Sheep Guarding Llama

Tuesday. It was bright and sunny this morning. I got to start the day outside with some coffee. The atrium is getting so much use now that we have the new furniture, lights, and astroturf. Being able to go outside in socks makes a huge difference for me. I rarely want to take the time to put on shoes to go a couple of steps to sit out and have my coffee.

Jim was over this morning fixing the siding that I was unable to reach last week. So the house appears to be all buttoned up now. Paul tried hosing down the parts that seemed to leak the most to see if we got any moisture inside of the bar area. So far, nothing. Jim couldn’t stay very long, but thankfully he got the important bits done. He also fixed a few shingles that were problematic up there, but a new roof is in our future one way or another. He’s considering doing the house painting for us, or at least the high portions of it. We have the paint and it is time to repaint the entire house. We want to do it before summer for sure, the paint will help to seal up some of the tiny cracks and we are moving from a very dark colour to a very light one, light cream with white trim. So the house is going to look completely different and be way more economical to cool in the summer months when we are on continuous air conditioning and fighting off the brutal sunlight all day.

Work was work today, busy but normal. Nothing of note there. What was interesting today was the storm that rolled in this evening. Paul had his Tuesday night pool league, so Dominica went with him. The girls were in a mood to do their own thing, mostly. So I spent the evening in the office working on a Windows 2003 R2 to CentOS 7 migration, taking MS SQL Server from 2005 to 2017. Went really well and was a bit fun. The kind of work that I enjoy.

While I was working, an epic thunderstorm rolled in. One of those storms where you get the thunder storm, then the rain storm, then the thunderstorm and back and forth, but not together. Both were crazy. Thunder so loud it was totally shaking the house. And then the rain came.

This might have been the heaviest rain that I have experienced since living in Texas. At least the heaviest in Texas itself. I’ve seen heavier in Panama, for example. The sheer volume of water coming down, nearly eight inches we learned later, was just incredible. This was a great test of the new atrium work. With the new gutters and the atrium all cleaned out, the atrium was able to handle the water as it came down no problem at all, it never even started to back up in any way. Pheww. It used to be so bad. Had this been a year ago, the house would have been totally flooded, like never before.

Thank goodness Jim had worked on the siding today, too. Just a week ago in a fraction of this rain we had leaking in the bar again. But with the new stuff that Jim did today, we were bone dry even with this new level of rain!

There was so much rain that the front yard was effectively a small pound. Our entire sidewalk was underwater with a full inch of standing water right up against the step to the front door, two meters back under the roof line! I’ve never see it come up over the sidewalk like that. I made Liesl and Luciana both come out to look at it. With the front door open, two meters back from the edge of the roof, there was so much rain coming in, with some much force, that rain was hitting the wall behind the front door! And there is no open wind there either, we are under the roof, inside the house, with two meters of roof, plus the pillars to block the wind, plus the house next door not far away at all and there was still that much driving rain!

I tried to go to bed and more or less a good time tonight, but just as I was heading to bed, my phone rang in the office, at like one forty five in the morning, and it turned out that AT&T was trying to get me to work on the issues that they were supposed to have been working on all day but had not. So after waiting from eight in the morning until almost two in the morning with them doing absolutely nothing, suddenly they need me and are going to work?

Looks like no sleep for me tonight. We are pretty sure that they were scheduling the work in the hopes that I would be asleep and that they could report that they could not reach me and pass things off to the next shift like day and evening shift had already done, but I caught them and stayed in my office. So they didn’t get to pull that trick and were stuck working on the problem.

Monday. Nice weather today. Overcast and not too hot. Perfect for sitting outside. I was pretty tired when I got up today. The weekend wore me out. I felt super tired all day, today. We are supposed to get some rain tomorrow, but today is just overcast. Perfect for using the atrium.

This evening, Liesl finally agreed to try watching Who’s the Boss with me. I tried to get Luciana to watch it, too, but she was having none of it. Liesl and I tried watching in my room, but the Nvidia Shield’s Kodi app can no longer show videos from our NAS device. So we moved to Liesl’s room and watched it in there. This is the show that made me fall in love with sitcoms when I was just eight years old in September of 1984. Overall, Liesl said that it was okay, but she was not that into it.

Liesl really wanted to hang out, but did not want to watch a sitcom. She kept asking for an anime, so we looked through the collection and found the first Tenchi Muyo movie, Tenchi Muyo in Love and we watched that. That is the one where he has to go back in time and save his mother in 1970. Liesl enjoyed that much more.

I hung out outside for a while before going to bed on the early side. I was pretty tired tonight.

Easter Sunday. The Grices got up super early this morning and did their Easter eggs here at the house and were on the road before seven. Our girls slept right through it. I got up around seven thirty, but everyone else went back to bed. So I had a few quiet hours of working this morning.

The girls got up around nine or nine thirty and went searching for their ~70 Easter eggs each plus their Easter baskets. Luciana found hers long before Liesl did.

The girls both went for pretty quiet days today. Liesl mostly on her own, Luciana set up at the bar in the living room and worked on Lego sets for the entire day. She built three sets by the end of the day, all by herself! including some pretty big ones. Very impressive. And some really cool new sets that she has.

I spent a lot of the day working on uploading pictures from my phone. It has collected quite a backlog of pictures and videos and I want to make sure to get it cleared off. So I uploaded all that I could today. My Flickr account is over 21,000 images now.

Tuesday. I was up and working for a few hours before anyone else in the house was awake. I got up before eight and didn’t see anyone awake until about ten when Lee got up and came outside to hang out for a while. I managed to work for a while on NTG stuff, and then cleaned in the atrium and did the dishes.

Paul and Dominica had to go down to Las Colinas this morning to scout out hotels and stuff for MangoCon 2019 which is just a month away.

Lee and I got a little while to hang out outside, but once people were up he needed to run to Costco with Paul: time to buy a new Dell Inspiron laptop today. Back into the office for me.

The whole day was super busy. I had a lot of work in the office and was on the phone a lot of the day. And the new laptop arrived and I needed to check it out and get Fedora 30 installed on it. That took several hours.

I also put in a lot of time trying to get some Polycom phones configured so that we could use them. I would never, ever choose a Polycom intentionally, but we had a few that were pulled from a customer environment. It is hard to turn down free. But after a few hours trying to make them work, turning down free got pretty easy. Into the trash they went to make sure that we spent no time storing them and were never gullible enough to attempt to use them in the future. Instead I grabbed a cheap old Cisco SPA that we had had in the girls’ room for a while and had it configured and working in a few minutes. So Lee will be taking that back to Missouri with him.

I had just enough time to get everything done before evening. Fully configuring a laptop with a new OS, all updates, monitoring, and remote access tooling is not actually all that fast.

For dinner we had grilled salmon. Everyone loved it. Paul did the sweet soy salmon. Dominica grilled potatoes and sweet potatoes. And made green beans. And we all ate outside.

Before Lee left I had to spend half an hour with him getting things like his email, instant messaging, and file server set up and showed him around the Fedora desktop. They had to get moving pretty quickly because they want to make at least Oklahoma City or Tulsa tonight so that they can avoid the bad weather than is due to start around tonight.

Paul and Dominica had to get to league as quickly as they could after Lee and Alex left. I had half an hour before scheduled work was due to start tonight. So the girls just did some video games or videos on their own and I was on a support call for several hours, until around nine or nine thirty!

After my support call, I cooked up pizzas for the girls. Then Liesl and I started up Chaos on Deponia and played for quite a while. I set up my old 2012 HP laptop on the bar and worked from that for a while. Did updates, cleaned it up some, installed some of our new monitoring software, etc. I did the dishes, cleaned the kitchen, cleaned the bar, etc.

I set up our wireless DECT company phone in the kitchen so that we can use it when outside in the atrium.

Overall, my evening was super productive between doing support work, cleaning, cooking, office setup, etc.

I made myself a salmon sandwich for my dinner.

Monday. Today is Paul’s 55th birthday. We spent a lot of the day outside. The weather is great. A little warm, the sun is super bright.

I was in and out of the atrium all day. We did what we could to get Lee up to speed on stuff as time allowed. It was a very busy day in the office, of course. But not nearly as bad as it could have been.

My afternoon and into the evening was crazy busy. I ended up covering two customer emergencies, but both appear that they are going to turn into major sales opportunities. So that ended up being great. Lee did a lot of listening in while I worked today.

Dominica did a lot of cooking (lasagna), and baking (a funfetti cake with cherry icing) for Paul’s birthday. We had dinner and celebrated his birthday out in the atrium. Kat came over to spend the evening.

After dinner, I stayed home with Liesl and Luciana. Everyone else went down to Arlington to go to Free Play and play video games all evening. They were out till eleven thirty.

Once back, we all hung out in the atrium with guitar playing and singing until the wee hours of the morning.