Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Dominica was off to work at seven and I did my usual waiting for Morgan who comes at nine thirty.  Morgan ended up being rather late because she missed the exit and didn’t realize it until she was on her way to Richardson and she didn’t know how to get back to our house from that direction so ended up driving all over the place trying to get back.  So it was more like ten when she finally got here.

Got into the office rather late, for obvious reasons.  Dan and I went to lunch at Rednecks.  Need to get in there a bit before we move as this is my last chance to see everyone there.  Only a few weeks left if all goes well.  My paperwork for my background check and everything came today.  There was a lot of it so I did a bit of trying to fill it out this afternoon but it was more than I could get done at work.

Got home at a decent time.  Dominica I talked about the paperwork and moving and stuff for a while.  Then just a quiet night at home, we watched Are You Being Server?

Quiet Sunday at home.  Everyone was up by eight, Liesl being the last one up.  Dominica and I were up at seven.  I did SGL catchup this morning and Dominica worked on apartment hunting.  It’s Sunday so I have to work for three hours in the middle of the day.  Only a few more weeks of that, though.  Hopefully I won’t have scheduled work of that nature once we are in Connecticut, at least not regularly scheduled work requiring every weekend to be scheduled around work.  Life in Connecticut is going to be a lot more busy than here in Texas.  I’ve been really fortunate to have a lot of free time and schedule flexibility for the last six years or so.  That will be mostly going away.  This will be a huge life shift for us.  At least a lot of our favourite places are within easy drives of there.  Like Prince Edward Island, Halifax, Montreal and Bar Harbor.

We are beginning the strategy of figuring out what can be donated from everything in the house.  Time to cull the stuff again.

I watched the kids and worked this afternoon while Dominica went to the salon and out shopping at Target.

I did a lot of cleaning up emails today.  No opportunity to be behind on emails after a few weeks.  I really need to be prepared.

Dominica spent the early evening on a cleaning frenzy around the house.  It is going to take all that we have to get the house ready for when we are ready to move out.  We have no idea when that will be but we are playing with the idea of Dominica and the girls continuing to live here until late October when we go to Spiceworld and then to Disney World.  It seems rather foolish to have them move before then as we would be moving up to Connecticut just in time to immediately leave the new place, completely exhausted, and head out for vacation.  That seems like a bad idea.  It will be too much to do in too short of a time.  It would force us to move sooner than we want to and to make decisions too quickly.  That is, unless we get a beach house that starts right away.  Then everything changes.

Liesl and I played nearly to the end of Ankh 3 tonight.  I think that we will be able to complete it tomorrow.  She is getting better and better at these games.  She can do a lot of parts of the game faster than I can now.  I am constantly amazed by how much of the storyline and events she remembers.

Ciana went to bed at nine after I read her some stories.  Liesl went to bed at ten after a few stories too.  Then pretty much straight to bed for Dominica and I as well.  I did a lot of writing today.  Spiceworks was incredibly slow this weekend, the slowest that I ever remember it being.  There was maybe only three or four posts all weekend.  Normally there is more than that an hour.  Something must be wrong somewhere.

We didn’t watch anything today, a nice change.  The house is looking so much better.  Dominica really put in a lot of work.  The entire house has been mopped.  We are really looking forward to the shipping labels arriving for some large boxes of Microsoft and Lenovo gear that was here on demo and needs to ship out.  It is taking up our entire foyer area and making it hard to get around the house.

Madeline is taking Liesl’s old bed and Liesl’s current black dresser that Dominica painted a few years ago.  At some point we are going to figure out how to get those down to Houston for her.  That will help so that we don’t have to deal with those in the move and Liesl won’t be heart broken that her bed is going away.  She is very sentimental.  And we will be happier too.  That was Liesl’s bed that we bought before she was born and it was always there in the Peekskill house, then Liesl used it in the Tuscan Villas apartment and for the first year at this house.  Then it became Luciana’s bed and she has used it ever since until a few weeks ago.  So it has a lot of sentimental value having been the bed of both of our children.  It’s been with us constantly for nearly five years.

Dominica has been getting bags of stuff ready for donation.  One good thing about each move – we cut down on the amount of stuff that we have more and more.  Tons of clothes getting ready to be donated and a ton of toys will be coming up next.  We aren’t planning on taking much of the furniture with us this time either.  That will help a lot.

I am really happy that SGL has been staying up to date a lot more recently and I have been getting content out for SMB IT Journal recently too.  Not a ton, but some.  I was really overwhelmed with everything going on, work and whatnot, for a while and just could not keep up.  Now I seem to be pretty much on top of it and that always makes me feel a lot better in general.  When I worry that SGL is not updated I start to feel like things are piling up and I have a harder and harder time getting other things accomplished.  Keeping SGL up to date and my mailbox as close to empty as possible are key factors in keeping myself productive and sane.

Tomorrow Dominica goes to work early.  I have to stop by her office at some point during the day to discuss the fact that we are relocating and preparing them for that.  Hopefully that goes well.  What they decide to do about that will have major ramifications on how we are handling the house and lots of other things.  I will be going into the office tomorrow, although I am not sure when and for how long.