Sheep Guarding Llama

So instead of getting a reprieve after doing the interview yesterday, now I have another one tomorrow and I need to continue preparing for that.  I helped Dominica with the packing for a bit today but she worked on it quite a bit.

I was online for much of the day working on MangoLassi and SpiceWorks and getting ready for tomorrow.  Tomorrow will be the final phone  and online interview with Facebook.

We will know more in a few days about what all is going on.

Our house is filling up with boxes.  I cannot wait to get these out of here.

After the exhaustion of yesterday and the opportunity to take today off because of the weather postponing my drive to dad’s house with the moving fan today became a day off from packing duties.  Probably a bad idea as there is so much to do but I was extremely busy all day with studying my Python.

My coding interview with Facebook was this afternoon at four.  So I was attempting to prep for that all morning.  It has been so long since I was really a coder that while coding, conceptually, comes pretty easy to me the skills are relatively rusty and my technical knowledge of current languages is very sparse.  So I am working hard to overcome that as this is a very coding heavy company and Facebook is a company that I am really interested in.

The interview went well this afternoon, I think.  It was slightly late in the day so there is a good chance that I will not hear back from them until tomorrow or later.

Once the interview was done, we took some time and all relaxed as I wanted to decompress a little after the interview and all of the prep that I did for it over the weekend.  We actually got the call this evening that Facebook liked the interview and wants me to do another round with them on Wednesday.

This really messed up our week’s travel plans.  Originally we had thought that I might take the cargo van up to dad’s this afternoon.  We pushed that off because of the weather.  Now we don’t have a window to do the trip until Thursday to Friday which is the last possible window in which to do it because Art and Danielle are coming to our house on Thursday evening and Friday morning will be the only possible time to install the new oven that I will be bringing back with me.

This is going to be one really busy week.

Today is dedicated to packing up the house as well as me continuing on my work on Python.  I was up on the early side today because Luciana got up early and got me up with her.  So I got to work on my Python work rather early.  Dominica got off to the store around ten thirty to go get the packing tape that we need to put the boxes together to start boxing things up.  There is so much packing to be done!  Even just this first load is going to be huge.  An entire cargo van is a lot of space to fill up.  And we plan to that plus another Acadia and a Spark load to ship up to dad’s in the near future.  That is just a lot of stuff to do in short order.

Any shopping trip of this nature is always a massive affair.  Dominica was gone for several hours.

Dominica packed all day.  She put in something like four hours of solid packing which is enough to completely exhaust anyone.  Her back does not allow her to even do that much let alone do any more.  I spent probably half an hour helping out, but the process did not start until the afternoon after she had done the shopping (because we needed packing tape to get started) and I was pretty swamped trying to study Python with the remaining time.

I slept in again this morning.  Dominica was up before me.  The girls came in and said “oh no, no snuggles” and climbed into bed with their iPads and hung out with me for a while.  They love getting to do that.  We get a lot of hanging out time that way, just the three of us.

I got up and spent the majority of the day working on going through the book on Python programming that I had started yesterday afternoon.  This is a major learning project in a very short time.  Dominica did laundry today and we were going to spend the day packing in between me working on Python but we were out of packing tape and Dominica was not motivated to go to the store to get any more.  So tomorrow is going to be a really intense packing day, I am afraid.

It was dark and rainy all day today.  No sun at all.  This encouraged Dominica to make it a day to stay at home.

I went up to the attic to get boxes and stuff to pack in the cargo van on Monday, but when I was going up the stairs the left hand side metal piece that holds the stairs ripped off.  Three bolts sheared off (we never found the missing parts, no idea where they went or maybe they were missing before) and the main bolt came loose!  Thankfully the stairs did not collapse, it just scared me as everything went flying and now we have to deal with repairing the stairs.  One more thing to deal with in the very limited time that we have between now and when we intend to move out of this house (which is, in theory, as early as late December!)

Since we are almost out of groceries in the house, we ordered in Chinese delivery for dinner.  We really like the Chinese place that we have discovered here.  We use them at least once a week now.  So handy that we can order online – easy, fast and no confusion and we are even able to pay ahead of time.  We love it.  That option alone makes us choose them over the alternatives.  It saves them money too, in addition to winning them customers.

The girls watched Night at the Museum again today.  Well Liesl did.  Luciana made it farther than she did last night but part way through she came upstairs to play Baby Bus games on the iPad in my room with me while Liesl watched it again.  When that movie was over we all watched Night at the Museum 2: Battle at the Smithsonian together.  Liesl liked it just as much as the first one and Luciana, who actually made it through the entire movie, loved it too.  These were great choices.  I am surprised that we went so long without getting these movies for them.  We had sort of forgotten about them.

After that Luciana went to bed.  Liesl stayed up for a little while to work on her storyboard for the book that she wants to make from the book making kit that my dad got her for Christmas.  She has been working on that for days.  So Dominica and I caught up on Brooklyn Nine Nine, New Girl and The Mindy Project while Liesl worked on that.

It’s Friday and I am pretty much taking the day off to just spend time with the family outside of the core job hunting duties that take up my time.  The girls really missed me and want to spend a lot of time together.  They had sneaked into our room last night and slept with us, so we stayed in bed late and snuggled much of the morning.

I was told that I would get feedback on my Wednesday interviews either yesterday or, more likely, today.  But I went all day and did not hear a single thing.  Not a good sign.  I hate that companies do this.  Making decisions on hiring should not take a long time.  If they know that they want me, say so.  If they know that they do not, say so.  If it takes more than a quick discussion to make a decision then you are waiting too long and the memory of the person starts to fade and the hiring process gets very sloppy, very quickly.  Considering the cost, both in raw money and in people time, to bring me out to Seattle for the week, it seems like keeping on top of the process would be a high priority.

I had a call with another company at noon today.  That one scheduled a first round technical interview for Monday morning.  This is a really tough one so I am going to be spending the weekend preparing for that interview.

I talked with several companies today, it was very productive.  Amazing that there is so much happening still in December.

We decided that we are going to have a cargo van run up to dad’s place early next week to drop a load of our stuff that we get packed up over the weekend and then pick up our stove from Dominica’s parents’ house on the way back so that Art can install it when he is here next weekend.  That is going to make for a really busy week especially if the Monday interview goes well because if that one goes well we are anticipating that I will be going to California as early as Friday for more interviews.  We have a lot going on in a very short amount of time.

I was very busy all day working on Python stuff.  I’ve been reading some of my Python books from my extensive library.  I am happy to be doing programming so much again.  I love getting to program but get to do it so seldom.

This evening we tried to get Liesl to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark but had very little luck getting her interested in it.  We finally settled on Night at the Museum which turned out to be a huge hit.  By the end, Liesl declared it to be her favourite movie of all time!  Well that was a good idea.  I can’t believe that we have not watched it before now.  I guess that we just forgot about it.  Dominica and I have always really liked that movie.  Luciana decided not to watch it and went upstairs to have her alone time and just played games on the white iPad (the iPad 2.)  The girls have been getting new Baby Bus games all week and both of them have been addicted to playing them.  So she was content to have time to herself to play her games.