Sheep Guarding Llama

Another tough day of mostly waiting to see how things will fall.  By today we are pretty confident that we are going to be turning down the option to move to California and are going to look into doing something else but we are not completely sure yet.

This afternoon I had a brief meeting with the office to talk about the situation and to set a schedule for deciding on what is going to be done.  So the current schedule is for a decision to be reached by Friday afternoon.  So, one way or another, we should know what is going on by Friday.

We are feeling generally good about the option to not move to California but do not have all of the pieces in place yet and are not one hundred percent sure that it will all work so we are still waiting to figure it all out.

So still under a bit of stress as we try to make decisions.  Can’t wait for this to be all over.

I was up early this morning.  Had a lot of phone calls today.  Kept myself very busy.     So I was up at seven this morning.

We spent a lot of time today trying to figure out what it would look like for us to move out to California.  Dominica did a bit of research on the home school laws to see what that would look like and actually found that California is pretty good for that and that it would not be all that big of a deal for us to switch the home school stuff from Texas to California.  We are pretty happy about that.  It was a major concern that that would be a disaster.

The downsides to California are pretty big.  Really high taxes, long commutes, incredibly high costs of living and long hours in the office away from the family.  It all adds up and very quickly.  And then there is the cost of getting out there, too.  That’s not trivial.  And then, on top of all of that, there is the fact that they waited to tell us about the move until after we were out of Panamá, after the retreat and when we had just, the night before, paid for and committed to the flights and apartment in Nicaragua.  The timing for making the decision to go to California could not have been “worse.”

So most of our day was spent trying to look into options and get a really good idea of what it would mean to go and what it would mean to not go.

We are a bit stressed but hopeful.  We really hope that this bit of stress turns out to be just what we need to be a catalyst into something bigger and better.  Time will tell.

It’s Sunday and we are taking it easy today.  It is going to be a long and stressful week as we try to figure out our plans and make decisions and there is pretty much no way for us to get additional information over the weekend so we are stuck trying not to stress too much and just being as ready as possible for the coming week.

I played Blackguards a bit today.  The girls discovered that they like the game a lot and spent a huge amount of the day hanging out in our room watching me play.  It is so funny how much they get into watching me play video games.  I put in many hours at the game and completed a chapter or two.  The story is good and I am enjoying it.  The strategy portion is fun but I dislike the lack of decision making, it is really just a story that tells itself, more or less, with break points for me to do some gameplay before the story moves along again.  The story telling is good, but the style is not one that I normally gravitate too very much.

This evening we watched more of Modern Family together before going to bed.

This is a slow weekend for us, we are more or less taking time this weekend to relax and try to think about what it is that we want to do in regards to the job situation.

I took some time to relax and play some video games this weekend.  I have a bunch of stuff from Steam that I have not gotten a chance to check out yet so I played a little bit of several different games just to check them out.

I tried playing Home is Where One Starts but found that the Mac was just not fast enough to play it smoothly.  Then I tried Shoppe Keep and, likely so many things, it completely crashed the Mac.  So I moved on to playing Blackguards and actually found something new, fun and that worked reliably on the Mac.  Sadly, like so many other things on the Mac, this breaks the windowing features that seem so nice on the Mac when they work so that there is no way to go in and out of the game to use the computer for anything else.  So when playing this game the Mac is completely dedicated to it which is really annoying when you are not surrounded by lots of computers.

Dominica and the girls were out most of the day so I had the house more or less to myself.  I took the chance to have some downtime and played Blackguards for a lot of the day.

This evening we had take out from The Cheesecake Factory for dinner which was excellent.  I got the Thai glazed salmon and it is one of the best salmon dishes that I have had in a very long time.

It is another really rainy day here in Houston.  Pouring rain.

It is Friday and today we got the news that my job wants me to switch to living in San Francisco and working from the office.  This would mean a major change for us and a huge expense.  Moving to California isn’t cheap and working from the office means big commute times and fifty to sixty hours a week, again, in an office away from the family.

We love the job where I am now, but with this change we don’t know if it will continue to make sense.  We have a lot of thinking to do over the weekend to decide by next week if we are going to pursue the move out to the coast and a complete change of our lifestyle that we have come to love or if we are going to decide to give up the job and look for another option.

So tonight was a bit stressful and a lot of talking about options and trying to figure out what a move to California would mean or what another option would even look like.