Sheep Guarding Llama

Saturday. The sun is shining and it is a very nice day here in Dallas, today. I actually got up quite early, like just after seven, even though I didn’t go to bed until around one thirty last night. I just woke up and it felt like time to get up. Dominica was actually up before me, she said that I had been snoring.

Less than two weeks until we head down to Nicaragua! That’s crazy, I can’t believe that it is coming up so quickly. It is twelve days until Halloween, and thirteen days until we fly down to Managua! It felt like it was a ways away, but it isn’t at all.

I got up, made coffee, and got some work done in the office this morning. And got SGL posted for yesterday. I built some VDI systems. And a new server to deploy some code for testing. Talked to several clients. Closed some tickets. Pushed some other code out to staging and tested. Opened some tickets. It was rather busy. Plus plenty of posting on MangoLassi. I just figured out today that this is the week when my all time post count on MangoLassi is going to surpass the one on Spiceworks! Well over 135,000 posts on both. ML is actually way, way ahead of my SW activity because on SW I only ever had one account, but on ML I have a news posting account (with like eight thousand of its own posts), a admin account (with lots of its own), etc. But as myself, it’s about to surpass it.

Around eleven thirty the girls and I sat down and played Nancy Drew in the Trail of the Twister again. We are making good headway and hope to complete it today. This is title number twenty two in the Nancy Drew video game saga. We have hopped around a bit and this one is the prequel to the first game that the girls played in the series, Shadow at the Water’s Edge, which is number twenty three.

At one thirty I took a break from gaming with the kids and went to the natatorium to swim. I got in 2,000 yards. It was a good swim. I grabbed an Impossible Whopper on the drive back and ate it. Then went to Taco Bueno and got myself dinner to re-heat later so that I wouldn’t have to go out again. And the girls had requested Long John Silver’s, so I stopped there and then it was back to the house. Nearly five by the time that I got back.

I did a lot of work this afternoon. It was quite productive. All kinds of stuff.

This evening the girls and I settled in to playing Nancy Drew and the Trail of the Twister. It took several hours, but we finally completed it! It was a pretty good title in the series, although I think that the “mood” of it wasn’t as good as many others, but doing a weather related one was definitely a good change of pace.

We went back to working on Nancy Drews in an Alibi in Ashes, which is number twenty eight in the series and is the one where Nancy is in jail and you have to play as her friends to try to set her free.

Friday. I got up, showered, and had my usual nine o’clock Friday meeting to start off the day. That went until about a quarter till ten. Then I had a two hour gap to get all of my morning work done before I had a noon meeting scheduled. It was a busy two hours.

At noon, we had a meeting that we thought was going to be ridiculously simple and straightforward. It was anything but that. It was a sales call that we had requested. So there was really nothing to do here. Just tell us about the feature (we are already big customers), give us a price, and tell us when we can try it out. But it didn’t go well, at all. It was a train wreck of terrible pricing, caused by non-obvious design decisions that led us to sticker shock and wondering why it would cost a large vendor ten to twenty times more to implement a feature than it currently takes us to do it ourselves. Trying to sell us on a twenty times increase in cost seemed ridiculous. When we questioned how this made sense, we got some made up, clearly fictionalized story that was really insulting. When we questioned further, it was clear that we hit a panicked fight or flight response from the guy trying to pull one over on us and he totally lost it on the call.

We ended up spending the entire afternoon dealing with the fall out. There were two follow up calls immediately following that one. Then about an hour break where our teams were discussing the calls. Then I spent nearly three hours on the phone with the CEO of the company! We ended up having a great meeting and got a lot of things worked out. It went really well. But what a crazy day.

Then I had about two hours to work and get caught up as much as I could given that I had lost nearly the entire day to meetings that I had not planned and a little to a meeting that was planned.

Around seven I managed to get “done” with work and had some dinner, Dominica’s pasta with veggie “meatballs” and we watched two episodes of Star Trek: Voyages. Then Dominica and I watched some Brooklyn Nine Nine.

Around ten or eleven, the girls and I settled in for an evening of playing Nancy Drew: The Trail of the Twister. We played until after one in the morning! We played through about half of the game. Got through a lot of tough puzzles. We had a good time. Going to try to play more tomorrow.

Thursday. I slept in a little this morning and didn’t get started on work until after eight. It ended up turning into an absolutely crazy and exhausting work day like you would not believe.

I got to my desk and was essentially on the phone for the entire day. Phone calls, emails, training videos, meetings, it just went on and on. I did just about every possible type of work today. I was a tech manager, a people manager, a ticket triage person, a helpdesk tech, a server engineer, a sales person, etc. Every hat you can imagine, all in one day, all day.

So really no news, in any way. Grocery shopping happened today. Cooking for Mia happened today. Tonight was billiards league for Paul. So the house was pretty quiet, although the girls really wanted to spend time with me today and I was just not able to be available all day, which sucked.

Even after the normal work day was over I was on deck to support a new tech on her first day out in Denver doing an on site with a customer there. And supporting an email migration that somehow was much harder than it should have been.

https://i.imgur.com/ZgjYwat.jpg

It was all that I could do to get a small break at ten to grab some food out of the microwave that Dominica had thrown in for me. Then I sat in the living room for two episodes of The Thundermans with Liesl and Luciana. Luciana had been requesting this all day. But I could only hang out for an hour. Then it was back to work.

I worked on an unrelated email project from eleven until one in the morning. I got the day’s SGL video filmed and posted, got the tiny update that we have written up. And that’s it. Off to bed at one thirty. Exhausted, but the day went well.

Wednesday. Today the whole family, including Paul and Kat, are going to the Great Texas State Fair… except for me. I am staying home to work and to watch Mia. So really, I’m the big winner today.

The family was off to the Trinity Mills train station at nine thirty. And I went to work on what was an extremely busy day. I worked like crazy all day. So much of it on the phone. Lots of customer issues (issues induced by the customers, in fact.)

https://i.imgur.com/L84V9IJ.jpg

So my day was very busy and the time just flew by. It was like the day never existed. I didn’t eat anything all day, either. It was just work, work, work. Even Mia left me alone. She was in the living room sleeping on the black couch all day. I almost forgot that she was even here.

The family got back from the fair earlier than I expected. The girls’ legs hurt from having walked so much.

I worked a long time, but we took some time for Dominica and I to hang out and watch some Brooklyn Nine Nine tonight.

Then there was more work to do and I stayed up until after one in the morning doing it. A very long day for sure.

Tuesday. A pretty busy day for me, again. I didn’t get up until well after eight this morning. I just felt like I needed the sleep.

I was at my desk all day. Nothing really special happening, a pretty normal work day. Lots of people management, and lots of code review and deployment stuff.

Today Steam had a big sale on The Escapist 2, which Liesl has really been wanting, she has played the original a lot. So I went ahead and got it for her. She is super excited.

The kids are going to the Texas State Fair tomorrow. That should be fun. There is just no reasonable way for me to go, I have so much to do. Nothing for me to do there, anyway. I don’t ride rides, the exhibits don’t sound interesting, and I can’t eat any of the food and stay healthy. So best just to stay home, work, and save money.

Luciana played some of the first Eventide game today now that we own the entire trilogy. She is excited about those. But after a while she let Liesl have the Steam machine because she was so excited to have The Escapist 2.

A lot of this evening was spent doing code reviews, staging testing, and pushing to production new changes for WasteWatcher.

My evening flew by. I have no idea where it went. I worked until close to seven thirty. Then the girls and I made rice krispy treats together. Then I ordered Domino’s pizza for dinner. While we waited for it, the girls played The Escapist 2 together on the local two player mode. They are super excited about that. Apparently it is a lot of fun.

Once the pizza arrived we watched three episodes of The Thundermans together while we had dinner. It is a “new” Nickelodeon sitcom that they really like. I have never seen it before.

Then I took a shower and the girls played video games again. Luciana had to take one tonight, too. So that they are ready for the fair tomorrow.

It was eleven thirty when Paul, Dominica, and Kat got home from billiards. Kat is staying over to make it easier to go to the fair tomorrow.

Before going to bed, Mia discovered a giant American cockroach running around in my office. She spent a good half of an hour hunting it and actually managed to catch and eat it!

Rachel was supposed to come over to work this afternoon but didn’t make it. Then was supposed to come over tonight, but didn’t make it. But she called around twelve thirty and we talked till one. Boy was I tired after that.