        | Monday's events consisted of a trip to Freeport and relaxing back at the house. Once again it was rather rainy as we headed up to the home of L.L. Bean. Leigh was on the hunt for shoes and a jacket, so we loaded our shopping weapons and went to the main store (there's your standard L.L. Bean, the L. L. Bean Hunting & Fishing, L.L. Bean Cycle and Ski, L.L. Bean Outlet, and soon to open L.L. Bean Home). Required upon arrival are photos with the giant boot. Then as soon as you go through the door is the fabulous fish tank. Leigh's shoe radar led her to a snappy pair of a blue specimen that she tried out on the fake rocks with Emily. On the way out the door, Leigh exclaimed how super excited she was about her new shoes. I reminded her that she would hate them the next day. We meandered down to the children's section and lost Emily for a heart-thumping moment. Instead of just running the distance of a couple of clothes racks, she high-tailed it to the end of the store. The reaction of the staff was a bit comical in retrospect--they evidently see that so often that they had no reaction. We completed our transactions and departed. The Bean has another nice little photo op for cheesy tourists right out front, so the perky teen handing out menus for the restaurant next door snapped a winner for us. Next we stopped by Starbucks to treat Emily to a hot chocolate, and then it was on to the L.L. Bean Outlet, where Leigh picked up a snazzy jacket. Then up to the Mangy Moose to browse, and on to Isabella's Sticky Buns for brunch, where we practiced our uvular and generally silly photography while awaiting our food. ...and one last photo on the way out to demonstrate our child's love of the animal kingdom in general, and of frogs in particular. We spent the rest of the day back at the house watching movies and playing Wii bowling. Emily got two spares in a row, unassisted, and one was a difficult split! Leigh whipped up a mucho bueno taco dinner and we watched The Bachelorette, because we fully support screwing around with the love lives of others for our entertainment. Before we retired, we tried to account for all six resident felines, but couldn't. Too bad--we're not going out to the Great Maine Woods to try to find you, kitty! |
One issue that can occur when using VM snapshots to back up a server with large database volumes is that the server gets paused when the snapshots are consolidated. We like to refer to this a "stunning" because it sounds worse, and it can cause really bad things if you are using clusters and/or availability groups. If a cluster node gets stunned for more than a few seconds, the other node will think that it needs to fail over. Additionally, when the stun is over, the node that was stunned comes back to life right where it left off, and if it was the owner when it was stunned, all this has to be sorted out, and honestly, after working with Microsoft Cluster for twenty years, you just don't want to put it in this situation unless there's no way to avoid it. So, your backup strategy changes, and you set your large volumes as independent disks so that they are ignored by the VM snapshots. This lets you backup the OS and any other small volumes without a stun. Your
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