Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

DuoLingo Streak: 28 Days

I slept in as long as I could this morning, till a little after eight.  I was so tired getting into bed last night, but this is after ten to my internal clock so sleeping in any longer just was not going to happen.

Was at the condo for a bit, then Sujit and I went out to breakfast at a really cool south Indian vegetarian fast food place.  I got masala dosa and some tamarind rice, all excellent.  It was not that close to the condo, so the drive used up a bit of time.

From our late breakfast, it was already time to go to the airport and pick up Jeremy who had just landed as we started driving in that direction.  So the timing was nearly perfect for getting to it and getting him after he had picked up his luggage.

From the airport we drove to the condo, picked up my luggage, and then on to the Holiday Inn Express to drop us off for a few hours.  This gave us a little time to relax, do some work, I caught up on SGL which I had not yet posted from yesterday, and catch up.

At a quarter till five, we were picked up and went to the office.  This is Jeremy’s first time in the office.

We worked all evening in the office, which went really well.  It was just four of us and quite productive.  A really good introduction for Jeremy to the team and the vision and exactly what we are doing here.  And he was impressed with how nice and large the office is.

We worked until dinner time.  Then went to Star of India for dinner.  Jeremy really has not had Indian food before.  In college he tried it, but nothing like this.  This is really good, high end Indian cuisine.  He got a chicken tikka steak and loved it, and tried our curries as well and loved those.  He was very, very impressed.  Talked about how good the food was for hours.

Nearly ten when Sujit dropped us at the hotel.  Time to get started on the real work for the day.

This project is so much like the “good old days” when Andy and I went to Pittsburgh.  It is amazing how many similarities there are between that and this.

I managed to get caught up on SGL to the point that all of our time in Europe from this spring has been recorded.  I continue to make good progress on the back log of posts.

DuoLingo Streak: 27 Days

I did not sleep in as long as you would think, given that we did not get to bed until nearly five in the morning.  I was up before nine.  We have paperwork and stuff to do that needs to be tackled first thing this morning.

We are feeling much better today.  Yesterday was a rough one.  Today we are busy with packing and planning and figuring out how to adjust now that a few things have changed.  It is more likely now that I will be in Phoenix for three straight weeks.  Hopefully I will still get a break to go to Austin for SpiceWorld.

So today was a pretty short day.  Dominica and I spent a lot of time just talking over coffee. There is so much to figure out and so much unknown that we are going into.  Stressful, but exciting.

I am very sad that we did not manage to finish reading our Harry Potter book before I had to leave.  I worked so hard pacing that to be sure that we would finish it in time, and because we could not read it last night we didn’t make it.  One more good night of reading and we would have finished it up.  I was loving our bedtime reading time together.  That was so much fun.

It was at eight thirty that we left the house to drive me to the airport in Dallas.  We have this down to a science now.  I got dropped off at terminal E31, I gave my kisses and hugs to the family, and I gave my luggage to Spirit and I was off through security.

It only took a minute to get to my gate, E33, same as before.  I know exactly what to do, now.  I went to Blue Mesa and had a couple beers and a quesadilla.  I ended up talking to Phillip Glass from the movie Trophy which is in theaters now.  We probably spent an hour talking.  He was very interesting.  He was in Dallas for an interview and was just on his way back to his sheep ranch in west Texas.

After Phillip grabbed his flight, I spent some time with someone else who was waiting for a friend of his to join him so that they could car pool together.  He was in town for a personal growth seminar.

The flight was on time and an easy two hours tonight.  I had the middle seat between two women.  We all napped on the flight so only talked a little just before take off.

It was about twenty after eleven when I touched down in Phoenix, the same time that I had taken off from Dallas.  Had they gone any faster, I would have moved backwards in time!  I got my luggage, got my Uber and was off to the condo.  Sujit was already asleep when I got there so I had to wake him up to let me in.

I did “tomorrow’s” DuoLingo before falling asleep, but was asleep pretty quickly.  My big adventure in Arizona has begun.  Tomorrow is going to be a big day.  Jeremy was just starting to wake up to head to the airport when I was just getting ready to head to bed.

Already missing my family.  This is going to be a long month.