I managed to sleep in until nine thirty. Not really all that late considering that we were up until almost four in the morning reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets last night. We have just four chapters left to go, I think. I worked very hard to get us to the point that we would be able to finish the book tonight. Tomorrow I leave town for two weeks, so this is our last chance to get through our bedtime reading.
We got some heavy rain last night, but it did not last long. This morning when I got up we had a light rain coming down. It is only seventy degrees here in Dallas this morning.
I did a lot of catching up on SGL today and currently my backlog is caught up through all of April now, and I am working on May. That has been hard work, but I am feeling much better knowing that it is getting done. I have loads of notes and pictures, so I have it all documented by not written out.
Of course I tried to relax today but never got a chance. I even tried to play XCOM but never got to a point where I made any progress. I had to quit before I could get to a new save point. So my very short day of gaming was just lost.
This evening I had consulting work for the energy company to do on site up in Plano. So my day was rather short as I had to get ready to go around five and by six was out the door. I swung by the Taco Bell on Frankfort at the Dallas North Tollway to grab dinner on my way up to north Plano.
I was at the office for about four hours tonight, so a good, solid half day of work up there. I really enjoy this kind of work and I really like this customer so it didn’t really feel like work. I have always loved what I do. And as we were able to complete one task after another and made great progress, fixed real things, and had loads of success it was way more fun than when there are all kinds of problems.
While I was at the site, however, I got some very troubling news about the new job in Phoenix that I am supposed to be leaving to go to tomorrow evening. Enough news that I was pretty sure that we were not moving forward tomorrow and would need to change all of our life plans, again. So that disrupted things pretty dramatically.
The rest of the evening and almost all of the night was spent trying to figure out what was going on, what was supposed to be going on, how this impacted other people, what we were going to do, etc. I ended up on a conference call at three in the morning to go over everything and was on there until four thirty! Talk about no sleep. It was a very stressful night.
In the end, however, I think that things worked out very well, even better than we had been thinking that things were earlier in the day. Maybe not, but we will see. It is very hard to gauge the situation at this point. We will just have to get to Phoenix and figure things out from there. One way or another, however, the new adventure starts tomorrow night officially, so we need to get some sleep tonight so that I can get there tomorrow night. I am going to be exhausted.
Jeremy, likewise, got no sleep tonight. I at least will get to sleep in a little. He pretty much has to stay up and go straight to his last day of work at his old job. He does not wrap up until Friday evening and will likely have to drink at the office tomorrow.
It was nearly five when Dominica and I got to bed.
Wednesday. I managed to sleep in this morning, thanks to the magic of Liesl snuggles. I really needed some sleep. This week has been incredibly stressful and it just keeps weighing on me. Even the good stuff that has been happening is keeping me overly busy and unable to get a chance to relax.
So this morning started with me needing to do lots of work here and there. I had been hoping that today was going to be time for me to chill and play some games and hang out with the kids while I did. But, in reality, I turned on the Steam laptop mid-morning and never once got a chance to go out and sit down at it to do anything. But the kids used it on their own, later in the day.
Our “exciting” news today is that our water heater in Peekskill has died. It leaked and got the walls, floor, and the furnace room all wet in the basement in Peekskill. So now, on top of everything else, we have to deal with that disaster and have to deal with it quickly. Two major plumbing disasters in just twenty four hours. This is ridiculous. I really feel like we never get a break. It’s not just the money, but it eats up loads and loads of what little free time we have, too.
Dominica spent another day hard at work on her web design stuff. She is making real progress now, though, after a frustrating night last night.
This evening Dominica made a run to Aldi for groceries. Then, after she got back, we went out for frozen yogurt because the girls have been asking for a few days.
Luciana at YogurtlandLiesl at Yogurtland
And then, since we were already there and since we had not eaten anything since breakfast, we went to Denny’s. The girls were very excited. They have been wanting Denny’s for months but we have been avoiding the expense. They love eating there. So this was a family treat night. We needed it after this week.
Luciana Drawing Pancake Man at Denny’sLiesl Drawing at Denny’s
It was eleven when we got home. I sat down with the girls and we watched our Berty Bott’s Every Flavour Bean challenge video from yesterday together. They had not had a chance to see it yet. It was pretty funny for us to watch ourselves.
The girls took a little time to watch videos and relax while I spent some time trying to catch up on journaling and Dominica watched whatever television show she is binge watching now. Something political that I am not familiar with.
Tonight is more of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. We made it to the halfway point in the book, I think, last night and now we have to read like crazy to make it through in the next two nights before I leave on Friday for Phoenix.
Tomorrow evening I am back up to Plano to work on a VoIP project. It has been one busy week. All kinds of phone consulting, remote support, on site support, prep for moving out to Phoenix, dealing with flights, finding new laptops (we placed loose orders for two this evening), and more. I am so worn out.
Tuesday. Today ended up being quite the disaster of a day. We started the day with me getting up at four thirty in the morning to work with Jeremy on sorting out our flight schedules for next week. I was up for about an hour before getting back to bed and sleeping a bit more. I had a snuggly Liesl which made it easy to fall back to sleep.
When I finally got up, I worked for a bit in the office. Loads and loads of coordination between people today. I was hoping to get to video game today so had turned on the Steam laptop, but it took all morning before I was actually able to get to it.
Dominica discovered the sink was totally backed up this morning. I was in my office and could hear her fighting with the sink. She kept running the garbage disposal trying to get it to go down, but it never did. She eventually brought me in, found some Draino, and had me Draino the sink. That did not work so after a few hours I Draino’d it again. Still nothing. The water did not budge.
So both sides of the sink are full of dirty, rotting food water and Draino that is going absolutely nowhere. Just great. This is how we wanted to start our day.
We spent loads of the day working on travel arrangements and plans. What a long day. We had to change days, flight routes, and all kinds of plans to get everything to work. It took all day before we had things worked out and submitted. Now the final plan is that I am heading out to Phoenix on Friday and back to Dallas on Monday morning, super early. This will give me just a few hours to see the girls at home before I have to drive down to Austin for SpiceWorld 2017, which starts on Monday night. Thank goodness a good friend of mine was able to get his hotel changed from a single to a double and I am able to stay with him. I would not have been able to have gone, otherwise. Jeremy is flying early on Saturday morning directly to Phoenix (instead of coming to Dallas first as we had originally planned) and leaving Phoenix to fly back to Rochester just twenty five minutes after I fly out on Monday the ninth. That makes it really simple for the two of us to get to the airport when it is time for us to leave Phoenix.
It was, overall, a really rough day even by mid-afternoon. Once Liesl was awake, she and I played XCOM for a while. That went okay. At least I got a little bit of a break. It was not all that much of one, though. But it was something.
This afternoon when the Draino had sat for hours and the water had not budged, I went out and tried running the garbage disposal. This, to my great surprise and chagrin, caused the two sinks full of nasty, dirty, acid water to come pouring out from under the cabinets onto the floor where I was standing! Dominica had been talking about getting in a plumber as it was, but I had been hoping that we could avoid spending money on that today, for obvious reasons.
What a mess. I ran to tell Dominica to call a plumber, then ran back to see what I could do to fix things. I found that the pipes had come apart under the sink and I was able to hold them together. I sent Liesl to get Dominica to come help me. We managed to stop the water from continuing to flow out, cleaned out under the sink, mopped up the floor, and called Mr. Rooter to come out and take a look at our disaster. They said that they could be there in under and hour.
We cleaned a little and I played just a little more XCOM before the plumber arrived. He was there for a while. He fixed the sink, fixed sealed, rooted it out, drained it, ran a camera, and discovered that our pipes are broken somewhere around eighteen feet from the drain valve in the atrium and that tree roots are growing into them. So we have pipes that are not continuous, not level, and the ground is slowly washing away. The estimates are about eight thousand dollars if things go really well and we only have to fix ten to fifteen feet of plumbing and seventeen thousand dollars if we need to have things fixed all of the way to the public drain point. This is a disaster. At least, for the moment, we have some drainage.
Early this evening both Jeremy and I got our tickets for Phoenix. Things feel “real” now. There has been a lot of stress waiting for things to fall apart or not to go as planned and now with tickets in hand, a condo ready for us, and everything in motion it feels a lot more solid that we are really getting on planes in a few days and meeting up down in Phoenix to really get this new adventure underway. I am sure that this is way bigger for him than for me. I’ve been in Phoenix for more than a week already and have been involved in the project for more than a month at this point. But for him, getting the tickets in hand is the first real sense of things actually moving forward that he has had in all of this time, other than two one hour phone calls that he has had. Jeremy also put in his notice at work today, so his first really concrete step has been taken, as well. A major day.
I had promised the girls that I would play Bean Boozled with them tonight. This is the Berty Bott’s Every Flavour Beans game taken from the Harry Potter books, so we are doing this as part of their school and bedtime reading activities to help get them excited about reading. We set up the Lumix on the school room table and the girls and I went through all of the bean flavour sets on Liesl’s first self hosted video. We all had a lot of fun and the video is really cute.
Doing the game together on video was a really good idea. It was more fun to do and now we have a great memory of it that we can share.
Dominica and I were both feeling like we wanted Domino’s pizza tonight. We have not done that in a really long time. More than a year, I would expect. So we decided that between this being a really long, stressful day and having some major reasons to celebrate at the same time, that we would just go ahead and splurge on some pizza. The girls both liked that idea, they ask for Domino’s every so often.
I did just a little bit more work before the pizza arrived. Then, once it was here, Liesl and I set up the fourth Pink Panther movie, Revenge of the Pink Panther from 1975 and watched more than the first half of it while we ate our pizza. Liesl loves, and always asks for, Pink Panther plus Domino’s Pizza Daddy/Daughter movie nights. We’ve done this many times and she always loves it. It is our special treat that we do here in Carrollton.
After the movie, the girls both played some video games for a while and then both settled in for some YouTube videos. Dominica spent the whole evening working on a web design project that she has been stressing over. It is going pretty well, in reality, but she is trying some new stuff and is learning to deal with clients and expectations and timelines and that stuff is a bit much for her so she needs extra time and support. She is working with some new technology, as well, and needed some assistance.
Tonight is another reading of Harry Potter night. This is our third night reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and now that we know that I am leaving for certain on Friday night at eleven twenty we can budget our time to make sure that we are able to cover the chapters that we need to cover by the end of the week so that we can just finish the book before I have to leave to go to Phoenix. This is going to be a long time away and we don’t want to leave something like this unfinished.
Tomorrow, in theory, is going to be a quiet day. Knock on proverbial wood. We have our travel plans sorted out. We have our tickets. I’ve been doing light work for the office, making notes and lists and plans and so forth. Jeremy is busily wrapping up his final days in the office, he will be likely tied up handing over projects that he has been working on. Dominica should have much less stressful design work to tackle. If all goes well I will be able to kick back and spend some time with the kids and mentally prepare myself for a crazy upcoming two weeks of nonstop work, design, business, strategy, planning, and world conquering. So much to do.
Monday. My alarm was set for eight thirty this morning, but I was awake at eight. I got up, did my daily DuoLingo, showered and was out the door. I am working up in Plano, today, around Headquarters Drive. I grabbed Taco Bell breakfast and coffee at the corner of Frankford and the DNT and ate on the drive up.
I put in a more than four hour day doing telephony consulting up in Plano for a very large energy producer. It was a fun and interesting day. We had a chance to talk about SodiumSuite, as well. And MangoLassi, too. It was a fun project and a nice day.
While I was there, we got word that instead of being pushed back for later scheduling for moving out to Phoenix, things are actually being pushed up and Jeremy and I will be starting to move on Friday, rather than on Monday! So things are really in motion now.
I worked until mid-afternoon in Plano, then drove back home. I was only home for a little while before Dominica wanted to go up to Frisco to go to IKEA. IKEA is just one street over from where I was working all day. So just a round trip drive for me.
It was around five thirty when we finally drove to IKEA and did not get there until after six due to all of the terrible traffic that was going on as it was rush hour on a Monday. Probably not the best time to have decided to drive up to Frisco.
We had dinner at IKEA, of course. Dominica had the salmon. Liesl decided that she does not like the al dente pasta there and stole my veggie wrap, but did not like the cheese in it, and so ate mashed potatoes. I had a salar and a veggie wrap. Dominica ended up with a double salmon.
We spent way too much time shopping this evening and before we were to the end Luciana was over exhausted and just whining and crying the whole time. I was tired after a long day and just wanted to get home. Our objective, however, was to find Dominica a little desk for her to put her laptop on while working on the new love seat that we bought from IKEA recently.
Dominica spent the evening working on her website. She has moved from her awful, garbage Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro to my amazing Asus RoG laptop and is able to work a lot better now. It is so much faster and more stable and doesn’t have any of the problems that she constantly encounters from that cheap junk. It is amazing how problematic having to use a bad laptop can be.
We had some last minute changes to our travel plans for Jeremy and me over the next two weeks and Dominica and I were up for a few hours attempting to deal with that. That made for a stressful evening and I knew that I was going to have to get up in the middle of the night to deal with it further, so we limited our bedtime reading this evening to just one chapter and got to bed a little early so that I would have some rest before needing to get up at four thirty.
That means that tonight was just chapter five of the second book in the Harry Potter series: The Chamber of Secrets. The girls were both sad that we could only read a single chapter, they love these books.
Both girls slept in our room last night. As often happens, Luciana got the couch and Liesl climbed into bed with us. Luciana loves to snuggle and does all day long, but at night she gets too warm and feels trapped so likes to sleep on her own. She migrates all over the bed as it is, which is probably why she feels trapped when she sleeps with people around.
A nice, relaxing Sunday at home with nothing particular needing my attention. More or less. I was up at eight, well before anyone else. So I had a little while to relax in my office and work on some serious catching up on SGL. I got in a few hours to myself before anyone else woke up. I had the Steam laptop all ready, though, so that I would be able to play something once Liesl was awake. I was in the mood to play some XCOM, but I try to not play it until she is free to join me. We like to play it together. She roots for my squad as they face down the alien hordes.
At ten thirty I ended up doing a consulting call that went for two hours. Not what I really wanted to do today, but I need to pay the bills. Really cannot complain about getting to do Sunday phone consulting. I will be working tomorrow, as well. Tomorrow I am on site with a customer in Plano. I have been really busy this month.
While I was on my call, Dominica brought me a cafe latte. And as soon as I was done, she made a late breakfast of egg and cheese on bagels. Liesl set up XCOM on the Steam laptop and as soon as we had eaten we played for several hours. I had a lot of really successful campaigns on XCOM today, too. One of my better days.
At five thirty, Luciana wanted to game so I gave up the Steam laptop and let Luciana play Slime Rancher for a while.
I did some SodiumSuite support work today. We had a new release and finally tracked down a problem that we have been having for over a week that has really been plaguing us.
I had some more time to work on journalling on SGL. And finally I have completed all of the entries from March and have worked my way into April. That still leaves quite a huge gap, but I am working on it. The gap is, at least, getting smaller.
Dominica made tilapia and green beans for dinner, it was quite good. We watched two episodes of the fourth season of Cheers while we had dinner.
Liesl played her Christmas themed hidden object game twice through today, again. That is four complete play throughs this weekend. She is oddly addicted to a very funny little game. She played The Sims 3 for a while, as well.
Luciana and Liesl took a shower tonight. They had a load of fun playing with their science set and My Little Ponies while in the shower.
I had promised to play a little Overcooked tonight, so after their shower we did. Just two rounds, but that is nearly half an hour. We are up to the “Peckening” which is basically the final boss battle, I think. So it takes forever. We are up to sixty six hours of total play time on that game! Like Slime Rancher, this is the other one that Liesl got for her birthday this past year. Both really turned out to be great finds that have endured and gotten an absurd amount of use.
After our video game time was done, it was about one in the morning and it was time for us to start our family bedtime reading. Luciana really wants to start the sixth book in the Magic Tree House series, but that one is currently out from the library, so I have a request in for it. Instead, tonight we started Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The second book in the series.
Tomorrow I am working for a large energy company in the area all day, on site.
