Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Friday. A very busy day at work. I was going crazy all morning. But it was good work and I got a lot done.

Kristen parked her car at the house and I ran her over to the train station around noon so that she could go downtown for the day and the Kacey Musgraves concert tonight.

I worked all day, it was very busy until early evening. No relaxing time for me. Dominica and I did not get time to go out for a walk today, either.

This evening Liesl decided to join me and we watched several episodes of Brooklyn Nine Nine until Luciana came out and joined us, too. Then we switched to watching Full House.

I started digging out the WiiU tonight for Luciana. She has been wanting to hook it up in their room for a while.

Tuesday. Another incredibly cold day. My office was so cold today that I had to wear my hoodie, a nearly winter coat over it, my shoes all day, and even my fingerless alpaca woolen gloves to stay warm. Plus I had a few gallons of hot water sitting in the office to add some heat to the space.

My day started with a friend in California calling because they had a massive data loss at a client. Helping out with that took a large portion of my day. A lot of time attempting to do XFS filesystem file recovery from a file system that was accidentally formatted over and that has no working backups. That was a bit of a challenge.

Work was a bit busy on top of that. And I spent a bit of time working with Valentina on training.

Paul had a lunch meeting out today. So he was gone for a while.

This evening Dominica and I went out for a walk and got in a few thousand steps. We are getting better at keeping our exercise up.

Paul and Dominica went to pool league tonight. I made the kids pizza for dinner, did the dishes, and did some work standing at the bar. Tonight I finally finished watching Star Trek: Enterprise. I am now completely caught up with all of the Star Trek universe that has ever been released except for the new stuff that has not gone to streaming service yet.

Next up, I watching Hairspray on Netflix. I have never seen this 2007 musical. It was pretty good, strong cast.

I watching The Birdcage while I finished up exercising. Such a great movie, I have not seen it in a really long time.

I managed to do over fifteen thousands steps today! My Samsung Health app tells me that I just need to target six thousand a day, although I try to aim closer to ten thousand but have not hit that yet in a while. Fifteen thousand is pretty good. I burned more calories exercising than I ate today!

I’m loving our new Amazon Alexa Microwave. It is small, but it was affordable and works really well. Simple but works better than the fancier microwaves. And the voice control is just a cool novelty.

Monday. Another extremely cold day. It was twenty one degrees when I woke up today! But we are expected to be closer to eight by the weekend.

Work was busy, but not as busy as I had expected it to be given how busy we were over the weekend with the ransomware event.

This evening, I made pizza for Liesl (the frozen kind, nothing fancy) and my home made garlic, sage, butter pasta for Luciana. I have figured out how she likes it. Spaghetti pasta, butter heated while the pasta drains and liberal use of garlic and sage and salt. Butter melted and then the pasta thrown on top on top of the still hot burner and I basically butter fry or braise the pasta in the butter sauce. It gives the pasta a certain texture and works in the herbs. I’ve done it exactly the same twice and both times Luciana doesn’t just report that it is good, but that it is awesome.

I watched some of Star Trek: Enterprise tonight. I am late in the fourth season and well into the terrible episodes. In a Mirror, Darkly is the worst I’ve seen of the franchise, I bet. So bad. Totally worthless to watch. Good for working on my exercise while it is on. I’ve been working hard to get my steps in every day. My Samsung Health app has been helping that a lot.

For dinner I had a pickle cheese burger and a bag of steamed veggies. Only eight hundred and thirty calories and I wasn’t hungry at all. I wasn’t actually even hungry when I ate. I have no idea how I can go so long not getting hungry.

Dominica and I watched some of The Bob Newhart Show before going to bed.