Sheep Guarding Llama

Saturday. This weekend Dominica and I started the day watching some House Hunters shows, both International and Renovations. I also had some client work to do on an HP C7000 blade cluster that I have been doing for a few days.

While we were watching our shows this morning, Dominica was doing research on VRBO and found an amazing house that we can afford and fits all of us on Crete on the outskirts of Chania. We showed it to Emily and she was like “BOOK IT RIGHT NOW!” So we have our stake in the ground in Greece, a two bedroom house near Chania with a pool and just off of the beach. Now the trip is real. And coming up soon.

We got just a tiny bit of rain today. Mostly it was warm and sunny. We have been on air conditioning for a week or more. But it doesn’t have to run very hard.

This evening I was watching Kara & Nate and Dominica joined me and after watching their episodes on Lebanon and Iraq, she is now addicted to it. She never likes YouTube travel vlogs, so this is a big victory. I have been watching them for a few days and really like their hows. I found them because they had done an episode in Montevideo.

I did some video gaming with the girls tonight. Only about an hour. We played their Zelda multiplayer game where we all wield swords and a bow and arrow together and play cooperatively. We beat levels five and six tonight. Five is the one that we had to give up on yesterday because it was too hard and frustrating. We are improving a lot.

I had to work a bit more tonight, though. So I got interrupted.

Friday. My day started off really busy. I had a lunch time meeting, so of course my early morning ended up just being totally nuts so that I was spending the whole morning rushing really quickly to get enough done so that I could get to the shower and get out the door.

I left with plenty of time to get to my lunch meeting which was supposed to be just eighteen minutes away, I gave myself double that time, just in case. But the moment I turned to get onto I35E southbound, I was in a parking lot and Google Maps was totally useless. It kept telling me that the delay would only be a few minutes, it was, in fact, about fifty minutes. It took nearly an hour for me to get just eighteen minutes away! So frustrating.

I had lunch at a Koren BBQ place that also did sushi. I went for a giant sashimi salad bowl which was amazing and pretty darn healthy. Quite different from what I normally get. I like sashimi but as a salad was quite different.

My meeting went for two and a half hours, so a pretty big chunk of my day. It was after three when I got back to the house. Luckily the drive back wasn’t so bad. Only took twenty two minutes taking the surface roads and avoiding the highway.

I spent the afternoon going back and forth working in the office and hanging out in the atrium. The girls had their friends over today until around six thirty. So they were off doing their own thing all day, I barely saw them. They were pretty quiet today.

Paul and Dominica wanted to play video games tonight. So they went to Free Play to play arcade games. The girls and I hung out this evening. I watched travel vlogs and discovered some new ones. The girls talked me into playing video games with them for much of the evening as well.

Wednesday. I was super tired today. My night was just working all night. I worked most of the night and finally got a chance to lay down for nearly two hours, but basically could not sleep, and then was woken up by Paul that my phone was ringing and it was back to work. So almost no sleep for me. My entire night was one of dealing with spaced out AT&T support calls. They really seemed to have them spaced out as if it was engineered to see if they could make me fall asleep and they managed to push things off to yet another shift. So this morning I started the day working with the same people that I was working with yesterday, except I had been working four shifts straight, and they went home, had dinner, slept, etc.

So my day was basically a blur. I did, after working all morning, finally got the AT&T issue fixed. It’s been hell dealing with that for weeks.

I had a pretty slow day once I was through my morning hassles. But I was just so tired and never got a chance to really not stop working. So I just worked through the day.

I managed to make it to a reasonable, but early, bedtime and get off to sleep.

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.