Sheep Guarding Llama

DuoLingo Streak: 33 Days

I got up at six this morning, side effect of going to bed just after midnight.  How do I manage to sleep so little?

I got up, showered, did some work, and prepped for an eight o’clock presentation that Jeremy and I were scheduled to give this morning.  I got Jeremy up at a quarter till eight so that we could run down and get breakfast and coffee before the presentation.

The presentation ended up getting pushed back till a little after nine, so we got picked up and went into the office and did things from the board room instead.

We had a very good morning.  Lots of good presentation, meeting, and decisions.  We are very excited about where things are going.

For lunch, Sujit, Jeremy, and I went to Woodlands so that Jeremy could experience masala dosa.  He loved it.

I went for a spicier, more southern style dosa myself.  It, too, was delicious.

Our new monitors for the office came today.  So we now have twenty seven inch Dell monitors on our desks in the office, this is so much better than it was before.  We got a great deal on these from Costco, too.  So Jeremy decided that he wanted to stay late in the office so that he could work from the big monitor for as long as he could.

So we got a quiet evening in the office, our first time using it alone for a long period of time.  We worked quietly in the office till around seven thirty.

Sujit picked us up tonight and we went to a bar for a couple of beers and dinner.  Jeremy got a mushroom burger that he said was the best that he has had in a long time.  I got a grilled salmon wrap which was quite good.  I should have gotten it with a salad but I got tater tots instead.

We got back to the hotel at nine thirty and actually decided to go straight to bed.  So off to sleep super early tonight.  We are both feeling just a bit worn out.

DuoLingo Streak: 32 Days

Marriage Streak: 14 Years

Wednesday.  Today is Dominica and my fourteenth wedding anniversary.  Jeremy and I started the day having breakfast at the Holiday Inn Express.  Then Vijay picked us up and we got a ride into the office.

A busy morning in our office and then we did a lunch out with Vijay at the Curry Bowl; Jeremy’s second time getting Indian cuisine and his first Indian buffet.  He enjoyed it very much.

Just heads down work all afternoon and back to the hotel on the early side, around four, to work from there.  We put in maybe an hour at the hotel and then decided to do an early dinner and walked over to the Waffle House and had dinner there.  It was nearly empty.

After dinner, straight back to the hotel and we worked until around one in the morning.  We have a big presentation at eight in the morning so need to get a little sleep before it is time for that.

 

DuoLingo Streak: 31 Days

Tuesday.  Day two officially on the job.  Today went quite well.  We started in the hotel and caught a ride into the office.  Very busy morning of work.

For lunch Jeremy and I walked over to Panda Express and ate too much Americanized Chinese food.  Then we hit McDonald’s again for coffee.  It smelled just terrible again today.  How can it keep smelling like this every day?

We got to show off some of our progress early this afternoon which seemed to go over quite well.

We worked till around five, then caught a ride back to the hotel, where we worked for several more hours before doing out to walk to Del Taco again.  It is just too handy.  So fish tacos again tonight.

We hit the gas station on the way back and got some beers to have at the hotel.

Got some awesome news tonight, things are going really, really well out here.  I talked to Dominica tonight and we stayed on the phone long enough to wish each other a happy anniversary before turning in.

Worked until the wee hours of the morning.  We were both really exhausted when we finally crashed.

DuoLingo Streak: 30 Days

Heard about the shooting in Las Vegas before going to bed last night.  It was just twenty dead and one hundred shot by the time that I had fallen asleep.  It was fifty injured when we were at Del Taco yesterday evening, which is where I was when my phone alerted me about it.  We woke up to two hundred injured and by the time that we went down to breakfast at eight it was over four hundred and at eight thirty they reported five hundred and fifteen injured plus fifty eight dead and lots more unknown.  Unbelievable.  While at breakfast, the guy eating next to us was texted by his daughter, she had four friends killed at the concert.  He was very Vegas and his ex-wife worked at the hospital handling the trauma.

Jeremy and I got picked up from the hotel at around a quarter after nine and went into the office for Jeremy’s first weekday in the office.  We moved into “my” office suite and got to work.  Since we have our own suite off of the main office, we are able to have the lights off and avoid that eye strain.  We do not have any monitors, though, so we are stuck just working from the straight laptops.  So no better than just being at the hotel, except that the Internet is a little bit faster.  But not a ton faster.

We got into the office around nine thirty and settled into our own little suite where we were able to keep the overhead lights off, the room quiet and get down to solid work all day.

Around one we walked across the street to Firehouse Subs for some lunch.  On the way home we stopped off at McDonald’s to get some coffee.  It was horrendous, though, it smelled like the sewer had backed up in the McDonald’s.  I’ve never been in a restaurant that smelled so vile.  It was awful!

Back to the office for the afternoon.  Loads and loads of coding.  My job is more oversight and running interference to make sure that Jeremy can stay as busy as possible without having to deal with issues or interuptions or “logistics” of working more than necessary. Unfortunately, no monitors for either of us today, so we are only working from laptops which is not incredibly practical.  Just using laptops we can do from the hotel as well as from the office.  Better, in fact, as there are better options for plugging in there and no need to commute back and forth, even if it is just up the street.

We went back to the hotel at a quarter till five.  Nothing going on tonight with the team.  So just hotel time for us.  We were both hungry pretty quickly, so figured that we would just start the night by going over to Del Taco (because it is cheap and right next door) and grabbing some beer from the gas station here and getting straight back to work.

It was a very productive night.  Lots of work done.  We worked until the wee hours of the morning.

DuoLingo Streak: 29 Days

Jeremy and I are in Phoenix today.  It is Sunday.  Officially, our new jobs actually start today, according to our paperwork, even though we’ve been here and been in the office working already.  Today, it is all official.

Jeremy was up at two in the morning and already hard at work coding.  Of course, that sounds super early but when you consider that he is used to getting up very early eastern time, it was just him on his normal internal clock.  I managed to sleep in until six thirty, and then to fall back asleep for another hour.

I got up, showered, and then we went down and got breakfast in the hotel.  The Holiday Inn Express breakfast is quite good. Cinnamon rolls, omelettes, and lots of meat items for Jeremy.  Not a bad setup.

Jeremy worked all morning.  I went out at ten thirty with Sujit and Vijay to go laptop shopping at Costco.  They only have about six models of laptops there, so not a big selection.  But, in reality, the selection that was there was decently applicable to our needs and I was able to work with what they had.  I ended up getting a Dell Inspiron 13.3″ with a seventh generation Intel i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, backlit keyboard, and weighing under four pounds.  Jeremy got an HP Envy 15.6″, same proc, same RAM, and an upgraded SSD of the same size.  Both are convertibles, the kind that flip around and can act like a tablet and are touch screens.  Both were the display models, we we got a pretty serious discount on them.

It took a really long time to check out just because Costco had to wipe the laptops to get them ready for us.  Or so they said, but the laptops were not wiped or reimaged when we got them.  So we have no idea what they were doing.  The Costco accounts were still on them and there was no way that we could safely use them for anything without completely reinstalling the operating systems.  Which we planned to do, this does not present any kind of problem.  But for normal consumers, this would have been a major issue.

Back to the hotel I spent a few hours getting the two laptops built with a fresh install of Fedora 26 with Cinnamon desktop while Jeremy continued coding.  By early afternoon we were up and running, ready to work from our new laptops.

We were originally scheduled to have an afternoon meeting but that had to be canceled, not from our end.  So we have the whole rest of the day to get more work done.  We were getting pretty hungry, so around three we went out for a walk and went to Cracker Barrel for a very early dinner. I had the shrimp dinner, Jeremy had a French dip.  We were back at the Holiday Inn Express and and working by five. While we were out they cleaned our room.  Very efficient as they never bugged us about it all day.

It was an intense afternoon of work.  We were both quiet and deeply into our laptops until we headed out to find some late night dinner at nearly ten.  We did not want to walk too far but were unsure what we might find.  We happened upon a Del Taco just a few blocks away.  I had not been to a Del Taco in just about twenty years since there used to be one in Geneseo!

Dinner was decent.  I got the fish tacos and Jeremy got a carne asade burrito.  Del Taco was much as I remembered it.  Hard to believe that they still exist.  I almost never see them and I never hear of anyone eating at one.  The one in Geneseo closed so long ago, most people, including Jeremy who lives right next to where it used to be, have no idea that it used to be there.  The old Del Taco in Geneseo eventually turned into a few different things but eventually the old Starbucks, then the Sea Cow Grill, then a dance club that never actually opened but was built, and is currently a BBQ restaurant.  Not a great location, even though it is right in the middle of things.

We stopped at the gas station and picked up Red Bull.  Then back to the hotel.  Coding continued until one in the morning local time, which is two hours from Dallas time and three hours from New York time.  At one, Jeremy decided to call it a night.  I stayed up a little longer working on my DuoLingo and such.  His internal clock makes him get up earlier due to the jet lag.

I got just loads and loads of SGL caught up today.  This might be my single busiest SGL writing day of all time.  Probably not, that would be pretty dramatic, but it is definitely in the top five.  I must have gotten twenty days written in today.  Not only have I caught up all of April, but now all of May, and a bit of June.  I am getting more and more into the months where I already have a bit written and just need to fill in the gaps between the days that I have.  So things are moving faster and faster.  And September is almost all complete as it is.

We have a ride scheduled to pick us up at eight thirty in the morning and we will be headed into the office at that time.