Sheep Guarding Llama

It’s Sunday and the theme of the day is the Greece financial disaster in Europe.  This started before I got up this morning and lasted all day.  So pretty much the entire day was spent closely watching the news to see what the latest status on that situation was.

This morning Sarah made French toast for everyone.  I had very few plans today.  I did a little SGL catchup but very little.  Most of my day was split between watching the situation in Europe and attempting to play Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars which, by the end of the day, I was listed as being 39% of the way through.

I am really fortunate that playing Broken Sword now, after all of these years, and playing the HD remake on the Mac rather than the original on the Nintendo DS (the same version that Dominica played side by side with me), that I really remember almost nothing about the game and am truly playing the entire thing essentially “for the first time.”  It all feels very new.  I don’t believe that there was any voice acting on the Nintendo DS handheld version either and the graphics and controls were decently different, so this really, truly is a new experience.  Once in a while something that I do will feel familiar, but by and large it does not.

We both (Dominica and I) played all of the way through the original Broken Sword but there was a glitch on the DS version that we had so we sadly got to the end and could not finish the game.  That really sucked.   That was a lot of gameplay time to have that happen.  So now I am playing it all again so that I can get the full experience.  And now I own all five titles in the series so I get to really see where the adventure goes once I complete this one.

Jeff and I spent a lot of the day discussing the situation in Europe.  Several hours, in fact.

I ended up staying up until around two in the morning attempting to keep up with the reports coming from the EuroSummit.  It was kind of an exciting evening.  Jeff spent the day playing The Witcher 3 in 3D on the PC, which was pretty cool.  Josh is still playing Fallout: New Vegas on the 360.  Sarah has been playing Dragon Age: Inquisition on the PS4.

Got to sleep in and relax this morning.  Nothing to do and nowhere to go.  Jeff cooked up breakfast which included eggs and vanilla pancakes.  It was really good.  Pretty much all of us in the house decided that today was primarily a relaxing video game day.  Jeff and his brother took the “man cave” room with Jeff playing The Witcher 3 in 3D and Josh playing Fallout: New Vegas. Sarah spent much of the day playing Dragon Age: Inquisition in the living room.  For me it was Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars on the MacBook.

It was a nice day to relax and not have anything to really do.  I enjoyed having some serious downtime.

Jeff’s friend Eric came over this evening and hung out for a while.  The four of us, Jeff, Josh, Eric and I, went to Shari’s for dinner. Sarah had a party to go to so had left us home alone.

It is my one Friday out here in California for this trip.  Jeff and I were up early this morning, Jeff super early as he got called very early.  So we did our start of day from the house and then Sarah drove me down to the BART station while Jeff attempted to rest for a little bit before going to the office.

So I took the BART from San Bruno station to 16th and Mission and walked to the office from there.  It was a nice day, slightly warm as the sun was out by the time that I was walking.

Today started off on the slow side, it was good to be in the office.  Jeff came in a few hours later.  Our whole afternoon and evening was super busy with an orchestrated denial of service attack going on for much of the day.  So we were busy and scrambling to take care of that.  It was a very crazy afternoon going into the evening.

We worked very late and were worried, right up until the last moment, that we were going to miss our big dinner for the team that we were having tonight which has been scheduled for weeks now.  But we pulled it off and were able to head to dinner with barely any time to spare.

Dinner was at One Market near Embarcadero.  There were about ten of us.  It was an amazing dinner.  I started with a smoked salmon and egg appetizer that was quite good.  My main course was bay scallops and dessert was goat and sheep cheese.  We had a really nice evening.

Not much after dinner.  Got back to the house and just had a quiet evening.  It was pretty late by the time that we got there, taking the BART back.  I played a little bit of Broken Sword and went to bed.

I woke up at six this morning on the couch.  I was much better rested and feeling pretty good.  The couch was very comfortable and the cats only slept with me for a little bit when I first went to bed.

I was planning on going into the office this morning but by the time it was time to go to the BART station, there had been a fire on a train and the public transit system was shut down.  So we settled into working from the house instead.  That saves two or more hours of commuting for us, which is good.

It is another cool and drizzly day here in San Bruno, California.  It was pretty laid back today since Jeff and I were working from the house all day.

We managed to get a lot of work done today but did not try to push it too much.  Work has been so crazy as of late that we just can’t keep pushing all of the time or we are all going to burn out.

Today is my big travel day heading out to San Francisco.  I woke up around one this morning but tried going back to sleep and managed to get a few minutes here and there but was awake at one thirty and again at two and got up around then.  Luciana was so snuggly and today is going to be so long that I did not want to get out of bed any earlier than necessary.

I was in the shower by twenty after two.  Dominica was up a little after me and at a quarter after three we were in the Spark driving up to Houston to get me to Bush Intercontinental which is way up north of the city so it is rather a long drive.  At this time in the morning there is absolutely zero traffic so that makes it easier since it is actually less than an hour to make it to the airport, during the day it is a few hours.

Dominica dropped me off just after four.  I got into the airport and found a long line waiting for Frontier Airlines to come to the airport.  There was even a sign up that said that they would staff the check in desk one hundred and twenty minutes before boarding time – but we were well under that and there was no sign of anyone.  The line got much, much longer very quickly too.

The wait was less than twenty minutes before the Frontier staff arrived and did a pretty decent job of getting us checked in pretty quickly.  I had one piece of checked luggage and got that taken care of and headed to go through the TSA checkpoint.

Security went quickly and was easy.  The gate that I was waiting at had only six seats, which was really odd.  So I went to Starbucks and got myself a venti blonde roast and sat in a nearby gate having my coffee while I waited for the flight.

The flight was on time and we boarded just before six.  This is very early!  My seat was in the next to last row which I do not mind at all.  Actually I often prefer the quieter back of the plane.  I had a row where there was one guy by the window and me with no one in the middle seat which was awesome.  I believe that we were on a Boeing 737.

It was insanely humid this morning.  When we had first left the house the luggage that I had got wet with condensation in the time that it took to walk from the house to the car!  Here in the airplane the top thirty percent of the cabin was filled with fog coming in from the vents.  The air conditioning was making the humid Houston air condense.  It was probably the strongest fog reaction that I have ever seen in an airplane.  People were waving it out of their way to see as they walked through the cabin.

The flight was a bit bumpy but overall went well and we arrived ten minutes early.  Pretty happy flying Frontier Airlines on my first try and the price is awesome.  That was about $400 for round trip, direct flights between Houston and San Francisco including taxes and luggage.

It was just after eight, Pacific Time, when I landed in San Francisco.  Plenty of time to get to the office before the early morning stand up meeting.  I got my bags and took the BART to San Bruno station where Sarah picked me up and took me up to the house where I dropped off my suitcase, we picked up Jeff and drove into the office in San Francisco.  We got in at least twenty minutes, maybe more, before morning stand up.  This flight from Houston is perfect.

Today was a long one at the office.  We were pretty busy with me being in the office for the first time in months.  There was a lot to be done and a lot of people to see and a lot of catching up to do.

For lunch, Jeff and I went to Dos Piñas which is right next door to the office. We had tried going up to Live Sushi but even at one thirty the line there was ridiculous.  At Dos Piñas I got a fish and chips burrito which turned out to be absolutely amazing.  I cannot believe how good fried tilapia, French fries and avocado can be in a burrito!

We were at the office until eight this evening, which meant that by the time that Sarah picked us up I had been up, traveling and working for twenty one hours!  I did not feel too badly but I was certainly starting to get tired.

We came back to the house and hung out with Jeff and Sarah’s roommate Suzanne and celebrated Jeff winning a major award at work with some whiskey.  We were up probably till around eleven.

I am sleeping on the couch in the living room tonight.  It is quite firm and I think that I will sleep well on it.  As soon as I laid down two or three of the cats climbed on me.  I am not sure which cats it was as it was dark but there were at least two that decided to sleep on top of me, at least for a while.