Sheep Guarding Llama

DuoLingo Streak: 11 Days

Wednesday.  I got up and worked this morning.  At noon I had a call scheduled with the team in Arizona to discuss the next steps in that process.  They have been out of touch for a bit as they have been dealing with visas and immigration lawyers and such.

We had our call and decided that it would be far more practical for me to just get out to Phoenix as soon as possible so that we can finalize details while I am out there and so that I can get right to work.  So the plan is for me to go out there next week and be there for the entire week.

It was late in the day when the tickets were finalized for my flights.  Because they took too long booking them, I am going out on Monday night instead of Sunday night.  I would have gone out over the weekend, but the CEO is going to be in California talking to investors over the weekend and won’t be back in Arizona until late Sunday night so I would be in Arizona all weekend with nothing to do if I went early, so not doing that.

So the final plans are that I am flying out of Dallas on Monday night, around eleven in the evening on Spirit and will arrive, only a few minutes later, in Phoenix.  So I will be pretty tired, but fine, and in bed in Phoenix around midnight on Monday night.  So very ready to work on Tuesday morning.

Then I will fly back to Dallas, also on Spirit, on Friday night at midnight and arrive in Dallas at five in the morning, which Dominica is not happy about. But it means that I get home, get a little sleep and still get nearly all of Saturday with the family.  So really minimizing the time away while getting almost a full week in Phoenix.  And Spirit made the whole thing only about $120 round trip.  Not a bad price considering they are the most comfortable airline to fly, as well.  They have the newest and nicest seats.

It was a busy day of calls and building servers, working on SodiumSuite, and doing extensive network testing.  I was working hard, all day.

School was short today and instead the girls did a bunch of reading of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone as part of their school time.  This is day two or three of them doing a little of that book each day.  They are starting to get into it.  I did not like the first few chapters of it, myself, so I totally understand having a hard time getting into the story.  The beginning is so dark and depressing.

The girls were busy playing video games this evening, so Dominica and I watched the Korean blockbuster zombie survival film Train to Busan.  It was quite well done and extremely sad.  Glad that we watched it.

Tonight we continued our bedtime story reading tradition and I finished reading the fifth Magic Treehouse book, Night of the Ninjas.  We are now into Magic Treehouse books that I don’t believe Liesl has ever read.  Luciana has never read any of them, so it is all new for her.  It has been so long for Liesl, though, that she does not really remember them at all, and especially not at this point in the series, so she is really enjoying story time, too.  And now we are into books that I have never read, so it is a little more interesting for me.  But I cannot wait for them to be into more adult stories.  I’m looking forward to getting into A Wrinkle in Time, Little Women, or Johnny Tremain kind of stuff.  They are getting closer and with Dominica reading Harry Potter stuff during the day for part of their school time, they are getting used to longer form stories.

So today was pretty exciting.  Everything seems to be moving forward in Arizona.  We will have a lot more details next week when I am there in person.  But at least there was a conversation and another flight and week on site means that things are going to get done.  We will get a lot worked out while I am there.  Things have been quiet for the last week, so seeing some motion here is very encouraging.  We are pretty excited about the opportunity, though.  It all sounds like something that is a perfect fit for me and the kind of situation that will be perfect for the family.  Just need to get all of our ducks into a row and get the whole deal into motion.

DuoLingo Streak: 10 Days

Tuesday.  My Spanish is noticeably improving.  Between keeping up on DuoLingo again, after having to take several weeks off, and doing Mango Languages, I am starting to get somewhere.

Today was Apple’s big product announcement.  The iPhone 8 and the iPhone X were announced today.  But no iPhone 9, very confusing.  The new iPhone has some neat features and, of course, more power.  I’m not convinced, though, and the higher cost is just all the more reason that I feel that I have to be looking seriously at moving to Android, as much as iOS has been great to us.  The Asus ZenFones just look too good and at half the price of the iOS devices it is hard to resist.  We could get the girls brand new phones for as little as two hundred dollars and high end ones for ourselves at five or six hundred.  That is a significant annual savings over the iPhones and the dual SIM card feature is enormous for us.  iPhone really lags there.  Not to mention the Asus ZenWatch 3 is about half the price of the Apple Watch.  So the savings continue to add up.  And I could use real headphones. The iPhone 7 headphones are a pain and never worked properly for me.

This afternoon I got to deal with an outage on MangoLassi.  Turned out, after a bit of troubleshooting, to actually be an issue with the CloudFlare cache and not with ML at all.  But still very frustrating and ate up a lot of my evening ahead of SpiceCorps DFW.

As soon as the site was fixed I had to jump up, shower and run out the door to drive down to the south side of Dallas to find the SpiceCorps meeting.  Of course traffic was terrible and it took way longer to get down there than it should.  The meeting was at the offices of a large food distributor.  We got to see a presentation by the distributor on their use of G Suite for all of their core operations.  It was pretty good and interesting, they heavily use the suite so had some cool examples of ways that they were utilizing it for a range of communications tasks.

I spoke on a panel talking about MS Office 365 products and how it compares to G Suite.

Overall it was a good evening, nice group that got together.  About a dozen people, maybe even fourteen.

I got home around ten thirty, having stopped off at Taco Bell for dinner on the way home as I had gone all day without eating a meal.

When I put the girls to bed tonight we read the first half of the fifth Magic Treehouse book: Night of the Ninjas.  We get through five chapters on a normal evening.

DuoLingo Streak: 9 Days

Monday.  This morning I managed to get access to my Farmer’s Branch library’s Mango Languages account so that I can use their language training on my compute and iPhone.  I have been trying to get this working since we were in Italy and I am very excited as I have rather exhausted the utility of DuoLingo other than using it as a means of pushing myself to ensure that I practice my foreign languages a little each day.

We are loving our new couch.  It is awesome having a comfortable place to sit, finally, in the house.  It still is not much, but it is already making a big difference.

Today was mostly a pretty slow day.  I am scheduled to talk to the team in Arizona on Wednesday, so until then we really have no additional news on that front.  So a couple days of “just waiting” right now while they deal with personal immigration matters there.

Dominica and I are still on the third season of Cheers.  And tonight I read the final half of the fourth Magic Treehouse book to the girls, Pirates Past Noon.

DuoLingo Streak: 8 Days

Sunday. Finally a day that I am not stuck on the phone all day.  It has been a busy week.  At this point we are in a little bit of a holding pattern with Arizona and we are not sure what the plan is moving forward.  Hoping to hear something soon, but don’t want to push things too much either as we know that some decision makers are out of the country for a few weeks and are difficult to get to coordinate with during that time.

I did a bit of relaxing today.  And Dominica and I hung out a bit, mostly watching Cheers which is our current sitcom watching choice.  I know most of the episodes, but have never watched the show from end to end and it is definitely far better done in this way.  I understand so much more of what is going on now.

This afternoon we finally made the decision that Dominica was using some of her savings to buy herself a couch.  Lacking a place to sit in the house has been just awful and we are so happy with the one chair that we got from IKEA recently and we had told the kids that we would go get a couch as soon as I got a job and I sort of do at this point, so we figured that it was time to do it.  Luciana had even come into my office today and told me that we had agreed to that when we bought the chair.  From our last excusion, there was a low cost yellow love seat that the whole family had really liked that we felt would probably work perfectly for us in the master bedroom to replace the aweful old orange, broken Target futon that is in there now.

So we went to IKEA and I had read that the food there is so cheap that they actually lose money on every order.  So we investigated and decided to eat there before doing our shopping.  We had not done lunch yet, so this worked out perfectly.  Liesl got the kid’s pasta and loved it.  Luciana went for the salmon fillet dinner and really liked it; she got it without the sauce.  I got the salmon too, it was really good.  Dominica got the veggie balls in curry sauce, which she liked but realized too late that the sauce would bother her stomach so she could not eat much of it.  Overall, dinner was cheap and delicious.  A good find, we will do this again.

We did not have a lot of time as IKEA closes early on Sunday.  We found out couch and did a small extra bit of shopping. The girls love running around trying out chairs and couches and beds and exploring the little sample apartments that are set up in the store.

We stayed as long as we could, which was not long, but promised the girls that we would return sometime soon to do more shopping.

We checked out and I brought the minivan up to load in the furniture and we discovered that we could not fit the couch into the minivan with the girls in it!  Oops.  So we had to call an Uber to take Dominica and the girls back to the house and I drove back with just the couch.

So our evening was spent assembling the couch, which was mostly Dominica, while I got some work done.  The girls thought that playing with all of the cardboard that had come with it was lots of fun.  They made themselves coffins and pretended to be vampires, and boats and pretended to explore rivers.  They are so silly.

Once we had the couch assembled, Luciana asked that we watch Pirates of the Caribbean which Liesl sort of remembered having seen and Luciana could not remember (and maybe had never seen at all.)  It was on Netflix and we had mentioned recently that we should watch it, hence why Luciana brought it up.

So we did the first, real, family movie night on the new couch and our first family viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean which both girls really enjoyed.  And I doubt that either Dominica nor I have seen it in a really long time ourselves.  It was a fun evening.

After the movie, I put the girls to bed and read their next book in the Magic Treehouse series.  We started the fourth book tonight and totally by coincidence it was Pirates Past Noon.

Not only was this book about pirates, but right away in the story, the characters find and read a book actually called Pirates of the Caribbean! Both girls were like “WHAT!”  Talk about coincidence.  This was a bit crazy.  So it turned into a very caribbean and pirates themed night for this family.

We read five chapters, getting us halfway through the book, and called it a night.

DuoLingo Streak: 7 Days

Saturday.  Today was super busy.  I started the day consulting by phone for three hours. Which is great as it is a lot of money coming in, especially on a weekend.  And it all went really well.  Very happy about the work.  I had expected the call to only be an hour, not three, so I am very glad that I had gotten up and showered prior to doing the call or I would have been scrambling later.

Then I had just a little bit of time with Dominica to talk and have my coffee, then I had to drive up to McKinney for on site work with the doctor’s office up there that we have been supporting.

I drove up to McKinney, no chance for food all morning.  It was all just too busy.  I put in a few hours at the doctor’s office.  The big items today were getting their new firewall installed, moving all of their equipment over to the new addressing scheme, picking out and ordering new wifi access equipment (Amazon will deliver later today, but I can set it up tomorrow.), setting up printers and scanners, fixing a NAS that they have lost access to, some training and so forth.  A busy, but really successful and productive afternoon.

I grabbed Taco Bell on the way back home.  What a busy day it was.  It was probably five in the evening when I got my first bite of food all day!  I’d had nothing but coffee.  But it was a very full day of work, and on a Saturday, no less.  So I was quite happy.

Home and relaxing, spending the rest of the day with the family.

This evening, when I tucked the girls into bed, we finished reading the third Magic Treehouse book: Mummies in the Morning.  Liesl took a little bit to get back into the Magic Treehouse books as she read them long ago and they are geared for kids more Luciana’s age, but now that we read them before going to bed each night, Liesl is really excited about them, too.

This family reading time is great, it is helping the girls to wind down and get to sleep faster and we are having a wonderful daddy / daughter time just hanging out and doing these stories.