Sheep Guarding Llama

Sunday. Since today was my free day at home I ended up spending absolutely the entire day working. The whole day, all of it. I had just loads of projects that were all needing attention today with the big one being a full corporate Active Directory migration with us putting in new servers, moving to the new servers, moving from an old domain to a new one, etc. Quite a lot of changes for a Sunday afternoon migration.

I took only a few minutes to myself all day while I ate my meals to watch some YouTube. Enjoying episodes of Drew Binskey as he explores the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Got a little Karl Watson shows in, too. Maybe thirty or forty minutes total, all day. I never even got in the car once today.

For dinner tonight I was really wanting Torchey’s Tacos and I have wanted to try out a food delivery service so I attempted using Door Dash to get Torchey’s Tacos delivered. It worked out great. It only cost me four dollars to get the food delivered, and it saved me tons of time plus the cost of taking the F150 over there to get dinner. So I’m guessing that it only ended up costing me about two dollars, and saving me a lot of time. So nearly free with all things considered.

The food was great, too. Three Torchey’s Tacos. I figured out the right order this time. Their salmon and tuna always sound so good, and they aren’t bad, but those aren’t the big hits for me. It is their avocado and mushroom tacos that I really love. And I tried their limited time fried catfish taco and that was amazing. So I have figured out the right order for me finally. So good. And Door Dash was just so simple and convenient and really, so cheap, I think that I will use this more in the future.

I worked till something like two in the morning. A very long day. One of my busiest days of the week.

Tomorrow I have errands to run, a lot more work to do, I need to pack up the truck, and then tomorrow night I am driving down to Houston to spend Christmas with the family.

Wednesday.

Another very, very busy day. Got up and spent the entire day working. Lots of time on the phone, lots of time at my desk.

This evening I got more time with Liesl and Luciana to work on Nancy Drew and the Silent Spy. We put in several hours on it, but did not make it all of the way to the end. But we are getting pretty close. I am pretty sure that we will complete it the next time that we get a chance to play.

Tuesday. Only ten days till we go to Nicaragua. That is coming up so quickly.

Today was another very busy day. I was on the phone pretty much all day, again. That is really exhausting. It is so hard for me to get anything done because people need me just all of the time.

I had some Big Fish Games credits to use and used them to get the girls some new video games today. Mostly hidden object games.

I was busily working, on the phone of course, well into the evening and Paul and Dominica ended up going to league night before I was even done!

I made pizza at home for Luciana tonight. Liesl and I wanted Chinese and so we ordered in from One China. That’s enough food to last us a few days, for sure. Liesl was very excited to get to order Chinese tonight. She wanted General Tso’s shrimp. I got the house tofu and some crab rangoons. As always, I stock her up on lo mein because she will happily eat that for days.

We ate dinner and played some Nancy Drew and the Silent Spy in the living room. We set up there so that Dominica and Kat could participate, too. Paul went to bed early as he is leaving to go to Wisconsin in the morning.

We got an hour or two in on the game but it was hard to keep people focused so our progress was very much slowed.

Monday. Lots of tree debris outside this morning from the storm. The ground is wet for the first time in a really long time. That was a lot of rain last night. There are still 50,000 without power in the area this morning.

Work was super busy today. I had phone meetings back to back this morning. Then just crazy amounts of normal work to do all day. It was exhausting. But we did get a lot done. The team is getting stronger, for sure.

Very little to report for the day. Just so tiring. I finished up around five, I just needed to be done. I was so tired.

The girls and I immediately set up in their room to relax and played some Nancy Drew. We tried an older title but Luciana was not happy with the “oldness” of the game. So we decided to start one of the more recent titles: Nancy Drew and the Silent Spy. In The Silent Spy we travel to Scotland where we investigate Nancy’s mother’s murder. This is the most recently released title of the Nancy Drew series that we have played yet. It’s still pre-widescreen and very old school, but not too bad compared to other ND titles.

We played all evening. We all enjoyed this one a bit. Liesl controlled the game most of the time tonight.

It was a very quiet night. I managed to relax with my laptop and do some light work while we played the game together. I’m doing some work with the Sunshine English Project in Esteli.

Sunday. I slept in a lot this morning. Didn’t get up until easily nine thirty! The girls slept in, too. I got up and did a lot of work this morning. Pretty good day.

I managed to get out and go swim around three. Very late for going to swim. I had a lot of work to do and just could not get out until then.

I got in a short one thousand yards. Then showered and went to Burger King for an Impossible Whopper. Then back to the house.

I worked for another couple of hours. Then the girls and I set up to play Nancy Drew: Alibi in Ashes for the evening. We played for a couple of hours and then a huge storm descended on us here in Dallas. First it was just a bunch of rain, then hail. Getting around the size of a dime. We got a tornado watch pretty quickly.

We were playing our game when we heard the “shelter in place” sirens go off meaning that there was visual confirmation of a tornado in Carrollton or Farmer’s Branch. The girls knew what to do and ran into the bathroom for shelter. It was a massive 140MPH EF-3 that started right at I35 in Farmer’s Branch and worked its way into North Dallas, up to Richardson and on to the east, going all of the way to Arkansas! Twenty miles of massive destruction. We heard immediately that lots of buildings in Dallas were gone.

Turns out about 100,000 people went without power tonight! Multiple tornadoes ended up touching down in the area. It was a wild night. The storm was really intense and we got water in the walls again. But overall, we handled the storm pretty well. We did lose power, but only for a moment.

The girls and I played our Nancy Drew game until one in the morning. We beat Alibi in Ashes and hope to start another ND game tomorrow. This one was pretty good. Luciana especially liked it.