Sheep Guarding Llama

Saturday. I slept in and didn’t get up until around nine thirty. Shortly after waking up, the rain and thunderstorm that we were expecting this weekend arrived. Our new gutters did wonderfully and we didn’t get an atrium filling up with water like we have been getting for forever now. No more worrying about atrium flooding! And one step closer to being able to consider selling the house.

Today is the veterinary office network migration that we’ve been discussing for days. I got started right away in the morning and worked in my office until eleven at night! Yes, it was really that long of a day. Totally exhausting. And there is still a lot to be done tomorrow. Sadly, only one of our staff was able to be around this weekend so we didn’t get to use all of this time as training, really.

After I was finally done with work this evening, the girls and I started playing the Deponia video game series again. Liesl and I played the first two games of this series, and started into the third one, a number of years ago. But back then there were only three titles and we had gotten stuck on the third one and had lost interest. But recently she expressed a desire to play them again. But none of us really remembers the story from the original games any longer, so it just made sense to go back to the beginning and start all over again. The fourth game in the series was finally on a good sale yesterday so I picked it up. Now we are ready to play straight through the entire series for the first time.

We played for a few hours, then off to bed.

Friday. Today was a long day of customer meetings. After some client drama yesterday, I had suggested that we have a management meeting with the owner of a customer company first thing this morning. That meeting went well, but got me started on the early side today.

Work was pretty busy. These days I seem to be on the phone for enormous swaths of the day. It is a good thing that our crew has grown so much, it is very hard for me to get any real work done because I am in continuous meetings.

I had a few more formal meetings today, plus many that just popped up. By later in the afternoon I was in quite a rush. Paul and I had a meeting at four at the Preston country club that we had to make. My three o’clock meeting ran long and it was a mad rush to change and get out there. But the guy that we were meeting ran quite late anyway, so it really didn’t matter.

Our cocktails meeting was really pointless. I had guessed this and did a full explanation as to the expectations of the meeting to the sales crew ahead of the meeting to make sure that people understood that I had already assessed the meeting and thought that it was going to be a total waste of time, and I nailed it. The guy was nice enough, he bought us drinks and even offered to pay for dinner. But the “meeting” was nothing but inane questions asked to us shotgun style that made no sense, and time was never given for us to answer, and way more than was needed to know about us to know that the meeting was pointless was known well ahead of time. So the guy was just an idiot. The whole time that we were there, he struggled to put together a coherent sentence. My guess is that he was high the entire time, he was never sure what was going on and nothing he said made sense (not like scam not making sense, like drugged up lunatic not making sense.)

The meeting, thankfully, did not last long at all. The nut job just up and left without any pretense after about thirty minutes. So it was easy to escape. In the whole time, he was so incoherent, he was never able to explain even where he worked or what they did. If I hadn’t researched him on LinkedIn, we’d have left not even knowing that he was a sales guy, or for whom he was attempting to do sales. As it was, it was clear that he was trying to make a sale, but was just that bad at adulting.

We got back and I worked for a little bit longer, but Dominica and I decided to go out tonight. She wanted to try out Lonestar Taps and Caps in The Colony. It was relatively late by the time that we were able to go out. Maybe around nine.

We had a nice evening and Dominica liked the venue. It’s really handy for us, too. Straight up Josey. Dominica really enjoyed her awesome beer selection.

On the way home we stopped at Taco Bueno and I introduced Dominica to the potato burrito with beans and she is totally in love with it now.

Thursday. Today was pretty busy. This whole week has been pretty crazy and I am scheduled to work all through the weekend. It’s actually been a few weeks of super busy. But everything at work is going well, stress is down. Just busyness is up.

This morning was standard work plus a lot of dealing with AT&T today. This is the second time this week that I had to deal with AT&T outages. The competence level at AT&T is unbelievably bad. In this case, they even had their own phone systems internally fail while we were trying to get transferred. They own accounting department could not reach support, because their phones were down. Pretty much par for the course. At least we know that they aren’t failing to support their customers because their people are taking care of themselves. They can’t even do that. So technically that is three discrete and unrelated AT&T phone outages that I got to deal with just this week.

The last AT&T outage has been going on for four days and they can’t get their fiber working in Connecticut. This one is a DSL and POTS outage and we will see how it goes. Then there was their internal phone outage.

Around lunch I had to coordinate a physical site visit remotely.

This evening we had some customer drama happen, which resulted in hours of telephone discussion time talking about how to best address it. We will see how that goes tomorrow.

AT&T just missed their appointment to look at the downed lines today. They just didn’t bother showing up for their appointment even though three unique call ins were made for it. Total laziness.

We did have a meeting today about doing a project in Mexico City. Hoping to hear about that, soon.

This evening was just hanging out with the girls.

Wednesday.

Dominica and I both felt like falafel gyros tonight. We tried to talk ourselves out of it. But we eventually gave in. As soon as I was done with work for the day I drove down to Beltline and went to Tasty Greek and picked up falafel pitas, hummus, salad, etc. for us. Paul was out this evening so it was just us eating. I brought the food back home and we ate our delicious, and decently healthy Mediterranean dinner while we watched 30 Rock.

This evening, while watching 30 Rock with Dominica, I got a text from Mary asking about why I wasn’t on Facebook any longer. We’ve not really talked too much since I was in Greece. We’ve both had so much going on and there just hasn’t been much opportunity and with my FB being gone, even casual observation isn’t possible.

Mary and I texted for less than an hour then got on the phone and talked for a few hours. There is so much to catch up on after all of this time. Both of us have had some pretty eventful years since we last spoke. So that was most of the evening. A little more television and off to bed after talking.

Monday. A very busy day. We started the day with a long meeting about a potential project in Wisconsin. Getting started on the day was slow going, just so much to do this morning. We are onboarding a new engineer, but I was so busy that I wasn’t able to be involved with that at all. Thank goodness that the team is bigger now and there are other people to handle that stuff. The team is starting to be self training. I’ve been waiting for a day like this!

I did almost zero technical support today. Today was all team and account support. Around lunch time we got a surprise knock on the door and an Edible Arrangement was delivered for me! A thank you from an IT Pro that I helped out last week from MangoLassi. A box of chocolate covered bananas, apples, and strawberries. We all dug in. Edible Arrangements always makes the most delicious stuff.

The chocolate was delicious. Everyone really liked it. I called the girls out to have some as well.

We had the house evaluated for gutters today. We are having them replaced tomorrow at some point. This will be nice. Hopefully this means that the atrium will not continue to flood. And hopefully many fewer mosquitoes this year with their habitat removed. Once the gutters are done, we can do things like paint in the atrium as well. There is a lot of work that needs to be done.

My afternoon continued to be extremely busy. It was so busy, in fact, that I worked until eight this evening without even realizing it.

Dominica made dinner, which I had to eat at my desk tonight. Zoodles with dried tomatoes.

The girls played video games much of the day. Luciana had discovered Cateau last night and asked if we could get it on Steam. It was a free game, so we got it this morning and the girls played it for a while. It is loaded with reading and hard words, so we figured that it was good for them. On the Steam sale today was Queen’s Quest 2 which is the sequel to a game that Luciana has been enjoying, so I got it for her as the discount was very good.

Liesl asked for a BLT again tonight. She loves that I make them for her all of the time now. Having a continuous supply of tomatoes is a huge deal for her.

We watched more of Once Upon a Time before bed.