Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning, Paul and I are in Norcross, Georgia where we will be working for the day and going to a party tonight.

We went into the office around nine thirty this morning. We didn’t want to get in before everyone else was there, which often seems to happen. We spent much of the morning doing introductions for Paul. We were not scheduled to be in so there was not a lot of specific work awaiting us.

For lunch today, James treated us to delivery Thai in the office.

We knocked off early so that we could go to the hotel and freshen up.

This evening was the party in the hotel for several hours. We had a good time and I managed to introduce Paul to a lot of people. It was a fun party.

After the party, a group of us went out to a bar and pool hall and hung out for several more hours. It wasn’t a super late night, but definitely a long day. We had a good time and the whole trip was quite productive.

Paul and I rented a Nissan Rogue and drove from Dallas to Atlanta today. We have a retirement party to attend tomorrow night and are going to spend tomorrow morning in the office as much as possible so that Paul can get the lay of the land. It is a great opportunity to meet everyone in person for him and for me to see them again as it has been a few months since I was last here.

The drive from Dallas to Atlanta is not short. It was evening as we came through Birmingham, Alabama. We were there around time for dinner, we managed to hook up with Kris Leslie that I’ve not seen in several years and we went to a local Birmingham seafood place for dinner.

Dinner was quite good. I got the shrimp basket, which was coconut shrimp. We did not have very much time, though. We had to be on the road to get to Atlanta before it was too late.

We arrived in Norcross at midnight. Staying at the Hilton Norcross. The hotel that we used in February was not available and the party tomorrow is in this hotel so this is just too convenient.

I wasn’t too tired and there was stuff to do. So I stayed up for a few hours catching up on work after spending the entire day in the car. I did not turn in until three thirty in the morning.

Tuesday. Started today with a conference call at nine in the morning. It was a very call heavy day. I was on the phone almost continuously until one thirty in the afternoon!

We needed a new scanner with all of the paperwork flowing through this office now. All of the company scanners are up in New York and we won’t have them down here for quite a while. So Paul and Dominica ran out and picked up a cheap Canon scanner and I got it hooked up for them.

Paul and I are doing a surprise trip out to Atlanta tomorrow to see a client’s retirement party. So we were packing today and planning for it. We are driving out, not flying. It is a very last minute thing that we just learned about this morning.

I stayed up working until very late trying to make sure that everything is ready for Paul and me to be out of the office for the next several days.

Monday morning. We are back in Dallas and it is time to get back to work. I have my conference call this morning, but I sat in the meeting for a long time and no one showed up. A rather common occurrence it seems. IT teams are often seen as not being all that consequential and just ignoring us or forgetting that they’ve requested that we attend a meeting. Canceling a meeting is fine, but it would be nice if they told us about it rather than letting us just sit there every week waiting for them.

MangoLassi had a big outage today from Linode’s datacenter having a hardware failure.

This evening it was brats on the grill in the atrium. The weather is great and grilled brats are just perfect.

Monday. Back to work after our weekend and adventure in Houston. This week, like many to come I am sure, is very busy. I am quite suddenly doing so many more tasks than I have done for years. I am so much more involved in the day to day work and right in the thick of things. For the time being, it is almost entirely just Gene and me handling everything. It is so much more work because not only am I doing a bunch of work that I am not used to, but also dealing with the rebuilding of the company, creating new processes, doing a massive knowledge transfer. It is a bit overwhelming. Doing it without all of the stress would be bad enough. But with the insane levels of stress, it is just awful.

I dealt with Rackspace account stuff today. That was no fun. Then this afternoon had to going out to deal with some in person banking, too.

This evening I did a bit of cleaning and moving of furniture. Once work was done for the day, the project was to move out of Liesl’s old bedroom where I have had my office for quite some time, and move back into the office proper that we built nearly a decade ago. That took a lot of work, but I am back in the custom designed office that I have missed.

Paul moved into Liesl’s old room. The girls are just using Luciana’s room, the back one.

Dinner tonight was Quorn “chicken” tacos that Dominica made.