January 16, 2019: Huckleberry Finn

Wednesday. I have a big scheduled meeting for lunch, but on the far side of Fort Worth today (heading out towards Abilene) so I did not have a lot of free time. I got up and headed into my office for about an hour of work. Thankfully the morning did not start out to busy, and everyone is in the office today so there was plenty of coverage. I caught up on email and everything else.

Then around nine I got in the shower and got dressed so that we would be ready to go. Paul didn’t start getting ready until after ten. Our plan had been to head out at a quarter after ten, but we didn’t really leave until almost ten thirty. It is nearly an hour drive.

Paul and I arrived at the Chinese restaurant with just a couple of minutes to spare. We got a table and were joined in no time. We had a good meeting for nearly an hour and a half. I had veggie fried rice extra spicy. It was very good. Paul had fried rice with beef. The meeting was with a large private K12 school out that way. It has been a while since I did private K12 work on any scale, it would certainly be extremely interesting to get involved in that again. And it sounds like they might have excellent contacts there.

It was after two when we finally got back to the house. I got straight to work to see how behind I might have gotten. Paul got to work on the guest bathroom which almost immediately required he and Dominica to go out shopping for more equipment. Real work on the bathroom is going to wait until tomorrow. That is going to make him very busy. Only two days until the Grices arrive!

I had to help out some with Liesl’s school today. She had a breakdown when Dominica wanted her to start using a dictionary to look up and record words. Liesl did a good job of pushing through it, but we have no idea why such a simple, straightforward task triggered this reaction. Sometimes we can predict these things, but quite often we cannot.

Next week is going to be super busy. The Grices are here with us through Monday. Then Tuesday we are just here working as usual. Wednesday is a Unitrends event in Houston that Paul and I are trying to attend. Then on Thursday is the Midmarket CIO Forum in Dallas, and we are both attending that as well. So three days next week are already booked up. I am going to be struggling hard to keep up with the normal work. Maggie is out next week as well. Because of her university obligations, she is forced to be a translate for the pope next week while he is in Panama for the World Day of Youth. (It is amazing that an even with that name can be put on by the Catholic Church with a straight face, how inappropriate can any group be?)

Things were more or less slow for me until around four. Then Rodrigo and I did a ton of work and had a really busy evening until around seven thirty. But we knocked out so big stuff that really needed to be done. I am feeling so much about the backlog of work now. Majorly successful night. Sometimes you just can’t get anything done unless you have two pairs of eyes on it.

I made frozen pizzas by request for the girls. I had muzzi muzzi as there is a lot left over from two evenings ago and Dominica cannot eat any. So that pretty much only leaves me to eat it. While eating dinner, Dominica and I watched three episodes of The Golden Girls, we are on the fifth season now. On her own, Dominica has started watching some show called The Good Doctor that does not look good at all. Paul and I both think that it looks super boring and the acting is horrible.

After our show, Dominica moved into the bedroom and the girls came out for a daddy – daughter gaming night. We tried to continue playing Ankh which we all love, but for some reason it was having weird graphics issues tonight. So we ended up giving up on that after fifteen minutes and instead switched to Nancy Drew and the Legend Crystal Skull which we are very close to finishing.

We played for an hour and a half and came to the conclusion of the game! This Nancy Drew title only took us eight hours to complete. Overall, we have to vote that this was one of our less favourite Nancy Drew titles. The story was not too bad, but it was short and light. This game, moreso, was all focused on really hard, stupid, and boring puzzles. It was really just a lot of “filler” meant to make it take a long time to complete with minimal writing.

Since we finished our game a little on the early side, and since the girls were having a good time, we went ahead and started the next game in the Nancy Drew series… Nancy Drew: The Phantom of Venice. We played until well after midnight.

I got to do some SGL updates tonight. I have now completed September. That means that I have now completed the first three quarters of the year. Only the final quarter left to go. Feeling very good about the progress.

Tonight’s literary reading with the girls is starting Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.