Sheep Guarding Llama

Sunday. Slept in again this morning. But it was pretty early when I was called by the client who had been hit with the ransomware on Friday and needed me to work for a lot of the day helping out with their issues again. So my Sunday was essentially lost. I put in basically an entire day of work starting late in the morning. A very busy day, much like on Friday.

I worked until around seven or eight. Then ran out to pick up food. First stopping by Ralph’s Pizza, then heading over to Taco Bueno. I got myself a bean burrito (no chili sauce of course), a potato burrito with beans, and I tried one of their limit time street tacos: the fried shrimp taco. Came back home to eat.

This evening we watched The Glass Bottom Boat, which is one of my favourite Doris Day movies. And then watched a little of Star Wars after that. But maybe only half an hour. Got to bed early tonight. Pretty worn out from the last few days.

Saturday. I slept in pretty seriously this morning. I didn’t wake up until almost noon! Yesterday must have really taken it out of me. I slept solidly and did not even realize that it was so late when I had woken up.

It is cold this morning, just over four degrees. Dominica was watching the second season of Reba when I woke up.

In the middle of the afternoon we made it out for a walk. We went a bit farther today than we have been going. We got in over two miles, even in the light rain. It was a good walk. Dominica is able to go much farther now.

We got back home and decided to go out for a date night. Going down to Soho Food and Jazz in Addison for Tapas.

When we parked at Soho Food and Jazz, some crazy lady drove wildly through the parking lot and hit Dominica’s door as she was opening it. We are really lucky as Dominica foot was already out of the door, it could have taken her foot off! It ended up just bouncing off of the other car and no damage. But it was a near thing.

At Soho we struggled, as always, to find food that Dominica could eat. But with some modifications, we were able to have the goat cheese, hummus, tofu, ahi tuna stack, and the crispy ravioli. It was all delicious. Almost all of it required some modification to the sauce so that Dominica could eat it, but mostly worked out okay. We can add this to the list of places where Dominica can eat, at least a little. There was live music, too.

We couldn’t be out long, it was five when we got back from our walk, and well after six by the time that Dominica was ready to go and Paul needed us back before eight so that he could go play snooker with AJ. So our time window was tiny. We ate and ran back home. Dominica likes to say that I’m always late, but it is very handy to have Paul here so I can demonstrate to a third party that I spend tons of time being ready and trying to manage time windows to get where I need to be and everyone else causes me to cut things too close. Dominica always remembers me as causing us to be late, mostly just because I’m also the driver.

We were back well before eight and Paul went out to play snooker. I was still hungry later in the evening so had some soup and bread, and then some cereal. The kids didn’t feel like hanging out tonight. So I caught up on The Orville and then started watching Solo, the latest Star Wars movie, but did not get a chance to make it very far before deciding to go to bed.

Friday. I got my day started with a customer having an emergency that they had been hit with ransomware and they needed my help ASAP. Thankfully a break/fix customer and not a managed one, but still very bad. So that was my morning, on a conference call starting at nine and going for the entire day. One crazy day.

It was cold this morning, and I was in such a hurry that Dominica had to bring me socks, slippers, a fleece, and coffee to keep me warm while I started to work.

What a wild day. I didn’t really get to leave the office at all. It was a serious “butt in the chair” kind of day. I didn’t eat anything all day. The day truly flew by, though. I did not even really look at the time until it was almost seven thirty and Dominica and Kat wanted to order dinner! I had no idea that the time was passing. Over ten hours of work without realizing it.

Kat wanted Chinese and we have not done that in a while. So Chinese it was. Kat and I split some General Tso’s shrimp. Liesl got chow mein. Luciana got fried shrimp. We all split some crab rangoons. And Dominica made her own food, mostly, because she can’t safely eat anything that we get delivered.

The food did not come until eight thirty. But I was still at my desk working, so it did not really matter. It was delicious, but I was not thrilled to have to eat my dinner while working. My only food of the entire day and I did not even get to sit somewhere nice to eat it.

Paul was supposed to stay in Missouri until tomorrow night, but he was tired of being away from home, and there is supposed to be a big winter storm up there tomorrow with as much as ten inches of snow. Not a good idea to just hang around waiting for that to happen. So he drove home this evening instead.

Liesl tried her first crab rangoon tonight. But she waited until it was cold and she was not into it.

Kat went home at nine thirty, having crashed here last night. So she really got to see how much I work. She was here for a full twenty eight hours, and basically did not see me a single moment of that time, because I was either working or sleeping the entire time. The entire time.

Paul got home more like nine thirty.

It was eleven at night when I finally got to hang up the phone. What a long day. Fourteen hours on a single call, without a single break! But we saved the company. I’m very proud of our day.

The girls played online games with their cousins until about midnight. After wrapping up work Dominica and I watched an episode of Reba that she had been watching all day. Then I put on Star Trek: Enterprise to have on while I tried to get in my exercise for the night. It has been a very sedentary day.

Around one in the morning I did some systems updates and maintenance. I needed a bit of time to wind down and the laptop on the bar doing some tasks as I exercise and watch Netflix works pretty well.

I knocked off work at two thirty and headed off to bed.

Thursday. Super cold this morning. I got up at eight thirty and had to run around taking care of quick errands around the house before a nine o’clock morning meeting. I took out the recycling and discovered that the heat pump was totally frozen over. That is not good. It is below freezing out and the house is at sixty two degrees and unable to hold it.

Dominica brought in Paul’s space heater for me so that I could warm up my office. And she brought me a fleece. I had been really cold when I started my meeting. I was on the phone from nine until ten.

I ended up with a lot of meetings and phone calls today. Quite a busy day, but it went very well.

I started getting ready at four thirty to go out to the SpiceCorps DFW meeting that is in Irving tonight at six thirty. The meeting tonight is down at the Taco Diner right down the street from our old apartment in Irving. We saw this place for a long time, but I have never eaten there.

The meeting went well this evening. Probably more than a dozen people showed up. We ended up hanging out at Taco Diner until ten, then a small group went to Starbucks until eleven. For dinner, I had two tacos. One taco was mushrooms and poblano. The other was seared fish. Quite good. Some beans and rice. And Nick got the table some guacamole which was really amazing. I couldn’t help eat some of that.

While I was out, Kat and Tim came over to hang out at the house. Kat was just finishing The Breakfast Club when I got there. Then we watching Jhoom Barbar Jhoom. I have not seen that movie in many years. We only made it to intermission, though, before Kat fell asleep. So we turned it off.

At the end of the night, two people from the event tonight made accounts on ML. A third person is a solid business lead that I contacted before going to bed. And a fourth added me on LinkedIn. A pretty good evening, I would say.

And that is the end of February. SGL has been completely up to date for some time now. That feels great. And it is so much easier to write just one post every day. I am loving that.

Paul is having fun fishing up in Missouri. He is there today, tomorrow, and coming back on Saturday. Not a very long trip.

If business went as well today as it appears to have had, it looks like my plans to go to Nicaragua are going to be accelerated. Fingers crossed. It looks like I need to spend time in San Juan del Sur as well as San Juan de Nicaragua which is also known as Greytown. I miss it down there, that will be a really fun trip if I manage to pull it all off.

Thursday. Another busy day. Rodrigo is out sick, so we are short staffed and really feeling it. I was at my desk all day and am just getting busier. Tomorrow, I am sure, is going to be quite busy. I will probably be working over the weekend to try to keep up with the current demands.

Today was a coffee day. Paul brought some amazing, freshly packed Colombia coffee beans that we made a couple of pots of today and drank all day.

Today is Paul’s only full day in Texas before he leaves again. Just back from Medellin, Colombia, he is heading off to Missouri tomorrow for several days there.

The temperature really dropped this afternoon. This morning we were pretty warm and we had several of the windows open. By evening we were very chilly.

Dominica and I managed to go out for our walk this evening before it got dark. But we were too late to go out while the temperature was still nice. So it was a rather cold walk. We just did our short loop in the greenway, nothing too crazy. But we have been doing a rather good job of sticking to it. This is about a week of solid, daily exercise now. And a week and a half of being on our calorie counting diets. I weighed in today and it has been pretty consistent progress.

Kat was supposed to come over this evening. But then changed to coming over this morning. But ended up getting tied up and couldn’t come this morning. So we never saw her.

After eating a little too much yesterday, today I was not hungry all day and just skipped eating. Why eat if you are not feeling hungry? So, I suppose, that totally offsets any calorie overages that I might have incurred yesterday. My guess is that I was somewhere in the 1,500 to 1,800 calorie range yesterday, which is too high for me it seems. But it was high enough that I did not feel any need to even snack today. So, I will count that as a win.

Since this is the only day that Paul is in town, he and Dominica did a quick run to Costco this evening to make sure that we had necessary supplies to get through until next week.

The girls took a bath tonight and played with the last of Luciana’s bath bombs. And both girls got their swim goggles and played in the tub with them. Luciana had done this last night as well. I think that it makes her feel like she is practicing for swimming this summer.

I was on the phone for work until after eight at night. A very busy day. Once I finally got away from my desk, I moved to the bar to “work” and Dominica put on The Golden Girls.

Nick stopped by this evening. And he brought a six pack of Revolver Full-Tang IPA which was pretty good. He hung out for an hour or two at the Sheraton Lounge before heading home. I only had one, which is good, as it was my sole calorie source for the day. But I was never really hungry. Now we will see what happens tomorrow after I go a full twenty four hours without food. A bit more, actually, as it was twenty four hours before I went to bed. It will be about forty hours by the time that I eat something tomorrow, most likely.

I realized today when I was getting lots of posts on LinkedIn congratulating me on my twentieth work anniversary that NTG was now twenty years old! Unbelievable. Two entire decades. So many people have been a part of the team over the years.

I made the kids soup and sandwiches for their late dinner tonight. Dominica sent them to bed, and I spent at least forty minutes talking to them and teaching them about how to set and manage their own alarms. We are trying having them get up to an alarm tomorrow. And then tomorrow we are going to have them set a “last meal” alarm as one of our hardest issues is getting them able to go to bed at night because they constantly ask for more food. Once it gets to be about ten thirty, our evening tends to turn into a nearly constantly barrage of asking for more meals. That, more than the sleep, we need to figure out how to shift. But it seems like only by shifting their sleep times can we shift their meal times. And having them understand and anticipate a final meal “cut off” time seems to be the only way that it will work.

I stayed up late getting some work done. Without late nights to myself, there really isn’t much time for me to really do the “catch up” type of work that I often need. My days are just too busy and interrupted to really focus and knock things out. And the evenings are always full of one thing or another. So once everyone goes to bed and the house is quiet is really my time to be able to do that stuff. My to do list is not all that bad at the moment. But does require my attention a little.

The alarm talk seemed to work well, the girls went to sleep pretty quickly. So that seems like it was a good idea.

I was not able to get to sleep anytime quickly. Around two in the morning, when I realized that I was not tired in the least, I realized that I had had some of my first caffeine in a really long time today, because Paul had brought that awesome coffee from Colombia that we had to try right away. So my caffeine level for the day, while nothing for what I used to drink, is easily the most I’ve had in nine months! And on top of that, I had not a single bite of food today. So that means that I am probably in full on fat burning mode, and that always makes me have more energy and need to sleep less. The combination, especially since caffeine is a trigger to push you into fat burning, probably means that I have a crazy amount of energy.

I wish that it was not so cold or I would have used the excess of energy to go out for a couple mile walk in the middle of the night. Need to burn it off somehow.

I got my inbox cleared down to almost nothing tonight. Wide awake quiet time can be very productive.

I thought about going out for a walk even though it had gotten chilly, but I checked the weather and it wasn’t just chilly, but it was below freezing. So that plan was scuttled.

Rodrigo, who is super sick, ended up coming online to work at three in the morning because he could not sleep. So we talked a little. Our first real chance to catch up this week as he has been so sick. I think that he has strep throat, but they don’t have the cultures yet. At least he is on antibiotics now, as of this morning.

I have SpiceCorps DFW to attend tomorrow evening. Down in Irving. I have not made one in a while, it should be fun. No sponsor or speakers this time, just people hanging out. And tacos.

Paul is leaving for Missouri in the morning. His plan is to leave around six. I saw him get up twice during the night while I was still exercising!

Paul got up at three thirty. At four twenty, I decided to make an attempt at getting some sleep.