Sheep Guarding Llama

Sunday. We were all pretty knackered this morning after a late night of everyone hanging out last night. So a very slow start to the day.

This morning I got to see how my watch measured my sleep last night. Very interesting stuff. Supposedly I sleep for just over two hours of deep sleep, and more like four hours of light sleep. That will be very interesting to track over time.

I’m also enjoying seeing how much more I walk each day than I had assumed previously. I keep moving a lot. And it measures my heart rate and I have feared that my resting heart rate was not good, but it turns out to be between sixty and seventy two which is great. I have also learned that I was correct that when I eat my heart rate skyrockets, which is what makes me feel so awful after eating a meal of any size.

Liesl and I played some Spirits of the Wild together today. She has gotten pretty good at this game and beats me most of the time now. But I hold my own.

This afternoon, we got out Oregon Trail and Dominica, Kat, Liesl, and I played a long game of that for the first time ever. Liesl has been so excited about this, she bought it with her money from my dad that she got for Luciana’s birthday. Liesl has become our board game addict. Luciana spent most of the day playing video games with her cousins.

Liesl won the first game that we ever played of Oregon Trail. Dominica and Kat tied. I came in last.

Saturday. Kat is here all day today. I did some light work this morning. The thing that I have been waiting for today is my new travel watch (and Dominica’s) to arrive. We had pondered what to get because my plan had been to get a Huawei, I have been wanting one for a month, and at the last second Huawei and the US government have had this huge run in and getting one right this morning seems like a really bad idea. So I decided to carefully look for something else.

Kat had forgotten that she was supposed to teach today. So she had planned on hanging out all day, but got a call and had to run to the school to teach all afternoon. So we did not see her again until evening.

What we decided to order is the Huami AmazFit Stratos for me and the AmazFit Bip for Dominica. They came this morning and we spent a few hours watching travel vlogs and getting the watches set up. So far we are pretty happy. Mine is big and works well with my wrist, which is what I wanted. I need a large watch for my arm or it looks weird. Dominica’s Bip is cute and works well for her. Mine is all black, her’s is cinnabar red-orange.

We decided to get the watches as part of our general travel safety equipment. By having a smart watch is means that most of the time that you are able to keep your phone either in a pocket or better, in your back pack. That means free hands for safety, better alertness for safety, far less likely to leave your phone behind somewhere by accident, and the weight can be put on my shoulders rather than pulling my pants down which is always the biggest challenge that I have to long walks. We also get improved pedometer, heart rate monitor, GPS, and so forth. And they look cool.

This afternoon we did a bit of cleaning around the house. Then this evening Kat returned, and Nick, Corey, Rachel, and Tim all came over to hang out for the evening. Like we had for much of the day, we spent the evening hanging outside in the atrium. The weather was great. Nick brought over Miller Lite and we had some beers.

For dinner, we were split on what people wanted. So Tim, Nick, Corey, Rachel, and I ran out first to Quinlan’s and picked up shrimp baskets and hot sandwiches for one group, then went to Taco Bueno and got burritos for the other group. We ended up split half and half, basically. All great food.

Friday. Officially a work day, but things were crazy slow today. It might as well have been a vacation day for me. We were able to relax for much of the day. It was nice. This should be a really nice weekend.

Nick texted from Mexico and said that they were flying back today and wanted to have a party at the house tomorrow. So we are planning on a group coming over tomorrow night. Last chance to really see everyone before a couple of months away with travels. Only about a week until we are “in motion” until essentially August. For all we know, we won’t even make it back until August. It is going to be a long time in Houston, New York, on the road, and Europe.

This evening Kat came over. She is going to stay for the weekend since it is a long, holiday weekend. So mostly just a chill evening hanging out with her. Kat, Liesl, Luciana, and I played some Suspicion tonight as well. The girls have really gotten into board games, and gotten really good at them.

Tuesday. I finally got some sleep last night. Went to bed early and slept in a bit. Feeling pretty good.

It is mostly a quiet day around the house. No family here. I will be heading down to Houston tomorrow evening to join them. It was pretty much a busy work day for me.

We got a bug zapper for the atrium today. The flies, of all things, have gotten just so bad out there the past few weeks.

The exciting thing is that my SAMIT video on the Huawei vs Google situation hit over a thousand views in a single day, and I got several new subscribers. A very good day for my channel. Apparently doing news commentary is a popular thing for me to do. I guess that I will have to be doing more of that in the future.

Paul had pool league this evening so it was a quiet evening at the house for me. I had a lot of work to do, though, so I really never left my desk and just worked essentially all night until about three in the morning. I just cooked myself some vegetarian chicken patties and ate them while attempting to watch some Karl Watson videos on YouTube, but only got maybe ten minutes of relaxing time.

I did some recording for my SAMIT channel, but the camera managed to lose it, so I spent a good hour trying to recover what I had made and then gave up, made a new video, and uploaded that before getting off to bed.

I worked late last night, so slept in a bit this morning. This morning was just a little time to hang out outside with coffee. I was up late enough that coffee was ready for me when I got up. We had some sun this morning before the rain returned tonight.

I actually started the day talking to Mary. She had a rough morning because she discovered this morning that has job has been exposing her to cadmium and had not just ignored the health risks, but she had directly asked about it and they had told her to not use any personal protective equipment as cadmium was “completely safe” which, of course, it is not at all safe. So we talked for a long time all morning.

Kat needed Paul to help her at school today. So Paul taught a business class today.

I was supposed to run some more interviews today, but like yesterday, the candidates were not up to scratch so they didn’t need to talk to me.

Late this morning, Liesl asked me if we could have pancakes today. Right as she did I noticed the IHOP gift certificate from my dad. So I said “yes”, and that’s what we did for lunch. It took me hours to be able to go to lunch today, though. We wanted to go around one, and I couldn’t get off of the phone until after three!

I worked until around ten in the evening. Way too late. Mary was online with me for much of the evening, probably four hours. She’s learning all kinds of IT stuff.

The girls and I played some of the cooperative Zelda fighting game that they are really into on the Wii U. We’ve been doing a little every night and getting better and better at it. It takes a lot of concentration to get through it.