Sheep Guarding Llama

Friday.  Slow day today as we start to head towards the holiday week.  I spent a bit of the day today working on DuoLingo Italian.  We are going to be heading to Italy at the beginning of January and I want to be really ready for it.  I got into my Italian studies yesterday but am trying to really keep it going today.  I’m really enjoying how quickly I am able to pick it up and feel like I am making real progress really quickly.  So I did easily twenty lessons today!

Rachel came home at lunch today.  She is going to the Houston area renaissance festival this weekend and is not going to be home until Sunday afternoon but she had to come up from work and pack before being able to leave today.  So we saw her but just a little bit.

This evening, Dominica was going to go out but everyone ended up canceling on her so in the end she decided to stay home and watch The Gilmore Girls, to get ready for the release of their new mini series next week, and that I could go out.  So I talked to Shawn and he and I went to Quinlan’s for a couple of drinks.

Today is the final day of the “big gap” in SGL updates.  Fingers crossed that we can leap forward and keep things up to date very, very soon.

We had been doing MediaWiki testing the last few days and it was a dud.  So today we are starting some DokuWiki testing instead.  I’ve been keeping myself busy this week with documentation stuff.

Had a busy day of work between writing, building servers, posting and what not.  Was actually heavily engaged all day and really did not spend much time during the day out of the office.

Hung out with Rachel a bit this evening.  Then later on I took the girls out to go on a Pokewalk around the area to see if they could find anything.

I had to be up a little early this morning so that I could sit in on an SAP training class on the web.  That lasted maybe an hour.  Then most of the day was just writing and posting online.

Tonight was a SpiceCorps DFW event (that I have no involvement in organizing) that Watson and I carpooled to.  We started by going to Twin Peaks near where I used to work at CitiGroup a number of years ago and got beers to pregame before heading to the event and we got a snack as we did not know what the food situation is going to be like at the event.

From Twin Peaks we went to the SC DFW event which turned out to be a complete disaster.  They had food catered in from On the Border which was really cool and quite good, that part was great.  But the event itself was way too long and a total sales pitch and complete garbage.  It was condescending and pointless.  We were offended and when we asked technical questions they just blew us off.  It was really bad.  It was so bad that nearly everyone spent the entire time texting each other to talk about how bad it was and how little the presenters knew about technology or the market.  It was a train wreck.  It was so bad that a lot of us plan to not attend any of these meetings any more, what a waste of time.

I talked to a friend today who is a dual US and Venezuelan citizen and who has worked in IT in Boston.  He moved to Caracas in Venezuela because even with all of the problems going on there he found that the quality of life was higher and his career opportunities were better there.  What a sad state of things for the US!

Monday.  We got up and did house cleaning today.  We cleaned all morning and the kids did not get up until after noon! It was a busy day for me and I did not even end up eating today until I had some frozen yoghurt tonight when I took the girls out for it around eight at night.

I got the new logo for MangoLassi up on the site tonight, everyone seems to really like it.

SGL updates are pretty sparse these days.  This fall has been really challenging for me to keep up.  I’m doing half of these updates in January from Italy.  But I am getting past the biggest gaps and pretty soon will be posting updates that were recorded, in full form, as they happened.

Rachel spent some time this evening with the borrowed telescope that is at the house set up and looking at the moon in the atrium.  The moon is super close and bright right now.  So the girls went out and checked it out for a while.  This is their first time really using a telescope.  Pretty cool for them.  Dominica enjoyed it, too.

Dominica built a cubby hole dresser think from Ikea for the kids tonight so that they can organize some of the stuff in their bedroom.