January 10, 2020: Tornadoes and Surprise Work Day

Friday. What a busy day.

Great Texas winter weather here overnight. This morning I got called into a pseudo-client where I ended up working for nearly six hours today! Even Paul had to run in and work, too. It was a crazy busy day, but worked out really well for the long run, I think.

Had lunch with Paul at Jason’s Deli in Plano today. Haven’t been there in forever. Had lobster chowder and grilled cheese.

It was pushing six when I finally got home. Big storms coming this evening. Rain during the day, but crazy downpour on the way home. I worked for about an hour before tornadoes hit the area. We were under tornado watch all evening. So the girls mostly hid in the house while I was outside most of the time listening to all of the sirens going off and tracking the tornadoes on Twitter as they went across the DFW. We even ended up in a rotation at one point, but never got hit ourselves.

Dominica and I watched Derry Girls tonight on Netflix. Really cool series about kids our age growing up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. Very cool and interesting series.

January 9, 2020: New Bedroom Furniture for the Girls

Thursday.

Today was a surprisingly warm day in January, over seventy degrees and we had to turn on the air conditioning to keep it cool! Very crazy.

We’ve been taking down the old fence since Mia has been tearing it apart to get to the neighbour’s dog who is trying to get to her so we just needed a new fence between them.

The big thing today is that Dominica went furniture shopping and got all new, very nice furniture for the girls’ room. It’s all fancy adult style furniture. A full suite. New bed, with storage underneath. New end table, dresser, desk, etc. Dominica went to physically do the shopping while Liesl approved things remotely via her phone. All new closet organizers too, which holy cow do we need. Their closet has always been just a crazy mess.

Luciana has continued doing projects with her electronics kit that we got for her. She is enjoying that.

I’ve been playing with the new Raspberry Pi 4 4GB that I got as I learn more about it. It’s pretty nice compared to what RP has made in the past.

January 8, 2020: First Time in Court as Plaintiff

Wednesday. I got up at eight, showered, showed Paul how to put in tickets and handle the phone, and got myself all ready to go to court this morning. It’s just the local justice of the peace, but it is my first time dealing with taking someone to court in any capacity. I have been to traffic court, of course, many times and I once was arrested and had to go to court for owning fireworks, but that felt like traffic court and traffic stuff was going on at the same time. This was a “real” court with a plaintiff, defendants, evidence, etc.

I got to the court a little early, but the lawyer for the defense was already there waiting. I checked in and waiting probably twenty minutes before we got started. It was all very easy. Just three of us, me and two defendants (the towing company owner and the apartment complex’ lawyer.) It all went very smoothly. The defendants had a lot of documentation, but none of it mattered because I had a copy of the instructions given out at the time which I followed exactly. The judge looked at that and pretty much shrugged and ruled in my favour. I didn’t win a ton, but I got back my towing fee and the court costs. The towing company had to waste their owner’s whole morning, paid a lawyer for the session, lost the chance to actually tow someone, and had to probably pay around a hundred dollars to perform the tow since it tied up a tow truck for probably two hours of the truck and driver’s time, plus the fuel. All in all, I bet this was an $800 – $1,000 loss for them, at a minimum.

A good start to the day. I went straight back home and took over in the office. Very busy day as so many people are out sick. We had to put Paul on the phones to help out.

The girls are back to school today. They were going to get to it on Monday, but with it being Epiphany and their cousins being off and then the fence disaster that didn’t work. Yesterday they started school, but it was pretty light. Today was more of a full day of school.

Once in the office I was pretty busy. First supporting the normal ticket work loads, but then on several calls that took four or five hours. Super busy day overall. But our meetings went great today. So a very good day in every regard.

I wrapped up my “normal” work day at six thirty. Paul made his famous grilled salmon tonight. We had that for dinner and I managed to watch most of an episode with Paul and Dominica before I had to run back to the office to work with Jeremy.

Jeremy and I had our evening meeting only until eight tonight, mostly going over a recap of today’s many hours of meetings. Then he had to go to bed early, and Paul and I ran to MicroCenter to pick up some stuff that I needed. They close at nine, so we had to be quick.

Today is Wednesday, so normally would be our second D&D night of the week (I need to get us to reduce this to just once a week, doing it twice is burning me out), but Kat forgot about it until it was a little late and with how busy I’ve been we just decided that we needed to cancel for tonight.

This is my first trip ever (that I remember) to a MicroCenter. It’s really nice and we found the Raspberry Pi 4B kit that I needed. We also found an Electronic Playground educational kit that I’ve wanted to get for the girls for a long time. It is supposed to be for ages ten and up, but I think that Luciana is old enough for it now. It’s a small kit, but enough to get started.

I got home and showed the new electronics learning kit to the girls. Liesl was mostly indifferent, but Luciana was super excited and immediately asked if she could open it up and try it out. So I brought her into my office and set her up at the second desk and she got straight into it.

Luciana totally loves the electronics kit. She started so quickly and did it so fast. She was so excited when the first light lit up. Her first experiment being to make a simple light with a switch. Then she made a dimmable light, and at this she exclaimed “Oh, is this how the dimmer on the wall works?”

She went right from project to project, so excited. This is great, we are having some real fun together. I’m able to sit at my desk and work, while she’s learning like crazy and really enjoying it. And I’m back to answer her questions and explain what is happening really quickly. She said “This is so fun. I wish school was like this.” Well kid, this kind of is school, surprise!

January 7, 2020: Watching the Iran Situation

Tuesday. Not a ton going on today, just a lot of work to do. Loads of people are out sick in the office today, and really all this week, so we are very short on staff and that keeps me extra busy.

The girls didn’t have school again today because their cousins were off still today.

Had a long, few hour meeting this afternoon.

It is Tuesday so Paul and Dominica have pool league tonight. Just me home with the kids. It is extra quiet with Rachel gone, normally I am wondering if she will drop in and surprise me or something, but she is in Mexico (or on her way there) so I won’t see her until Saturday evening.

I worked all evening. The girls were involved in their own things and really didn’t need me for anything. They played games with their cousins much of the evening. And of course there was some VR from Liesl.

I worked until late but not super late tonight. I’ve been a bit tired and wanted to catch up a little.

Most of my evening was spent watching events unfold as Iran fired a volley of ballistic missiles at US bases in Iraq. In the future this will probably not seem like much of anything, but tonight we teeter on the brink of a massive world war and all it comes down to is how the US will react. The US struck first a couple days ago and this was a carefully measured response to try to goad the US into starting a war. So a lot of careful observation tonight. The US has said that it will not respond until the morning, however. But this tied up a lot of my evening.