Sheep Guarding Llama

AJ and I were on the road early, leaving around eight, to get down to Austin to drop in on Spiceworks.  What a busy day.  The drive down went fine.  We got down to Round Rock just in time to go to Round Rock Donuts and do a conference call from there via Skype with Bahrain.  That actually went really well.  We got ourselves a dozen donuts from there and then drove on to Spiceworks headquarters.  It is really impossible to state just how excited AJ was to get to go there.

We made decent enough time and hung out in the offices all day.  It was fun and AJ was ecstatic to get to just run around meeting people.  It was a very busy day.

After the day at Spiceworks AJ, Nic, Agent K and I went to “My Place”, a bar across the street, and got dinner before AJ and I got on to the road to make the trip back north.  The drive back was fine, traffic was not too bad.  It is always a bit of a boring trip – the road from Austin to Dallas is a long, flat boring one.

We got back to Dallas and stopped at Jack in the Box so that AJ could eat again.  Then back to the house getting home around eleven.

Didn’t go to bed until after midnight.  Took a while to wind down from the drive.

It is going to take me forever to get caught up from the backlog of emails an posts that I missed while I was out today.  It is amazing the volume of stuff that I handle on a daily basis and any amount of being out really causes me to back up most horribly.

Well now we are into the process of really trying to figure out what we are going to be doing as we have to move pretty soon.  We are on a counter now.  The days are ticking down and we have a lot to get figured out.

This morning I had to be up really early as I had an on site visit to do at eight this morning.  That was a bit of a mess.  My Windows phone has a horrible mapping system for the GPS and took me to completely the wrong place.  That hasn’t happened in a long time.  Not too impressed by the phone at the moment.  Ended up being very late finally getting there and had to have Art give me directions over the phone while I drove since the GPS was useless.

Had a good meeting and got into the office around ten.  That was an exhausting way to start the day.  I was worn out before even getting started.

Monday and into the office.  Dominica and AJ were both at work today too.  So I had to wait for Morgan to arrive before going in to work.

Work was pretty uneventful today.   We’ve been on pins and needles waiting for my background check to clear and everything in our lives is pretty much on hold waiting for that.  So we aren’t doing any preparing or anything.  Work was slowish but I had to work through my normal lunch and no one in the office was available to get lunch because there was so much work to do so I was going to go by myself but convinced Dominica that since AJ was in the office that she didn’t need to be there all afternoon and so she could leave to get lunch.

So I swung into the office and picked up Dominica and we went to Redneck for lunch.  While we were there we got the email that my background check was all approved and everything is official.  My start date in Connecticut is October 7th so I officially gave my notice this afternoon.  Nearly three weeks notice, but not quite, but more than two.  We are definitely pretty excited.

Took Dominica home and I worked from home for the last hour of the day.  We spend a lot of the evening planning as we now have definitely plans to try to make and a real timeline to work from.

Late this evening AJ decided that he was hungry while we were out running errands.  He wanted to go to Redneck but we got there and it was completely packed because a game was on – it is not a good place to go during a game.  Instead we walked next door to TGI Fridays and got a quick bite there then back to the house.

Very excited to announce that SGL is now receiving over one million page hits a month!

I stayed in bed extra long today.  Liesl had slept with us last night which works out well as it means she does not get up early.  I think that she sleeps way better when she sleeps with us and I am pretty sure that we do because she stays asleep which helps us to stay asleep.  Luciana didn’t get up until nearly ten.  I was half awake for a while and knew that AJ had left around nine or so but did not bother to get up until later when Luciana was jumping all over us.

We stayed home pretty much all day today.  Took the day off from most everything.  Stayed in and got work done.  Very productive morning.  Knocked out a lot of tickets and got a ton of my email cleaned up too.

AJ was only at the house for a brief stint in the middle of the afternoon.  Maybe two hours at most.  We did a tiny bit of work together but not very much.  He was out most of the day so it was mostly just the family hanging out.

I slept in this morning, did not get up until nearly ten.  Did some work this morning but not too much.  Dominica wanted to take the girls to Rainforest Cafe in Grapevine again today so we tried to do that.  It was well after noon by the time that we managed to get out of the house.

We got to the mall and found that, not surprisingly, it was completely packed.  It would be a 20 minute wait to get a table.  Not too big of a deal since there is a store to hang out in and the girls like watching the animatronic alligator that hangs out at the front.  AJ had decided to come with us too.

We got seated and the girls got their Mac and Cheese that they like so much.  They both ate and wanted to walk around to look at the animals but the restaurant was so busy that we could not do that at all.  So that made them more restless and they really wanted to get moving.

Our meals ended up taking for forever.  It took about ten to fifteen minutes to manage to place our orders, we all ordered the same thing, and then thirty five minutes before the food came to our table.  When it did, it wasn’t correct.  It took several minutes to find our waitress again to have the kitchen attempt to correct it – which took another five minutes and they did incorrectly.  It was nearly an hour and the kids were bouncing off of the walls, almost literally, and we only had incorrect and now cold food to show for it.  I eventually ran up to the front since there was no one working in our area of the restaurant to help us and had a manager come back and cash us out so that we could leave.

Before leaving the mall we took the girls (and AJ) for a ride on the mall’s “train” that drives around the call.  It is pretty silly but the girls really enjoyed it.

We went to Mooyah to get veggie burgers instead which was much cheaper and much quicker.  Everyone enjoyed that and it was on the way back home so not a big deal to do at all.  By the time that we were back home it felt like we had been out all day trying to figure out how to get food.

Did a ton of work at the house this afternoon and evening.  Knocked out tickets, did posts, etc.  Very productive.

Around eleven AJ was hungry so we went to Redneck for a while.