Sheep Guarding Llama

I slept in all that I could today.  Still not a full night of sleep but at least five or six hours.  Then up and into the office for the day.  Nothing special at work today.  Lunch at the Local Diner.

I got home and we just spent the evening relaxing and packing so that Dominica can get on the road with the girls first thing in the morning because the lake house that they have this year will allow them to check in anytime tomorrow so there is no need to wait until the afternoon to get in.  They want to get maximum use out of it and getting to the lake house on the first day late in the afternoon is just annoying because you need time to get set up, figure out where things are, deal with problems, etc.

Dominica was hungry so after I was done working, which was around seven thirty, I ran over to Subway and picked up dinner.  I brought it back and we discovered that a new season of Rules of Engagement was now available on Netflix so we watched just a little bit of that.  Just enough to eat our dinner.

Then Luciana decided that she was tired and went to bed and Liesl asked if we could play Ankh 3 which we have not had very much time to play together recently.  So we went into my office and she and I put in probably two hours of video gaming together.  That was fun.

Then everyone went off to bed.

The drive this morning was awful.  I was struggling all night to stay awake.  The weather was good but I was just so exhausted.  It was all that I could do to keep moving.  I was getting out of the car at nearly every rest stop just to walk around.  It was such a hard drive that I was in physical pain trying to make it.  I would have stopped at a hotel but if I didn’t make it home Dominica would have to call into work or something.

So I pressed on.  Dominica had to go in late, but only a tiny bit.  She was sitting on the couch when I dragged myself in the front door.  I was feeling awful.  I went straight to bed, it was about seven thirty when I fell asleep, and she went straight off to work.

I only managed to get one hour of sleep before the girls were awake and climbing all over me.  I was so tired that I could not safely drive them to daycare so I called Dominica and she came home, got them and took them up to Corinth.  It is too bad that Morgan wasn’t watching them today or we could have just asked her to come early and we wouldn’t have had to have run around so much.

So just one hour of sleep and I have to make it all day.  This is going to be hard.

Got into the office.  I really don’t remember much of the day.  I was practically delirious all day.  And really soar from the drive.

After work I went home and helped Dominica get the house ready for the Dungeons & Dragons game tonight.  Not the best timing but we didn’t want to cancel either since we have to cancel, or do something creative, next week anyway since Dominica is going to be out of town all week.  I considered taking a nap this evening before everyone arrived but there really wasn’t time.  I decided to take a shower instead and rather than being a bit late, everyone arrived early tonight and so I wasn’t even quite into the shower yet.

The session tonight was pretty good although I was struggling hard to stay awake and did doze off once or twice towards the end.

I was not as lucky as I had hoped that I would be and I only got about two hours of sleep last night. I had some CPAP issues that kept me from falling asleep too quickly and then I woke up at nine.  Two hours after putting in a sixteen hour day of work followed by seven hours of driving last night and needing to do the same again today plus a little extra driving.  This is not going to go well.

I got to work from the hotel at nine thirty and worked until just after noon.  then it was into the car and back on the highway.  I got up to Bob’s place in Kansas City at one thirty.

I worked for the afternoon from Bob’s.  We sat out in the Panama room with our laptops.  It was a nice afternoon.  Just before it was time to head to the SpiceCorps event to set up Francis came by and visited a bit as well.  He had flown in this morning from Austin for the event.

We got to the Overland Park Chamber of Commerce building which is where the meeting was going to be held at about five.  It was only about ten minutes away from Bob’s house making it pretty convenient to go there.

We got there on time and got set up.  The meeting had a really good turn out, more than thirty people and the presentations went well.  Francis presented on Spiceworks 7.0 which releases soon and I spoke on hosted services and Microsoft Office 365 which I had presented last night.

After the meeting we went to a local bar for about an hour.  Just had some appetizers then Bob drove me back to his house where my car was waiting.

So it was eleven, again, when I managed to get back on the road for Dallas.  This is going to be a horrible night.  I need to get to Dallas before seven if Dominica is to make it to work on time.

It is a straight shot down Interstate 35.  So I took off and was already feeling sleeping when I was still not yet to Topeka and only just getting started.  At least no storms or rain is expected tonight.  That would be more than I could handle.  Just the exhaustion will be enough to make this a horrible drive.

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.