Sheep Guarding Llama

I worked late last night, so slept in a bit this morning. This morning was just a little time to hang out outside with coffee. I was up late enough that coffee was ready for me when I got up. We had some sun this morning before the rain returned tonight.

I actually started the day talking to Mary. She had a rough morning because she discovered this morning that has job has been exposing her to cadmium and had not just ignored the health risks, but she had directly asked about it and they had told her to not use any personal protective equipment as cadmium was “completely safe” which, of course, it is not at all safe. So we talked for a long time all morning.

Kat needed Paul to help her at school today. So Paul taught a business class today.

I was supposed to run some more interviews today, but like yesterday, the candidates were not up to scratch so they didn’t need to talk to me.

Late this morning, Liesl asked me if we could have pancakes today. Right as she did I noticed the IHOP gift certificate from my dad. So I said “yes”, and that’s what we did for lunch. It took me hours to be able to go to lunch today, though. We wanted to go around one, and I couldn’t get off of the phone until after three!

I worked until around ten in the evening. Way too late. Mary was online with me for much of the evening, probably four hours. She’s learning all kinds of IT stuff.

The girls and I played some of the cooperative Zelda fighting game that they are really into on the Wii U. We’ve been doing a little every night and getting better and better at it. It takes a lot of concentration to get through it.

Friday. After such a long, exhausting night last night (working until four this morning) I tried my best to sleep in as long as I could. But, of course, I was called out of bed and Paul came to wake me up and let me know that I was needed on the phone by nine. So very little sleep for me, after a long week of not very much sleep. I am so tired.

Mary was around again today, but she had a busy day so I did not get much of a change to talk to her.

Valentina was out sick most of the day, which did a lot to make me that much busier.

We shipped our first equipment to Bolivia today, to Cochabamba. USPS says that it will take seven to ten days. We will see.

My morning was all very busy. And on into the entire day. I never really got a break all day. I was at my desk dealing with customer issues, or more web hosting, until nearly seven. I was thankful that the interview that I was supposed to do today was canceled (not good enough to go on to the round that I was managing) so at least I got that reprieve.

I was living on coffee the entire day. By evening I was actually able to walk away from my desk. Dominica and I took the change to put on Kara & Nate and spent some time relaxing. For dinner I went out to Taco Bueno and picked up dinner for Liesl, Luciana, and me. Liesl also had me cook her a veggie burger before I went. Then she had Mexi Chips & Dips, Luciana had a quesadilla, and I had my normal vegetarian burritos.

Dominica and I did a lot more planning for our trip to Europe in June as well. We have more of our flights books, and we have our hotel is Athens books now, too. Dominica found some really cool places to stay in Switzerland, too. So it looks like we might do that, out in the country where we have never been before.

We watched our shows for a while, but both Dominica and I were starting to feel sick. Eventually we gave up trying to watch our show.

I video games with the girls for a while. We completed level eight of a total of nine in our multiplayer Zelda action game that we have been working on for weeks.

Then before bed Liesl and I watched episode four of A Series of Unfortunate Events.

I was so ready for a Friday. I need this weekend to relax, if that is possible. MangoCon 2019 is this coming week and I have to get ready for that, as well!

Thursday. Word was busy today, but went really well. Today I had many meetings and ended up closing a lot of new accounts. So things were really good. Overall, though, I had a super busy day with no free time. I worked a full day, but all of the interviews that I was supposed to be doing got cancelled. So far, no good candidates have showed up. It’s been either bad people or no shows all week. That has, at least, given me a little more free time. Well, time to work on other things.

Tonight the girls and I had some video game time together. Then I got to work on a web server migration that took all night. I had the prep work all done during the day and was ready to do it and thought that things would be pretty easy. But, of course, that was not the case. First I did the migration, then discovered problems and stayed up until four in the morning dealing with a distributed denial of service attack that has been hitting the server that I was working on for several days.

Four in the morning and I finally got to go to bed. Tomorrow is going to be rough. But very good work done tonight and I am feeling good about where we are.

Tuesday. I got to hang out a little Busy work for the most part.

Dominica and I managed to watch a little of Kara & Nate during a late lunch today. This worked out well because my evening was entirely lost.

This afternoon we had a tornado warning. We had a big rain storm and the tornado sirens were going off. We got bypassed, but it felt a lot like a tornado outside. We heard that one may have touched down or nearly so in Denton proper.

Like often seems to happen in the evening, my evening was expected to be nice and relaxing with nothing planned and when it got later on, I got contacted with some emergency work to do and I ended up working all evening and into the night. It went well, but was very tiring.

Kat came over tonight, but not until almost midnight. She is staying the night so that Dominica and Paul can help her with cookies for someone at her school tomorrow.

Monday. Liesl had bad nightmares last night. We think that it is likely stemming from a “scary” video game video series that she was watching yesterday. Not really scary, very cartoony 1990 era computer graphics, so not something you would expect her to find scary. But it appears to have affected her some. So she had a rough night sleeping.

I weighed in this morning after a few weeks of avoiding the scales since there was all of that cake and pizza for all of the birthday activities. Keeping the food healthy has been very difficult. But my weigh in this morning had me down another one and a half pounds. Nothing amazing, but I am so thankful that even with all of that “cheating” that I was still moving forward.

I had a decently slow work morning. Not totally slow, but not bad. For lunch, Dominica brought be some shrimp tempura and a Koren rice bowl. It was yummy. We ate lunch while we watched Kara & Nate on YouTube. We are currently up to where they have transferred from Cambodia to Thailand.

This afternoon was much busier and I was on the phone for much of it and I ended up working until eight at night at my desk. Way too long of a day. And that’s just the time at my desk.

Dominica made some potatoes and asparagus for dinner. But I had to eat at my desk, locked in my office. “Dinner time” seems to consistently be one of my busiest times of the day. I never get to hang out with the family during eating times, it just never works.

I made myself some veggie chicken sandwiches for the core of my dinner. We watched Kara & Nate until it was time to go to bed, which I had to push Dominica to go to bed for a change. I was tired for a long time and falling asleep trying to watch our show. I need some sleep.

I did about ten thousand steps today, which isn’t bad. Nothing compared to the nearly twenty thousand that I did yesterday, though.