Sheep Guarding Llama

DuoLingo Streak: 12 Days

Thursday.  Now that I know that I am going to be out of town next week, there is a lot to do to make sure that everything is ready for the trip and to spend as much time with the girls as possible as I will not see them for the majority of the week.  At least I have the last flight out on Monday and the first flight back on Saturday so I will be home in time to sleep at the house for Friday night, even though it is Saturday morning.  So I will only miss the family for four days.

So today was super busy.  Not a lot of posting, though, for that it was a pretty slow day.  But I had consulting calls nearly all day and so was on the phone for the majority of it.  So very little to tell, nothing of interest.  But it was a solid day of work that kept me hopping from first thing until very late.

School went well for the girls today, at least according to Luciana’s regular after-school check in with me.  She always pops into my office for an after-school hug and she gave me her signature “thumbs up” that school was good today.

I made myself some dinner tonight, just veggie burgers and tried to eat them while watching some YouTube videos but actually fell asleep for a little bit while trying to do so!

Later in the evening Liesl, Dominica and I sat down and watched Lost in Space, from the 1990s.  I have not seen it in a very long time and Liesl has never seen it.  Dominica actually watched it on her own pretty recently, which I had not realized.  It took a little cajoling to get Liesl to watch it, but she was in a “snuggle on the couch with daddy” mood so she stayed and then she ended up liking it.  We tried to talk Luciana into it, but she would have none of it and spent the evening in her own room watching something on her iPad.

After the movie, it was bed time.  We were all tired.  Dominica had missed reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for school today and I was unable to get the next Magic Treehouse book from the library for our bedtime reading as we had finished Night of the Ninjas yesterday and needed the next title in the series.  So that is on hold, for now.  The girls asked for me to read HP&PS tonight, so I did.  They said that they like me reading it a lot more and want me to read the whole thing.

This is the first time that I am reading HP&PS in print (well, on the Kindle) since Dominica first had me read it, while we lived in Ithaca, when we were first dating.  I have since listened to it as we have the book on CD (literally, on CD) somewhere in our storage, but I have not read it directly.  And I prefer reading it myself as I was unhappy with the semi-dramatization of the book on CD available in the US.

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.