Sheep Guarding Llama

Thank goodness the power came back on at some point during the night.  No CPAP and no air conditioning was not a good situation at all.  It was a rough night, but at least I was able to get a few hours and the air conditioning is running now, so the house is working its way down to a reasonable temperature.

Today I was online writing all day.  So much to do to play catch up after spending all day yesterday either working on getting the house and the yard ready for the Mango Meetup event that was at the house, or being offline because our power was out all evening and much of the night.  So just a bit backlog of things today.

It has been such a hot week.  We have a heat advisory for tomorrow.

“Democracy is the political belief that the means justify the ends.” – S.A.M.

This morning we started off the day with Dominica making homemade breakfast tacos.  After breakfast, I went out and mowed the lawn, as best as I could, with the push lawn mower.  It’s a manual one with the whirling blades.  It is so hard to push that after mowing the lawn my hands were rubbed raw and were bleeding!  This is not going to work.  And it really wasn’t able to cut very much, either.

It is a hot one today.  Very warm.  I was mowing the lawn this morning to get ready for our Mango Meetup DFW meeting that is scheduled for this evening.

We spent much of the day cleaning the house and getting things prepared for the meetup.  Just before people started to arrive, however, the neighbourhood transformer blew, probably from the extreme heat and so many people running so much air conditioning, and the power went out for our street.  I did some walking around to figure out what was happening and managed to catch up with some of the neighbours who were doing the same thing, making it easier to track down what had happened.

So this is not good.  One or two dozen people coming over to the house for a meeting that we were planning to record and there isn’t power for the lights, the air conditioning, cooking the food, running the cameras, powering laptops… nothing.  Not good, at all.

So we had a very interesting evening.  The meeting was very difficult and we had to have the windows open, as best as we could, with it being in the high nineties outside and very humid.  Our house does not have good cross breezes at the best of times and with the house full of people, very warm people, it was that much worse.  We were all just sweating and sweating.  It was really rough.

Originally the power was listed as going to be restored in the early evening, but this was pushed further and further back.  Because the meeting was over it was pushed to nearly four in the morning!

No way for me to go to sleep tonight, and no way for me to post about what was happening as our Internet was out.  A long, dark, hot night for the Miller family.

Talked to John Nicklin for a while this morning.  It’s been forever since we’ve had a chance to catch up.  I had a full morning of phone calls.

Other than that, a busy day of work.

Tuesday. I had a busy day of posting and writing.  So busy that I really recorded nothing that I was doing all day.

This evening, I rushed to get up to date on everything so that I could head out with Rachel to quiz night down Malarkey’s on Trinity Mills.  I have been away for so long, it will be nice to get back to this.

Monday.  For a change of pace I am actually at home in Dallas for a little bit.  This is nice.

This morning Dominica discovered some kind of larva that looked like that of flies, swarming into the house through the atrium door and the cracks around it.

We spent nearly the whole morning dealing with this new infestation.  They were everywhere, hundreds of them.  It was so gross.  Something about the weather or something has caused them to attack us in this one spot.  They often came five or six at a time and if you looked away they would sneak past you.

I have no idea what was driving them to enter the house, and all in a single spot, and all to try to cross from the atrium and head for the far side of the kitchen, it was truly bizarre.

It took all morning to get the swarm under control.  I was in pain from bending over to pop one after another.  We had chemicals all over the floor but that did relatively little to slow them down.

Later in the day I worked from my office, the one just off of the kitchen, and had to come out continuously to keep an eye on them to see if any more would come in.  Just disgusting.  I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life.

We eventually managed to get things under control and we think that the assault on the house and ceased.  But why did it start, why did it stop, will it happen again?  We have no idea.

Liesl and I played some Overcooked tonight, just the two of us.  We are going through different levels trying to knock out stars that we have been unable to get previously.

For dinner tonight Dominica made pancakes.