Sheep Guarding Llama

Up at seven, I just can’t sleep past seven anymore.  I probably laid in bed for half an hour hoping to fall back asleep before getting up but just no luck.  Without the caffeine to drain me, I just can’t sleep that much.  So I got up and started my day.  Got a bit of posting done before anyone was up.

Luciana got up at eight and wandered into my office all smiles.  She said good morning and set herself up with the iPad on the chair behind me and entertained herself all morning.  Dominica got up at nine.  Liesl was up shortly after that.

I spent most of the day working in my office.  Got a lot of posting done and some other stuff.  Today is my only day at home this weekend so all of my work is crammed into today.  Tomorrow we are leaving to drive down to San Antonio for the long weekend, looking forward to that.  I have only been to San Antonio once before and it was only briefly and it was a work event to tour the Rackspace offices there – I never got a chance to see the city proper.   So this will be a treat for me.  There is a lot of very historic stuff that I want to see down there and San Antonio is very culturally different from the rest of Texas.

This evening Kim and Armando came over and their kids stayed to babysit our kids.  We managed to get Luciana asleep before they came over and Liesl was just going to bed as they arrived.  Then we got to go out for the evening which was a nice change.

Got up early, quarter till seven, and put in some time getting caught up on Spiceworks this morning.  Then headed into the office.  Another slow day.  No idea why things are so slow, it is very odd.

At lunch I went to Rockfish with Nick, we seem to get lunch together about once every year or so.  It seems more often but mostly I think that that is because I am old and time passes really quickly.

Today is the last day before the long weekend so everyone was trying to get out of the office early.  The place was pretty empty by four.  I, of course, did not get to leave early since it is Friday and was covering deployments for other people so I did not manage to leave until twenty until seven.  Dan did not get out until seven.

We went over to La Cima for their Friday afternoon happy hour.  They have free food and cheap drinks and it is nice to relax up there.  Only a few chances left to go to La Cima before we both end out club membership and leave the area.

Came home and we watched Star Trek the remake.  What a great movie.  Haven’t seen it in a while so that was nice.  Dominica was really wanting to watch it.  Luciana went to bed early.  Liesl stayed up and watched the move with us.  She is about the same age that I was when my parents first rented Star Trek: The Motion Picture on CED around 1981 which, at the time, required renting the CED player too since no one actually owned one of those weird things.  I wonder if Liesl will remember watching many movies now.  Back when I was her age, watching a movie was a big thing, especially at home, it was a major event.  For her, it is a normal thing that she can do anytime, so I doubt that she will remember any specific movies, which is sad.  I remember many movies being watched, for the first time, right around her age.  Star Wars (now called episode four), Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Fox & The Hound, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Song of the South, The Sword in the Stone, etc.  I vividly remember my father bringing home real to real 8mm movies that he borrowed from Kodak and projecting them onto the pull up screen that we had for slides.  That’s how I first got introduced to many Disney and other classics.

I never ended up making it to the office today.  It was just one of those days.  Got up and started working from home because Dominica was in the office today (she only has one more scheduled in-office day after today and that is next Thursday because Monday is a holiday) and I had to wait for Morgan and then ended up being so busy that I never got a chance to head into the office.  It was a really busy morning, though, for me.  So I spent most of it locked in my office on one call or another.

For lunch I didn’t manage to leave until one thirty.  Dan met me up at Redneck and we hung out up there for a while.

After lunch it was late enough that there did not seem to be any point going into the office.  So I just went home instead, getting home twenty minutes before Dominica.  So I got to hang out with Morgan for a little bit.

Dominica came home and Morgan hung out for about an hour.  Then she was off to her night job and we just hung out at home.  We had Netflix pick out some movies for us.  First it picked Teen Wolf from 1985.  I saw that one when it was new, so I would have been just nine years old.  I have not seen that moving in nearly thirty years.  I was amazed by how much of it was completely familiar, as if I had just watched it.  A classic for those of us from the ’80s.  Liesl watched it with us and seemed to like it.  That is not a scary movie at all.  In fact, watching it now, it makes no sense at all.

Then we tried a movie that Netflix also recommended called Charlie Bartlett which was not too bad.  It had Roberty Downey, Jr. and the kid star is one of the newer Star Trek stars for the rebooted cast.  That movie wasn’t great but it wasn’t bad.

Normal day, up and into the office.  The first of my references are getting called today.  So the process is moving forward.  So far so good.  We cannot wait for this process to be over so that everything can be official, and we can have a start date and start making solid plans.  Because we lived in New Jersey for a little while they said that the process will probably take an extra week because New Jersey just punishes anyone who was ever foolish enough to live in that state by holding background checks an extra week.  So if all goes well the hope is that we will have final confirmation late next week.

Dan and I went to Redneck for lunch today.  I was good and just got a salad.  It’s always difficult to eat in Texas in a healthy way.

Tonight we had a major disaster, Liesl ran into the office and jumped into the old recliner (the one that we got before Liesl was born anticipating that we would use it to rock her to sleep, which we did, it spent its first year living in her nursery in the house in Peekskill)  and it rocked back picking its feet up off of the floor.  Luciana ran up to it and the chair came down on her little toe on her right foot.  She started crying but we could not figure out what was wrong.  I had been at my desk and did not see anything happen. So I had no idea what was going on.  I looked and made sure that Ciana wasn’t caught in the mechanism and that Liesl wasn’t messing with her. She kept crying and I just couldn’t figure out what was wrong.  So I turned around and picked her up, having no idea that her toe was under the chair.

As you can imagine, this hurt quite a bit more than the chair being on Ciana’s toe.  She got her toe crushed and scraped really badly.  For about an hour we were really scared that her toe was broken but fortunately it was just horribly bruised and scraped.  Liesl was so upset though.  She cried for hours, terrified that she had really hurt her sister.  She felt horrible even though it really was not her fault.

We have been intending to get rid of that rocking chair for a long time now.  This is definitely the final straw, we don’t need to keep that around anymore.  It is time for it to go.  So we are going to set it out on the curb and hope that someone takes it soon.  We haven’t really used it in years and it just takes up space.  We always worry that the kids will get hurt in it.  Some of the bolts have been falling out of it and it locks up while you are rocking.  We don’t have room for it anyway.  It’s sad to see it go because it was how we rocked Liesl to sleep as a baby in Peekskill, but we have not used it for years and it just isn’t needed anymore.  Someone will really enjoy it as it is a perfectly nice rocking chair.

Went into the office as normal this morning.  Spent a good deal of the morning dealing with paperwork.  Both health insurance paperwork to make sure that we are not on the awful, expensive insurance anymore but on Dominica’s now which is saving us a ton every month and all of the background check information for the new position in Connecticut.  That was a crazy amount of paperwork to have to get in.  I’ve never had to have done so much.  So that took all morning.  I finally got it sent in later in the day.

Worked through lunch today.  It was a moderately busy day.  Dan and I never managed to go to lunch so at three thirty we ran out to Subway where he ate and I just had an unsweetened ice tea.  Just a quick bite then back to the office to do the evening deployments.

This evening we decided to buy the new Star Trek movie on the AppleTV.  Dominica really wanted to see it.  So we put Ciana to bed early and Liesl snuggled on the couch and watched it with us.  It was pretty good, we are continuing to really like the “Star Trek universe reboot” that they started with the last movie.  So much better than what so many other series have done.  This particular movie Star Trek: Into Darkness was particularly challenging, I am sure, as they had to compete with the original universe’s strongest film The Wrath of Khan which is widely heralded as a classic and the best of the entire series.  We think that they did a really good job and getting Benedict Cumberbatch to play Khan was an amazing choice.  We love him from Sherlock.