Sheep Guarding Llama

Sunday. Today was just a very chill day. Slept in until quite late. The kids wanted to hang out and play this morning. So spent most of the morning with them.

Dominica and I spent a bit of time today talking about the housing ideas that I came up with yesterday. I went on Zillow and researched pricing and options and communities. It is looking like Little Elm, Frisco, Aubrey, and The Colony are the most interesting areas. And the prices seem to be okay. A real consideration. We could have so much more space, and we really need it.

This afternoon, Dominica wanted Indian food. So she made homemade paneer, and baked homemade naan. Kristen helped out in the kitchen and after a few hours they had made a full batch of completely from scratch paneer tikka masala with loads of homemade naan and everything. Healthy and filling. It was probably 1100 – 1200 calories for me, but my only meal of the day. So pretty good. And most importantly, it was really filling. So filling that I never got hungry for the entire day.

We watched The Goonies while we had dinner. Liesl tried watching with us and made it about half of an hour but felt that it was too boring and broke our hearts and did not want to finish watching this great, classic movie with us. I have not seen The Goonies for many years. But we watch it from time to time. Such a good movie.

My new DVD case that holds four hundred DVDs arrived from Amazon this afternoon. It is the silliest thing but I am so excited about this. The garage is full of DVDs and I cannot stand how much space it all takes up. So as soon as Amazon delivered the DVD case, I started taking DVDs out of their cases and putting them into the new binder. I did this for about two hours.

I managed to take five DVD boxes out of the garage and get them into this one binder. And I had enough space left over in it that I was able to gather up all of the loose DVDs that I could find in the garage and put them in it too. And still enough space left over to take about half of the DVDs that are on the shelves in the book shelf in the living room area. The impact on cleaning up the garage was huge, and this is just the beginning.

Now that we know that these cases work and are really effective, we will be getting them regularly. I am probably going to need four more of these, but that is okay. They will take half of the garage and make it fit easily on a single shelf somewhere. I cannot believe how well this worked. Such a good idea.

I had a lot of driving to do this evening. But I took the chance having to be on the road to check out several neighbourhoods. I looked at a lot of Frisco, Little Elm, and The Colony. I stopped at CVS and picked up a few things. Then checked out the El Dorado area of Little Elm and went back home.

I really like the western El Dorado area. It seems almost perfect.

Saturday. Today is Rachel’s twenty ninth birthday and Ana-Maria’s seventeenth.

Brian Watson called this morning and asked me to come to a dinner party at his place tonight. Dominica will have to stay home with Liesl and Luciana as Paul is still in Medellin, Colombia and so we have no babysitter.

Today is day two of Dominica and I are on our diets. Watching calories today, within reason (since I have the dinner party tonight.)

Early this afternoon we went out for a walk to get our exercise in. It was great weather for a walk. We almost had to stop because Dominica’s instep was hurting, but I showed her how to stretch her foot and after that she felt better and was able to walk. So we got a full walk in.

We went to WinCo to go grocery shopping and stocked up on what we needed and got supplies to do baked potatoes for a late lunch.

Once home we got right to cooking jacket potatoes. They were delicious. I had been wanting them since last night and the girls even requested them today. So that was great. It has been a while since I had one. Sadly we could find no chives in the house.

By the time that the potatoes were eaten it was later than I had planned and I had to run out to get up to Sherman and pick up Kristen because I was giving her a ride to Watson’s for his dinner party. Dominica wanted to go but Paul is not in the country so we have no one to watch the kids. The drive up to Sherman always takes forever.

It was a long, long drive through the middle of nowhere to get from Sherman to Little Elm up on the lake to Watson’s house.

It was eight thirty when I got to Watson’s house. I’ve not been here in a year or two, I’m not sure when the last time was, maybe the fourth of July party when the girls got to set off some fireworks.

It was a small crowd tonight, just a dozen people or so. Brian was just getting the grill set up when we arrived. He did brats, chicken, and salmon for me (although secretly he wanted salmon too, I was more of an excuse.)

We hung around outside for a while, but it was rather cold. A bit hard to be outside for very long.

Dinner was nice and got to meet some new people. Hung around till about midnight.

On the drive back home via Little Elm I got to see a lot of new construction and developments gonig on in that area that I have not seen in years. It is really coming along up there and looks way more interesting than it did not too long ago.

I am starting to think that maybe the big houses up north might not be such a bad idea. I wonder what the kids would think about that. The prices up north are far lower than down where we are. I had not realized that Little Elm had such nice areas.

Friday. Very rainy this morning.

I had an eleven thirty lunch meeting at Pappadeaux on Frankfort so that made for much of my morning schedule to make sure that I am making it to that. So, of course, day two on the diet and I’m going to a very heavy seafood restaurant. Maybe that was not good planning.

I had to get ready at ten thirty and was out the door by a quarter after eleven. So that was my morning, pretty much. I got to Pappadeaux right at eleven thirty and the guys were already there. They got alligator as an appetizer and I ordered the half shrimp po boy along with a bowl of crawfish bisque for my lunch. That was definitely more than enough food for me for the entire day! But boy was it delicious.

We worked there until it was one forty five and Dominica needed me to get back home so that she could use the minivan to take the girls to the movie theatre where they are going to see How to Train Your Dragon 3 with Isabella and Juancho. I got home right at two, when they needed the car, and just left it running and they hopped in and off they went.

This gave me a couple of quiet hours at home to work in silence.

I ordered a four hundred DVD binder from Amazon today. We are going to test out this mammoth binder approach to see if it will work to consolidate all of the boxes of DVDs that we have everywhere. In theory it is supposed to hold a full four hundred in one binder. If that works, I assume it will take four or five binders to hold the collection. Then they can be packed into plastic and stored without taking up so much space. But four hundred seems impossible, so I am waiting to see if it really works. To me it seems like it would be impossibly large. But no matter what, we need some solution to the garage full of boxes and soon.

Dominica and I went for a walk this evening. We are trying to get into the walking habit. We need regular exercise if this diet is going to work. Nothing crazy, just a loop around the neighbourhood to give us thirty minutes or so of walking time.

I made the girls pasta for dinner. Dominica and I had eggs. Pretty simple meals. Dominica and I are trying calorie counting as a diet plan now. I weighed in this morning, so we will see how this works compared to other things that I have tried.

Brian Watson called, he is hoping to visit Nicaragua in April. We probably talked for almost an hour. He has a 311 Cruise in a couple of weeks that he is going on. Then if he can, a week in Nicaragua. Then, hopefully, he will be attending MangoCon in Irving in May.

Liesl and I watched Castle in the Sky. She has never seen this one, and I have not seen it in a really long time. I have been wondering which Studio Ghibli film it was that had some of these scenes and somehow I had completely forgotten this movie from a title and subject perspective, but once we started watching it, it came back to me pretty quickly. This is one of the really good ones.

Luciana joined us and we watched an episode of Full House before going to bed.

Thursday. Warmer today, we are back into the high fifties. Today, Dominica and I decided to attempt starting diets. It’s time to do something healthy.

Dominica made breakfast while I got to work this morning. Then she ran to the pharmacy to pick up some batteries for our scale.

The girls got through school early today. They got started on the early side and were done pretty quickly.

This afternoon Dominica and the girls went to the Farmer’s Branch Public Library to hear a talk for kids on Ancient Egypt. Liesl enjoyed it, but it was too boring for Luciana. She was hoping for hands on crafts, but it was just a talk. Isabella and Juancho went, as well. So they had fun, it is just that Ciana was pretty bored.

After they got back and work was slow, Dominica and I did a walk to try to get back into the habit. Paul is getting a lot of walking in down in Colombia. He is going up and down hills like crazy in Medellin and getting a lot of exercise. We only did around twenty minutes. Just enough to qualify as some cardio.

Once we were back we worked on dinner. Dominica made calzones at home tonight. We had the dough from before the diet decision and it has to be eaten. So today’s diet was a pretty big struggle. But dinner was very tasty.

We watched a few episodes of The Golden Girls and then Brooklyn Nine Nine before Dominica went off to bed. I finished watching Yucatan finally. The girls were up watching How to Train Your Dragon 2 in their room. Liesl bought it with some of her Amazon gift card money from Christmas. Tomorrow they are going to the movie theatre with Isabella and Juancho to see How to Train Your Dragon 3.

I broke out my stair stepper from the garage tonight and used that a little, too. It actually fell apart on me, but I was able to reassemble it. Liesl thought that it was fun and tried it out as well.

I discovered late at night that my Facebook account is gone. I had noticed around the time that Dominica and I were taking our walk that all of my Facebook linked accounts had signed out, but I had assumed that it was just a general “sign out” thing for general security that you see happen once in a while and did not think anything of it. So I did not even try to sign back in until around eleven at night. When I did, I found that my account was actually removed and no longer existed. I filed an appeal but got the standard response that everyone on the Internet reports as gettings: that my account is not eligible for no stated reason, no warnings were given, no information can be given, and that no further contact or appeal is allowed. That’s it, closed without cause, end of story. So Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and who knows what else all just gone completely. Maybe my account was hacked, who knows. I checked my email accounts to verify that I hadn’t missed anything. But not only was there no warning to the account deletion (and I’ve had this account pretty much since the very beginning of Facebook), but there wasn’t any acknowledgement or notification, either. Total silence.

Downside is, of course, hundreds or thousands of contacts with people are just gone. Over a decade of communications are gone. But in other ways, it’s great. It was an awful service and never did things that I liked. None of the Facebook products were good to use. For the next several weeks I suspect that I will keep running into stupid little “oh no, that was linked to my Facebook” problems as I did actually use Facebook as a sign in for many things (a word of caution to anyone using Facebook as an authentication mechanism to other websites!!) But after a little bit of time, I’m sure that I will enjoy not having Facebook in my life. Much like Spiceworks which I felt that I could not leave voluntarily, having an absence from it that isn’t by choice is a very different matter. Instead of a grueling decision or someone feeling that I might be neglecting them, this is a chance to be rid of a service that I really did not like without any of the mental overhead of having chosen to abandon it. So I am looking on it as a blessing. Probably one caused by a combination of glitchy code with a callous corporate decision process, but most importantly, not one caused by me. So I need not feel badly about any of the results.

One thing that I did notice, beyond Facebook taking only minutes to respond to my ticket that there was no further recourse and that I would not be told why my account was gone, was that when I had first opened the ticket and they had only acknowledged the ticket but had not looked into it yet, they had “accidentally” already marked the ticket as “closed”. Which means that the automated system had already closed the ticket within seconds of it being created, without any person having been involved at any point. I’m assuming that the follow up message a few minutes later containing nothing but the identical form letter you see all over the Internet was automated and that there was no investigation whatsoever. The whole system was so fast, sterile, illogical, incorrect, and boilerplate that it seems almost certain that it is nothing but a facade and that no human is ever involved in the process and the entire thing is a farce to give people plausible doubt that someone might have actually verified it.

So that is that. That is why no one will be seeing me on Facebook and why anything that was connected to me there is just gone now. And why decades from now when my kids wonder why the expectation of years of events that could have been logged there do not exist that they can know why all of that isn’t there.

Wednesday. It is bright and sunny this morning, but still very cold, in the thirties. I had to jump out of bed this morning as the phone was ringing. Multiple customers with server issues this morning and I was the only person who could be reached. So my day started out with a bit of a panic, but I was able to get everyone fixed and back online in under an hour.

Today is my first day in over a year that I am able to start my SGL updates without having a backlog that I want to get to instead. SGL is all caught up as of around one in the morning yesterday and it feels great.

Had a good surprise meeting today, looks like a new client will be starting with us soon. Details to come soon, I hope.

Paul reports that he is really loving Medellin, Colombia. He sent tons of pictures. He’s been doing touristy things and meeting with locals. Really enjoying himself.

This evening Dominica and I watched some of Brooklyn Nine Nine, we are on the fifth season now. We had Internet issues tonight, though, so we watched something that we had at home Our Man Flint which we have not watched in so long.

After Dominica went to bed, Liesl and I finished watching Princess Mononoke that we had started last night. She really liked it. She is interested in watching Akira sometime. I have probably not seen that move in at least eighteen years, I would bet. I wonder if I have seen it since I started SGL. (A quick search on Akira tells me that I almost certainly have not.)