Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica is home today working all day on getting the house ready for the event tonight.  I went into the office this morning.  It is going to be one crazy busy day.  We are going to be so exhausted at the end of this.

There was so much to be done and no time to do it in that I came home from work early, around two or three.  That way I could help with the cleaning and prep and watch the girls so that Dominica could run errands too.  There is just too much for her to do.  Originally I was going to take the Acadia for an oil change today but I didn’t get any time this morning to do that.  So we made the judgement call that I would take the Spark to Kansas tonight.  It’s maintenance is completely up to date.  I didn’t want to take it because of the lack of cruise control but I will just have to make due.  The upside is that driving the Spark cuts the travel costs for the trip nearly in half, it is just so much less expensive to operate than the Acadia and since it is just me going I don’t need the space at all.  So it is a good decision, just not so much fun for such a long drive on one, open highway without cruise control.  This is exactly not the situation that the Spark is built for.

I had to run over to Dominica’s office this afternoon to pick up two SpiceCorps yard signs that Dominica’s boss whipped up for us.  That was awesome, it makes the group feel much more professional and given how hard our house is to find it really makes it a lot easier for people to not be stuck outside wondering if they have the right place or not.  They are really nice signs that we will be able to use again and again too.  I put one in our yard and one directly across the street for visibility.

Dominica ran out to pick up the Subway catering trays and to go to Walmart for other supplies at the last minute and we were pretty much ready to go.  Allie arrived to set up the bar a little before six and the first people were arriving just a few minute later.

The meeting itself went quite well.  We had a decent turn out, about twenty people which is a pretty healthy number, and the content went well.  I think that people were pleased with the meeting.  I had to give both presentations plus MC the event so I was talking an awful lot.  I prefer not to do that if possible but it worked out okay and tonight’s meeting was shorter than most.

We wrapped up at the house around eleven. Having a bar tender on duty definitely went over well, everyone really enjoyed that.  It was quite a treat seeing our own bar in action for the first time.  It really, truly is a fully commercial bar right there in the middle of our house.

At eleven Dominica helped me to load up the car and get on the road.  It is a long drive to Kansas City from Dallas.  It is supposed to take about seven and a half hours if all goes well.  That would put me at Bob’s house, where I am staying, barely before it would be time to get up for work.

Most of the drive went fine.  All through Texas and Oklahoma was fine and I made good time.  On the horizon in Oklahoma, to the north, I was staring at blinding lighting flashing but never saw more than a few drops of rain.  That all changed once I hit Kansas.

In Kansas I got first rain and then a driving thunderstorm so fierce that the radio was reporting eight mile per hour winds and the rain was so heavy that even out on Interstate 35 I had to come to an actual stand still because I was unable to see the pavement in front of the car to know if i was on the road or not.  It was horrible.

The storm took quite a toll on my drive time.  I ended up having to grab a hotel room at the Econolodge in Emporia.  It was just after six when I grabbed the hotel room.  I knew that I was within two hours of Kansas City so that I could switch from Emporia to Kansas City during lunch tomorrow.

On the drive I listened to many hours of A Game of Thrones, the first book in the A Song of Fire and Ice cycle.  I’m not sure that I’m really that into it.  It is okay but I am very surprised by how popular it is.  Not what I was expecting at all.  It’s good, but much slower and more political than I had assumed.

It was probably six thirty when I managed to get to sleep.  Tomorrow is going to be a really rough day.  If all goes well I will be about three hours of sleep tonight.  I have to be back to Dallas tomorrow night.  So there is no time for more sleep than this.  I just have to make due.  Tomorrow will be an exceptionally long day for me.  The last few hours of my drive tonight were pretty rough.

So I discovered, somewhat at random, that six years ago I wrote a post talking about the word ramjollock and now Google has me ranked as the sixth hit, on the first page or results, for the word!  It simply means “to shuffle cards.”  Pretty weird that me talking about that word has made it so high in the results.

Today is Monday and SpiceCorps DFW is being held at our place tomorrow.  I had to go to the office today and Dominica is in the office as well.  She was up and in early, as usual.  Morgan was over to watch the girls today.  I had a really busy morning, several calls, so didn’t manage to leave home as early as I would have liked.

We are starting to get really busy in the office.  We’ve been losing a lot of people.  My small, “local” team has lost three people over the last several weeks.  Two went off to work for different departments within the extended reaches of the company and one leaves next week for a career move up to Lansing, Michigan.  Considering the entire team is only eight people to start with, that’s a 38% drop in staff in just a few weeks.  We won’t feel the full impact of the losses for another week yet and then we will really get hit when the furloughs start in about a month.  At that point we will drop to 50% staff or less for much of the remainder of the year.  Doubling the workload while cutting pay obviously doesn’t go over super well.  I’d say we are at a low point in morale since I’ve been there – which seems to actually be the point.  Keeping us running with low morale actually seems to be intentional.  I think that there is some misguided attempt to use attrition to cut the ranks with management forgetting that when you use attrition (other than retirement) to thin ranks that you are skimming the cream off and sending them to the competition and retaining only those unable or unmotivated to leave.  The better and more necessary someone is, the more likely that they will leave.  Which makes it actually start to be embarrassing to be left behind.

Went to the Local Diner for lunch today.  Their tuna melt is just awesome.

After work we spent the evening working on getting the house cleaned up as much as possible.  There won’t be a lot of time for that tomorrow.

Dominica and I were both up pretty early this morning.  I woke up around five thirty then Dominica got up around six.  The curse of going to bed on time, I guess.  Jim came over for about an hour this morning just to hang out.

The girls got up around eight thirty and then at nine or so I drove to Braum’s and got some breakfast for everyone. On my way to pick up breakfast I had a blade frame go down at work and had to deal with that by phone.  I thought that I had a good idea what was wrong and had the datacenter dispatched to look at it before I even got to Braum’s.  I was right and thankfully the fix was quick and easy and handled shortly after I got back home.  Never a true day off, though, it would seam.

Dominica went out this morning and did some shopping at Ikea and got new bar shelves and a few things for the girls.  So we spent some time this afternoon hanging three new Ikea shelves in the freshly painted bar so that we can now move the liquor that is all over the counter up on to the shelves as “top shelves” as opposed to the well that runs behind the bar itself.  We have a lot of people coming over in two days who will be using the bar and Allie is going to be bar tending for us so we want to have everything set up as well as possible.

Once it was all done the shelves really looked great.  They make the bar look so much more like a nice bar and they make the counter clear now.  So kind of a double whammy of improvement.  It makes the whole living room look better.  The next major project is getting the theatre equipment all installed and off of the bar so that the main bar is completely clear again.  That has been a problem for quite some time but it is such an undertaking that it never happens.

We did some cleaning tonight to get ready for Tuesday.  This is going to be a really long week and once it starts there aren’t any breaks so if we don’t get the house cleaned up now, we don’t have any chance to do it later.

It seems inevitable now that I will get drastically behind on SGL updates and fight like crazy to catch back up.  Luciana got me up this morning having soaked through her diaper.  It was seven thirty so I had less than four hours of sleep.  I got up with her so that Dominica could sleep some more and I put Ciana in the shower.  She didn’t want to stay in for too long so I laid down on the bathroom floor and napped there while she played.

Luciana and I finally got really up at eight thirty and Kyler was up a few minutes later.  Not much sleep for anyone.  Dominica was up before nine.

Made coffee and it was time to get to painting.  Dominica took off to go to Lowe’s to get last minute painting supplies and then to Subway to pick up breakfast for everyone.

Kyler is working on painting the bar today.  The goal is to have it fully painted before the even here on Tuesday night when we have twenty or thirty people coming to the house for SpiceCorps DFW.

I put in a ton of time working today.  I worked nearly a straight eleven hour day before even taking a break.  I got caught up on SGL too today.  That was a bit of work.  With so many readers now, it is important to really keep the site updated.

It was eight when Kyler took a break from painting and I took a break from closing tickets and Dominica made some dinner and we all sat down to watch an episode of Doctor Who.  Then it was back to do more work.  So much work to be done.  There never really is an end to it all.

One of our goals for tomorrow is for Dominica to run to Ikea to get shelving units so that we can set up the bar without all of the liquor having to sit on the wet bar.  The well isn’t big enough to hold even half of the stock and if we don’t have shelves it is nearly impossible to work the bar area.  Dominica put in a lot of time today trying to pick out the right shelves to get.  It is tempting to get a huge amount of shelf space but if we are not careful they will overtake all of the space on that side of the bar.  Instead we are trying to go for three shelves vertically to make maximum use of the otherwise blank wall.

Altogether I worked for about fourteen or fifteen hours today.  It was a very long, but very productive day.  I was quite happy to have so much taken care of during the day.  Kyler worked a ton today too.  Probably ten hours of painting and stuff.

Kyler went home after the painting was finished as he needed some sleep.  Dominica, Liesl and I watched a few episodes of The New Girl and went to bed a little after midnight.  Luciana had gone to bed earlier in Liesl’s room.  They love being roommates and we are starting to try that out more and more often.  We are really hoping that they will decide that they want to room together all of the time and the back room, Luciana’s old room, can be turned into a permanent guest bedroom and extra office space.

Still more work to do tomorrow.  It is going to be another busy day.  But overall I feel good.  Good progress, the house is looking good.  I have to be really on top of things before Monday because Tuesday and Wednesday are booked completely solid and Thursday I am going to be exhausted out of my mind.  Pretty much the entire week is completely shot.  Next weekend is going to be desperate work catchup as well and sometime next week Dominica and the girls are heading to the lake house so I will have the house to myself most of the week.  That will be my complete catch up and house cleaning week.  I’m already planning on doing my annual Rug Doctoring of the living quarters section of the house.  Hopefully this year I do not need to put up aluminum foil on all of the windows like I did last year to keep the house cool enough.

Work all day.  Had lunch at the Local Diner with Dan.  Talked about all of the latest developments at work.  Found out today that one of the main AIX administrators is leaving in two weeks.  We’ve already lost a lot of people recently so this is a major blow both specifically to the AIX that is currently overwhelmed with work and now being cut in half but also to the team in general which is running far below normal levels overall.  We are getting burned out as a department pretty quickly and there is no sign of relief.

I took advantage, again, of the Steam Summer Sale today and picked up eight more video games for $18, mostly games for Liesl and I to play soon.  Graphical adventure games.  And a couple of casual games for Dominica.

Our big set of Lenovo ultrabooks arrived today for doing the Office 365 demonstrations next week.  Now I have to work on setting them all up.  Eleven laptops.  They are really slick, touch screen models for showing off Office 365 on Windows 8.

I came home and worked a bit.  Dominica made salads and we started watching The New Girl but Kyler arrived before we had made it through a single episode.  We watched two of the best episodes from Season Four, The Silence in the Library and it’s second half episodes, because that was what Kyler was up to in the series.  We watched those because Liesl was still awake and the sun was not completely down yet.  Luciana went to bed pretty early.

Once the sun was down Liesl was off to bed and we went back and watched Blink which Kyler had been skipping so that he could watch it on the big screen with us.  Such a good episode.  It was kind of an epic Doctor Who evening with so many of the most epic episodes in one night.  We watched one more episode after that, then Dominica went to bed.

Kyler and I stayed up for a few hours, mostly looking at European photographs and some videos from our trips over there the last few years.  It was a quarter till four when we finally headed to bed.