Sheep Guarding Llama

Friday. Today was quite an adventure. Rodrigo started the day by getting hit while driving home from dropping off his daughter at work. So his entire morning was spent dealing with that. He is fine, just a fender bender. But the guy who hit him was not insured so what should have been a trivial matter turned into something huge. Apparently the insurance company picked up the uninsured guy and actually drove him to his bank so that he could withdraw the necessary cash to cover the damage. They are pretty hard core down there.

So the morning was very busy as I was actively covering for Rodrigo being out and lots of other people being busy. It wasn’t until the middle of the afternoon that we were able to start really getting down to business.

Our big task today is running interviews as we are attempting to hire someone today in Bolivia, again. We managed to get started with the first interview around three and had four to do, so it went until around eight in the evening. Very late for interviews, especially as Bolivia is ahead of us. It was a great evening of interviews, really the best that I have ever had. Four for four, we wish that we could hire all of them. It is very hard when you have so many people that you have to turn down, but only because they weren’t as “ideal” as someone else. Typically when we turn people down it is because they don’t have what we need, but this is very different. We really want all of these people.

It was a late night. Tonight Liesl and I watched more of Once Upon a Time.

Friday. A nice morning and not too crazy. But I got a cup of coffee that was left over from last night, microwaved it and drank that from the Fox “World’s Best Daddy” mug that Liesl made for me. Then when Dominica went to make her coffee for the morning, our coffee maker died. This was our Cuisinart grind and brew that we received as a wedding present fifteen years ago. Can’t complain about it, it has definitely lived a very long, very useful life. Sadly its last many years have been in storage and we only just started using it again. Would have been a little handier if it had died before going into storage rather than just afterwards.

It was a busy morning. We did a few hours of interviews, then of negotiations, and we ended up hiring someone new today. That took a good portion of the day, but we are excited. He will be starting on Monday.

This afternoon Isabella and Juancho came over until evening. So the kids were very busy all day. Work was busy for me. It felt like a really long day at the office.

This evening, after everyone went home, I cooked for a while. Hamburgers for Liesl and me (she is still addicted to them) and pasta with my famous butter, garlic, and sage for Luciana. I’ve totally become their favourite cook and they only want me making their food most of the time.

I watched more of the second season of Friends for a while. Then Liesl came out because she wanted to watch Once Upon a Time with me. She had started watching it back in Italy, which was early 2017. I have never seen the show at all, so we went back and started at the very beginning of the show so that we could watch it together. Liesl has gone so long without seeing it that she was up for watching it fresh to remember what happens.

We watched four episodes before it was time for bed. I am liking the show, it is interesting and different. Liesl seems to be liking it. It prompted a lot of discussion about some classic Grimm Fairy Tales as well.

Thursday. Work today at home. In the early afternoon I found out that SpiceCorps DFW is taking place this evening at PinStack in Irving. So my day got a bit hectic as I worked on getting things done so that I could arrange things so that I could make it to the meeting. The day was pretty busy. Managed to finally get an application for the job opening that we have later in the day.

Today we had a new intern from Panama City start working with us. So much of the day was spent getting her as much up to speed as possible. So much to be done.

I had to shower at five and run out the door at six. I got to Irving just in time for the evening. StorageCraft sponsored this evening. I had a cheese and spinach quesadilla and some delicious potato salad. Not a big vegetarian selection, but it was tasty.

It was a nice meeting tonight, a good turn out. Rush came out, too. I had one Lakewood Temptress while I was there. PinStack has good food and beer.

Got home and pretty much went right to bed. It was kind of late by the time that I got in.

Wednesday. Pretty normal day in the office.

My morning and into the early afternoon was just incredibly busy. Calls and meetings and just so much work flooding in. It was exhausting. I was feeling very burned out by the end of the day.

This evening, though, we did get an intern request from someone in Panama. So hopefully we will know more tomorrow.

By evening I was cooking for the girls. Liesl has fallen in love with my hamburgers and she seems to want them every day. It takes forever, about forty minutes just to cook the Morningstar Grillers, but she loves the results and loads of tomato. We have onion now, too, but that is more for me. I made Liesl two burgers and myself two as well.

I’ve been watching the second season of Friends. I have seen so few of these episodes. It is amazing that I so completely managed to skip those shows during the era. They really take you back. So completely the mid-1990s. The shows are totally cheesy and dated. But they really do capture the feel of the 1990s and of life in your 20s, at least of the 20s that I knew. Interesting to watch them and view them through a modern eye of someone not that far off from their ages, who understands the place and the time involved.

Saturday. Quiet day at home.

I finally got the WiiU hooked up in the girls’ room for Luciana today. She has been asking for it for a week or more. I got all of the parts set up in their room on the big TV. Although we quickly discovered that we did not have enough batteries in the house. So that is on Dominica’s shopping list for later as we need a lot for all of the controllers this week with the cousins coming. We need four controllers for the WiiU and four controllers for the Steam system. That is like fourteen batteries!

Liesl was in the mood for BLTs today. So I made those for everyone. Dominica recently got me tomatoes and Liesl has been loving having them again. She is such a tomato girl.

Dominica and I got back to watching Will & Grace today. We are on the second season and made it through a bit.

This afternoon our next DVD case from Amazon arrived. We have a scheduling plan for the DVD cases. Each case holds four hundred DVDs. That is five to six of our storage boxes. One DVD case creates so much recycling that it completely fills our municipally allotted capacity for a fortnight. So we have to pace out doing the DVDs at the pace that we can recycle the cases. So in two weeks we will get our next case and do it again. While we watched shows today, I got through four boxes today. I figured that I will do two more tomorrow and we will be done. The garage is now noticeably getting cleaned out. Two stacks are now gone from the floor space.

We did a little Just Dance Disney tonight. And the girls played a bit of their Nintendoland game.

Liesl also got out her Nintendo 3DS and played Animal Crossing: New Leaf for at least an hour.

Dominica and Paul went out to shoot some pool this evening. The girls stayed home with me. Liesl and I did a movie night. Luciana just wanted to hang out on her own.

This evening we ordered in Chinese from China One. Luciana decided against the shrimp tonight. Liesl went for a mix of fried shrimp and orange shrimp. I got the orange shrimp, and the crab rangoons. And some veggie lo mein for leftovers tomorrow.

We did movies tonight. Liesl wanted an anime. So first up was Porco Rosso, one of my favourite Studio Ghibli films. Liesl liked it, but it was not her favourite. That the movie is set in the Croatian islands in the Adriatic around where we have been. And some more of it happens in Milan, Italy, where we have been. She was not too interested in that stuff, though.

After that, we decided to watch Willow which I have not seen in so many years and Liesl has never seen. She was not too impressed at the beginning; she thought that it was pretty boring. But about halfway through, after she had pushed to get into the story, she started to get into it. By the end she was pretty hooked. She didn’t love it, but she liked it.

It was pretty late, about one in the morning, by the time that we finished our long final movie. So time to get to bed. Dominica and I have to be up before eight in the morning so that we can drive halfway to Houston to meet up with Francesca and pick up Garrett and Clara who are coming up to spend the week with us.