The week continues to be very, very hot. Expected to touch one hundred degrees again today. Rather unseasonably warm, even for Texas. I got up at six thirty and was in to the office at eight.
Today was actually very busy at work, not like it was yesterday at all. So I got very little free time. What free time I did have was all spent dealing with getting bills paid which we are struggling to get paid after having had one of my entire paychecks go missing. It all arrived yesterday so we are no longer technically behind but getting everything situated again and all of our ducks in their row takes some effort. I got that pretty much all cleaned up today. We had a $50 bonus on our rent for Liesl winning it at the Easter egg hunt and $300 off for a referral to the apartment complex so our rent was down significantly this month which was awesome and perfect timing. Our entire rent is just $1,076 so a $350 is very significant.
While I hate paying bills, boy did it feel good to take care of all of that. That has been hanging over our heads for weeks now.
For lunch I walked home around twelve thirty. I met up with Dominica and Liesl who were down in the pool which was empty today. Normally it is swarming with people by early afternoon, even during the week. Maybe the intense heat is keeping people away?
What really amazing Dominica today was that, while out at the pool, Liesl took a plastic watering can that Dominica had brought out for her to play with and started watering the flowers! We have no idea where she learned to water flowers. Maybe she has seen that on Dora the Explorer or maybe she had seen me watering our one, small houseplant that we have now or maybe she has memories to when she was just one year old and I used to water the plants around the house all of the time. We have no clue. But she knew exactly what to do.
Dominica then told Liesl that “those flowers have enough water” – so Liesl took the watering can to another set of flowers and started watering them instead! Once they had enough water, Dominica told her again and she moved on to the next set. Dominica was amazed that Liesl was understanding so much of the conversation including concepts like “those” flowers being different from “these” flowers and what “enough” meant. She is really developing her language skills quickly. What amazes me constantly is her ability to transpose pronouns correctly. I say “Do you know x or y?” and Liesl says “I know.” She also says “nope” all of the time.
I played a little Dragon Age: Origins over lunch. I managed to start and complete Shale’s Quest during lunch and got that out of the way. I’ve made it far enough in the game that I am getting pretty bored and would like it to just wrap up. Having seen Dominica play most of the game through once already and having her playing through at about the same place that I am currently really adds to the repetition and drudgery. Having us playing the same game at the same time is definitely a bad idea.
Back to work this afternoon. This afternoon ended up being incredibly busy and I did not get to leave the office until it was approaching seven thirty! It worked out, though, as Liesl was exhausted and was not going to be able to handle going to pasta night at La Cima anyway tonight. So we just gave up on that and decided to have dinner at home.
I spent the evening working on fixing the Windows server systems that died last night. I did one fresh build tonight on Xen.
I got set up today with a TechNet Plus subscription. I have not had TechNet in a very long time. I am hoping that it will be more useful this time around than it was last time. Some of the contents have changed and I am pretty sure that I can make much better use of it now.
My new book, “Head First C#, 2nd Ed.” arrived today from Amazon a day early. Awesome. I have been looking forward to reading this book, which covers .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Perfect timing too since I am off from work tomorrow and will be home all day. Not that that will allow me to read a lot of it but it will give me time to read quite a bit more than I normally would have an opportunity to read.
We are working on finalizing our plans for traveling up to New York this summer. Dominica and Francesca are planning on leaving for New York on Wednesday of next week, I believe. The plans are still in flux so I am not totally sure. But they will be leaving in approximately one week. I will be in Texas for almost ten days after that most likely hitting the road to Virginia on the nineteenth where I will visit with the Nicklins (in Maryland) and then pick up the Ralstons arriving from the Congo on the morning of the twenty first. Then up to New York.
We will be in New York for several weeks not returning until roughly July tenth. We have no idea how we are getting back at this point, though.