the whole process. Of course, I forgot to "measure twice" so I had to re-do the whole process. I had great help from the cats where there to investigate every step. I also spent a lot of time cleaning the free fridge we picked up to store breast milk at Kristen's office. It is in pretty good shape now, but it took a pretty good scrubbing to remove the signs of basement storage.

I also balanced the checkbook today. I've been using Microsoft Money for a long time and the only computer I have it installed on is a) slow and b) very very noisy. I got a little fed up with this and found how to install Windows in a Virtual Machine on our Linux desktop. So now, I can boot my (quite and fast) Linux desktop and run Windows XP within that environment. It was actually pretty easy (note the following is very geeky and maily here so I don't foget how I did it)

1. Download a Windows XP ISO image
2. Allocate 16 GB on the linux machine to act as the C-drive for Windows XP:
3. qemu-img create -f qcow2 vmdisk.img 16GB
4. Boot the Virtual Machine, booting from the CD drive, pointing at the ISO and 640 MB of RAM
   
5. qemu-kvm -cpu qemu32 -m 640 -boot d -cdrom windows_xp_professional.iso -hda vmdisk.img
6. Install Windows XP in the Virtual Machine
7. Boot the Virtual Machine with a network card, 640 MB of Ram:
8. qemu-kvm -cpu qemu32 -m 640 -net nic -net user -hda vmdisk.img
9. Install Windows Updates in the Virtual Machine
   

Right now, Kristen is taking a little nap and I'm watching an MSL soccer game while we wait for dinner to finish up in the crockpot. We'll probably relax for the rest of the evening and watch a movie. Tomorrow, we're hosting an early brunch (or having the baby) and will probably visit the garden center and spend some time outside (unless we have the baby).