Sheep Guarding Llama

Monday. I had to get up at six thirty this morning so that I could get ready and get on the road to drive to Plano for my early morning meeting with a customer there. That ended up going really smoothly. I was surprised. I could not have asked for a better start to the morning.

Of course, you get one blessing and something has to happen to even things out. No sooner were things going well at that meeting than I get alerts that our website, and several others, were down. I tried to walk people through what I could remotely, but ultimately had to jump back in the car and drive back quickly. Thankfully everything resolved itself before I had gotten back home.

After I got home Dominica and I decided to go out to breakfast. We went down to Sunny Street Cafe on the Carrollton downtown intersection. It was really good. I got migas tacos and she got the house benedict. It’s a nice place, I am glad that we checked it out.

After breakfast we drove down to Beltline to go to La Meyor, the Guatemalan bakery there that we like to go to. We discovered that it is the Feast of the Epiphany today, the twelfth day of Christmas, or King’s Day (Dia de Reyes). They had the traditional rosca de reyes Spanish bread there, hundreds of them. Everyone that was there was buying some. So we bought one too, along with some pan de elotes and treats for the girls.

When we got home Paul showed us where Mia was slightly injured or scratched up from having a run in with the neighbour’s rottweiler. They didn’t get into a fight, but they did yell at eat other a lot and Mia attempting to go right through our old fence and in doing so hurt herself a little, not that she noticed. But she did a lot of fence damage and showed that she is nearly to the point of just leaving through the holes that are there. So immediately the day’s project turned into getting the fence replaced.

I held down the fort at home while Paul and Dominica went out and got the lumber. Then when they returned I moved all of the lumber while Paul started knocking down the existing fence on that side. Then he and Dominica put up the new fence and trimmed back the tree that we have there. A major project, but one that really needed to be done anyway. So it wasn’t all that big of a deal, it just wasn’t the best of timing to have to do it all of a sudden. As they closed it up Mia was whining, she was so sad that the holes that she was using to get access to the yard next door were being closed up.

I got my letter in the mail today from the local Denton court telling me that my hearing for the towing incident is being held Wednesday at ten in the morning. I’m looking forward to that.

At three thirty I had to run out to go to Rachel’s apartment, pick her up, and take her to DFW airport so that she could catch her six fifteen Spirit flight to Ft. Lauderdale. She is getting there tonight and tomorrow morning she goes to the port so that she can get on her heavy metal cruise to go down to Cozumel, Mexico.

I got back home around five and worked for a bit longer. Kat and Taylor are coming over tonight to do Dungeons & Dragons. They couldn’t make it over early, though, so I had some time to get things caught up.

K&T were on the late side coming over. Before playing D&D Paul, Dominica, & Liesl showed them the VR system and everyone had to have a go. By the time that we were just getting ready to start our D&D game, we had some new things come up and I had to go work with Jeremy for a few hours and that ended up eating up my night. Dominica tried to run the game, but she is not familiar with what to do and was not able to get it started. So our game tonight was canceled. But Jeremy and I got a lot of work done and wrapped up around midnight.

Sunday. Since Romania is eight hours ahead of us, we all talked to Paula last night to which her a happy seventeenth birthday. But today is officially her birthday.

The Oculus Rift was well in use by the time that I got up this morning. That thing is going pretty much consistently from morning until night. Paul starts using it at like four or five in the morning. Liesl is still using it at one or two at night! It only gets a few hours to rest between shifts!

Around noon Luciana got a chance to get on the VR and tried out a new game that she got for it this morning, Coco VR. It was pretty short, but it worked and she enjoyed it. She said that it was a lot better than the version for the Oculus Go that she had played in the past.

I tried Coffin Dodgers on the VR today, but it didn’t work. It’s very frustrating how much time I put into the VR just to find that games don’t work or don’t work well. I get so little time to use it that these frustrations are magnified.

We lost a few hours this afternoon because the VR stopped working. We had to reinstall it and try all kinds of things. It took easily two hours to get it working again. Very frustrating. We were really worried that we were going to have to send it back.

This evening our datacenter is Los Angeles needed to do a physical move. In theory this was supposed to only require half an hour. Haha. Of course it takes more than that. I’m not complaining, the team did a great job with it. But it took much closer to five hours before things were back up. It would have been much shorter but they accidentally cut off our networking before we could power down and that meant that they had to go to the new datacenter, get the networking equipment, and bring it back to the old site, hook everything back up and get us up and running. I was at my desk pretty much that entire time to support the datacenter move. But it went about as well as a data center move could possibly go. Our entire rack had to be put on a truck and moved. So pretty extensive.

Tonight, Rachel came over a little before midnight. She brought over lentil dip, a bit of beer (including Suprema, my current favourite) and Salva Vida from Honduras. We watched the last five episodes of The Mandalorian and finished up the first season. Then she borrowed a suitcase and went home to pack. I have to take her to the airport at four tomorrow afternoon. She is off to Miami to catch her heavy metal rock band cruise to Cozumel.

I have to be up early tomorrow. I have a seven thirty meeting in Plano. I will be getting up at six thirty to get ready for that. Then tomorrow evening is expected to be Dungeons & Dragons night. A long day for me. Tomorrow night should be my first chance to break out my Forged D&D gaming board.

Saturday.

Slept in a little, but at ten the Spectrum sales guys rang the doorbell and no one heard them. Then they knocked. So I jumped from bed, got dressed, and raced to the door to see what was wrong just to find out it was peddlers who had been told not to come here in the past. So not only were they rude, but were in violation of Carrollton’s peddling laws. I was not happy and told them to get lost in no uncertain terms.

I did a little work this morning. Maybe forty five minutes. Then it was time for me to be working in the garage. I did moving of boxes while Dominica took down the Christmas decorations. Once that was done, the real work began.

Before noon Paul and I were out to the garage and starting to bring down boxes and stuff from the attic. So many empty boxes, so much stuff to donate. Before long Dominica came out to go through things, too.

We spent two hours or more bringing down all kinds of stuff from the attic and then moving all kinds of stuff from the garage up to the attic. The CDs, LaserDiscs, old computers are all up there now. So much of what we brought down was Liesl baby and toddler stuff. She was the right age when we first lived here and then moved that loads and loads of her young childhood stuff went up into the attic when we moved back to New York, never to be seen again. Luciana missed out on some of it because it was up there when we weren’t here. Very little of Luciana’s stuff went up there because she was still so little when we moved to New York that she was still using it, or we knew that we would never need it again because she was done with it, or because she had been using stuff that had been Liesl’s.

We took two loads of things to Goodwill! We have a number of things set aside to take down to Houston. And the back driveway is full of boxes and stuff to have hauled away. Plus we took a decent load of stuff over to Rachel’s as we found a bit of her stuff in the attic like her box of china, a Christmas tree, her decorations, etc. Suddenly we have so much free space.

Beat Saber on the Oculus Rift S continued to be super popular all day. Mostly it was Paul and Liesl playing, but Dominica played some as well. I have not even put on the headset in a few days. It is in continuous demand and nothing is really pulling me in too much.

Between all of us working on it, we figured out how to download additional songs into Beat Saber and now suddenly there is so much content for us to play on it. No need to buy add on songs now, the mod community makes hundreds available and they work really well. Paul, Dominica, and Liesl played that a lot this evening.

Paul make pan friend tilapia for dinner tonight, with rice and broccoli. It was quite good. Both girls ate all of their fish. Ciana doesn’t really like fried fish, but she ate it without complaining. Liesl said that it was decent and ate it all. All of the adults really liked it. While we ate dinner we watched a double length Star Trek: Voyager special, the one where Seven of Nine gets retaken by the Borg. We’ve been slowly working our way through this series for well over a year, feels like almost two years. Paul has still not seen the entire series!

After dinner, Luciana played just a little Beat Saber, then she tried playing Along Together which is a cute 3D platformer that we got for the VR. I had tested it a few days ago and thought that it looked like it would be fun, but I am not into platformers and have no time to use the VR so was just making sure that it worked before the girls tried to get into it. It looks like exactly Luciana’s kind of game.

Jeremy and I got on the phone to get to work on Vetastic around nine thirty.

I am taking Rachel to the airport on Monday afternoon. She is flying to Miami where she is catching a cruise. It is one of those band concert cruises like Dominica and Katie did together back around 2014. Wow, can that really have been over half a decade ago? That seems so recent. This one is a heavy metal cruise and Rachel’s favourite band, Haggard, is going to be playing on it. She turns the big Three Oh next month, so this is her last big hurrah to her twenties. She tried to convince both Dominica and I in turn to go on the cruise with her, but these things are not cheap, and we don’t have the time. So she is going alone.

Now that the garage has so much space cleared out, I am able to finally do some cleaning in my office, too. My office has been a huge mess for quite some time now. We really need to do something. In reality what we need to do is to buy a larger house, this one is just not meeting our needs.

Later on Luciana tried playing Rime which is one of our new games that we got in our Christmas shopping bundles.

At one thirty, Rachel stopped by for maybe half an hour to just hang out on her way home from having gone out dancing at S4.

Friday, and boy do I need it. I started the day by over sleeping and missing a seven thirty on site meeting in Plano at which I was supposed to be. Not a great way to start the day. I was not even awake until about ten after eight, about an hour and a half later than I should have been.

Once I was up, it was off to my desk and about half an hour to get some things done before our regular nine in the morning Friday team call that goes for about half of an hour. Then a relatively calm day of work. It was a good day with some really good potential sales that I am excited about, but of course we know full well that you can never count any sales deal until it is being billed and the invoice has been paid. “Sure things” are falling through all of the time.

Tonight was the second (for us) City of Carrollton Harry Potter Yule Ball. We had so much fun attending it last year, there was no way that we were going to miss it this year. The girls all had special shirts for it, even!

I was so busy with work that at after five thirty I had to run to take a shower and run straight out of the door. We had wanted to be there at a quarter after six to make sure that we were near the front of the line. We were still on the early side, but not as early as we had attempted to be, but it was not me that we were waiting for.

This year the Yule Ball was not big and crazy like it was last year. Fewer people and they used less of the city’s municipal complex. I have no idea why attendance was down, but it was still well attended. Hundreds of people showed up.

We started out our activities in the “room of requirement” where the girls did crafts. They made howlers, which turned out really cute. And they made one of those weird paper things that you put on your fingers and ask it questions and have it filled with random jokes. I can’t describe it well, but it was a popular folded paper thing that kids my age did in elementary school. I remember them being very popular on the school bus when I was young.

After crafts it was time for ice cream (actually frozen custard) courtesy of Andy’s. And there were cookies. And butter beer from Blooms in old downtown Carrollton. We ate, and then it was time to shift over to the library side of things.

On the way home I swung into Taco Bell for Liesl and grabbed food for myself as well.

After we were home from the Yule Ball, the girls each went to quiet rooms to do their own thing, Paul went to bed, I got on the phone with Jeremy and worked both with him for several hours as well as getting onto a system backup, audit, and update project for a customer. Dominica started watching The Witcher while she had some quiet time to herself.

Tonight is Olivia’s very first night attempting to sleep without a diaper! Hard to believe that she is four now. She is now the age that Luciana was when Olivia was born! That’s crazy.

Luciana didn’t even ask for me to make her dinner (pasta, of course) until a quarter after eleven! Liesl and I recorded today’s SGL video update while the pasta was cooking.

I got my first SAMIT video “Understanding Bespoke Software” posted for 2020. This is going to be the year of SAMIT, I can feel it. So starting the year off right with a post on the very first week. There were twenty views and five upvotes on it by the end of the day, so not a bad start.

Valentina continues to work on getting older MangoCon videos ready for me to post, as well. Those take a really long time, but at least they are progressing.

I worked until after half past midnght with Jeremy. That’s when he called it a night. Dominica was still watching The Witcher. I got yesterday and today’s SGL videos uploaded to YouTube and was pretty much ready to call it a night myself. I am tired. Very tired.

Thursday. I was really tired this morning and slept in till around ten. That might sound like six hours of sleep, but it really wasn’t. In reality I am lucky if I got three or four hours of sleep.

Dominica got on the road around nine, so the kids were home early in the afternoon and Dominica brought me two Carl’s Jr. Beyond Famous Star with Cheeses. Yum.

The family got home and I got to see them a little. Mia was SO excited that everyone was home. She has been missing having all of her “pack” together at home.

I had to work all afternoon. The girls were ready to have some downtime to themselves. Just quiet time without so many people around. Liesl set up in the living room and Luciana in their bedroom. And that is where they were all evening.

It is Thursday, so billiards league so just me and the girls home tonight. While Paul and Dominica were out I finally got time to hook up the new gaming PC and the Oculus Rift S in the living room and get it all up and running so that we can start using it. That was the first project that everyone had for me.

The girls, of course, got straight into Beat Saber, which they love. They got me to play, too, but only for about two songs. I just don’t have the time for anything more, and someone is always looking to play the system.

The girls played on the Oculus until Paul and Dominica got home. Then Paul and Liesl played the rest of the night. I worked. Dominica hung out with Mia and read on her phone in the living room.

Before going to bed tonight, I played the VR for just a tiny bit. Luciana had been trying out some new games, like The Crow. I tried downloading Rise of the Tomb Raider but that was going to take too long. The girls convinced me to try some zombie rail shooter on a mining cart and that gave me light vertigo and made me feel awful. So none of that for me.

Got to bed before two, I think, tonight. I need it, I am pretty tired from this week. But the family is back home! It has been a long, hard haul of being way too busy and very lonely while they are gone.

Tomorrow is the City of Carrollton’s Harry Potter Yule Ball like we had so much fun attending last year. It is our favourite event put on by our city. We will be attending that along with Juancho and Isabella tomorrow evening after work.