Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Quote: “NASA’s continuing investment in rocket fuel-based space travel is much like would be explorers of the 1300s spending all of their resources not on advancing sailing technology, but on the catapult industry.”

Thursday. Today is the atrium painting day. Paul and Dominica were painting by eight in the morning. It went all day, but was done by this evening. The atrium is now a light, sky blue colour, and the trim is bright white. Dominica said that it reminded her of something in Central America. I thought that it was more like a sea side cottage in New England. It gives the impression of spring. Tomorrow the new lights will be going up.

Our plan at this point is to take out the rubber tiles that are in the atrium, bring in a load of pea gravel and sand, do a little leveling out of the clay that is in there, put down some drainage, then put in AstroTurf. That will really make it look super nice, year round. And make it was better for just going outside and using it. And it would manage the heat in the house better. Just the new paint is going to do wonders for that. But AstroTurf instead of the nearly black rubber mats would go a really long way, too. Same for drainage, the current solution drains horribly. But getting in a layer of drainage, then going to a porous top would totally change the drainage situation. And that’s after the new gutters have already totally changed how much water goes in the atrium. We must only get about one third of the water that we did before!

Work was good today. Kept me busy. Had a very good meeting late this afternoon.

We were able to go back to fresh air today, it cooled down and we don’t need the air conditioning. We might make it through the weekend without it. Storms due to return on Saturday.

The girls are heading to their friends’ house tomorrow afternoon, so we will have some quiet time in the afternoon to really work on cleaning up the house before the weekend guests arrive.

Paul had league pool tonight. The girls and I played video games for a while. Mostly Sonic Racing Transformed online, Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing, and Screen Cheats. We have gotten really good at SSASR and the girls are starting to be able to beat me from time to time. And I was amazed to find that on Screen Cheats they were both able to beat me consistently. Luciana especially is really brutal at that game.

Nick stopped by for maybe an hour this evening and got to see the work on the atrium.

Wednesday. We went to air conditioning last night to be able to sleep and had to keep it on all day today. We have a hot week coming until it breaks with expected rain on Saturday. Today we hit eighty nine degrees!

First thing this morning Paul and Dominica started with painting of the outdoor furniture and painting in the atrium. That’s going to take a couple of days, there is a lot to do. But it was nearly all primed by the end of the day. They also got the old outdoor furniture prepped to be ready to spray paint once the wind dies down. This is the old furniture that used to be on our back patio and that we always used to sit on before we moved away. It was new then and in good shape and quite comfy. It lived under a roof so was well protected. When we moved away, the roof got ruined and so did the cushions. But the metal survived. I will always think of that furniture as the furniture that we sat on in 2011 when Dominica and I plotted our long two month back packing trip around Europe. We used to sit out there every weekend planning our adventures.

Lee and Alex are planning to come down to visit this weekend and will be staying for a few days. So we want to have the atrium all ready for them as we will be using it a lot while they are here. There is a lot to be done before then.

Another big gaming night with my girls. More Chaos on Deponia, Journey Down Chapter Two, & Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing. The last one we have around 125 hours into now! The girls have gotten so good at it. They are experts. We had a nice night together.