Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Sunday. The weather was much, much nicer today. Yesterday was so cold and windy. But the wind died down and things warmed up. It really felt like a great spring day today.

I got up and worked for a while this morning. There was a lot to do.

This afternoon, in the great weather, Dominica and I went out for a two mile walk. The weather was perfect. Really nice for a walk, a lot of other people out walking, too.

For dinner we had salmon tacos. Tasty. We watched some Star Trek: Voyager while we ate. Made it through two episodes.

I spent the afternoon and early evening doing a lot more coding. A very productive day. I have new code tested and being deployed to production tonight. And I built a new staging server. I’m getting into writing code again, this is fun. Especially as I am making good progress.

Dominica and I watched a bit of Brooklyn Nine Nine. After a while Liesl came to join us. Then after a few episodes we switched to Once Upon a Time and watched that until it was time for bed.

Saturday. Super busy morning. Got up around nine and went into the office. Worked for a little bit, then decided to go out for about a one hour walk to get some exercise. I went by myself as Dominica did not feel like it. I’ve not walked since Sunday and I don’t want to lose momentum, so I went alone. She was glad that she did not go, it was way too cold and windy.

I got back to the house and worked on the phone for about two hours. Doing tickets and general support. I was tied up until almost three in the afternoon!

Our job offer for the candidate that we interviewed yesterday was finally accepted late this afternoon, so we have a new employee starting with us on Monday. That’s very exciting. This is our second employee in Bolivia, and our first in Cochabamba.

We had grilled salmon for dinner tonight. And watched some Star Trek: Voyager.

This evening was an all coding evening for me. It has been a long time since I have been tasked with working with production code, so this was a pretty big change of pace. I also got a chance to chat with our new intern for a while as well. We had a good time to talk.

I got a lot of really important coding work done tonight and feel really good about it. I was worried that it would be really frustrating and unproductive. So this is a big victory. I am not done with what I needed to do this weekend, but I have done enough that I know that I can completed what is needed. I have some good processes set up now.

Liesl came out this evening and, as expected, wanted to watch Once Upon a Time and we watched until two in the morning. Still maintaining a pretty engaging story line.