Sheep Guarding Llama

The second podcast from Kidding Around Europe is finally up.  This one covers our arrival in the UK a full year ago.

It is Monday morning and I am home with the girls.  Dominica is at work today.  Liesl is very excited that she is now tall enough to be able to reach the light switch in our bedroom.  She can’t reach the fan switch yet, but she can turn the main light on and off.  It is a whole new era of Liesl self sufficiency.

Ciana spent a bit of time playing in the shower today.  She loves taking showers.  She sits near the faucet and played with buckets and a water can and rubber duckies that Liesl has collected over the years.

We had our kitchen sink clog on us completely this evening.  So when it wouldn’t clear I had to make a Walmart run for drain cleaning chemicals as we had none.  Gave it an attempt but it didn’t get the drain cleared tonight.  Will need to see if the garbage disposal can force the water through tomorrow.

This evening Dominica and I managed to record the next two podcasts for KAE.  One that I linked above and another that I hope to have up in the next three days on our time in Nottingham.

Got to bed not too late tonight.  Need to catch up on my sleep.  Was tired all day.

Today was an insanely busy work day for me.  I had to get up this morning and barricade myself in my office for the entire day.  I have just loads of homework, test writing, SGL and other stuff to get taken care of plus I did a lot of work for the office today.  I worked until four in the morning last night and Liesl got up around four thirty and I hadn’t fallen asleep yet.  So it was closer to five, rather than four, when I actually managed to get to sleep.  I was pretty tired all day.

Very little to talk about today, my day was just so busy.  I barely got to see anyone all day.  The girls would come into the office from time to time but then they would start to play and get rowdy and had to be shooed again so that I could work.  It is quite warm today and we had to adjust the air conditioning unit in my server room to blow cold air into my office so that I could work with the office door closed most of the day.  That actually worked pretty well.

I ended up having so much work to do that I worked solidly until four in the morning.  It was a good thing that I did, though, as I got a ton of work done and it was really useful.  I feel better about my workload after having a chance to do that push.  And SGL is now up to date as well.  And Kidding Around Europe is seeing updates again.

Check Out the new Kidding Around Europe!  I got the site moved from Rackspace to our own hosting in Toronto, added a new site theme that is way easier to use than our old one and we posted are very first podcast on the site.  So I am excited to see what all happens now that we finally have something for people to really go see.

A quiet Saturday at home getting caught up on work.  I was in my office for most of the day.  We were craving subs today so ordered in from Joe’s again.  We’ve been watching a little bit of Rick Steve’s Best of Europe Season 7 which just released recently on Hulu Plus.  We are nearly done with it at this point.  Only about two episodes left.  We aren’t as exited about it as we were before our last trip and we have pretty much not watched any of it in the last year since having done our big Euro tour.  It’s funny to think that our regularly watching of it was a full year ago, it feels so recent.  We definitely burned ourselves out on the first six seasons getting ready for that trip having watched every episode multiple times and watching lots of other travel shows too.  That was a major part of our lifestyle for about nine months.  But for the last eleven months we’ve not watched a thing.  The seventh season isn’t so exciting for us as it heavily covers just a few places and they are places that we are not particularly excited about – Rome, Paris, Florence and London.  We’ve done Florence and London and while we want to do Paris and Rome, obviously, they are not super exciting destinations nor are they unique for a show – we’ve seen too many shows on both.

Today’s project is breaking down Luciana’s crib and preparing her “big girl bed.”  Luciana sleeps in the crib that we bought before Liesl was born and it is convertible from a crib to a small bed to a large bed.  So today we converted it from the crib to the small bed.  Luciana thought that that was pretty cool and seems happy about her change of sleeping arrangements.  We are excited that she will be able to start getting herself up in the mornings like Liesl started doing around that age and this will make traveling a lot better because she will not require a pack and play wherever we go.  That was a major ordeal on our last European trip and is on every out of town trip that we take now.

Dominica went to the salon this afternoon and then did some grocery shopping.  We’ve been running pretty lean in the house and needed a lot of things.

I did a lot of work today. Luciana went to bed a little later than usual but not too bad.  Fingers crossed that she can actually sleep in the new bed.  Liesl stayed up way too late but she is good about sleeping in in the morning so we figure that she will be fine tomorrow.

I was going to go into the office this morning but got up at seven thirty after only three and a half hours of sleep, made sure that everything was under control, showered and was about to leave for work when I had to jump into a major conference call and ended up spending the entire morning on a call for the office.    That was a long morning.  But it forced me to stay home which was a nice surprise.  I was not expecting to get to be home today but am very glad that I am.  Today is going to be a very long day for work and I have to do work for the office again at eight tomorrow morning so there is not a chance for me to sleep in tomorrow either.

The weather was pretty nice today and we opened the windows.  Dominica did a bunch of house cleaning.  There was a light drizzle outside too.

Very little news today.  Mostly I worked.  I started at eight in the morning and worked until about ten in the evening.  I have a team in India now that routinely starts Friday night deployments very late and has all kinds of problems with them.  This is our third or fourth failed deployment night in a row.  Each one going until nine or ten at night, then people giving up and falling back in the morning.  What a mess and how annoying that I now have to plan on Friday nights going all night, every single time.

I bad a liquor store run tonight as our house is horribly out of everything.  I discovered that our local liquor store that I had liked so much went out of business.  Apparently I hadn’t been going there enough recently.  So now it takes a minimum of twenty minutes of highway speed driving to get to the nearest liquor store.  Texas is ridiculous with stuff like this.  It’s like they design the laws to be as environmentally unfriendly as they can possibly imagine.  Ten miles to get to the “neighbourhood liquor store?”  Seriously?  I don’t live in the county, I live right in the city.  In most of the world all the normal things are walking distance away from everyone.  It is so unthinkable that you can’t buy anything without ten miles even in the fourth largest city in America that makes it impossible for people from the outside to understand why Americans behave the way that we do.  Of course we drive everywhere and have zero sense of local community, how can we?

Luciana was in bed before I was done working and Liesl stayed up for a little bit and watched a couple of shows with us.  We did not make a late night of it, though.

Dominica was up and off to the office early.  Her back is finally enough better that she can go into the office.  She has been home all week with back pain.  So we hadn’t been sure if she would be able to go into the office at all this week but she was feeling okay this morning and really might have been able to have handled work yesterday but we figured better safe than sorry.

I walked in to Luciana’s room to get her up this morning and I said “Good Morning Luciana, Happy Birthday!”  And she said, “Birthday?  Me?  Party?”

Dominica had a very busy day at the office since all of her on site work was piled up for the week and even on a normal week there is more than she can get to in two full days of being there.

Ciana said that she wanted pizza for dinner tonight, not a very common request around here, so we ordered in pizza from Joe’s for the birthday girl and Dominica backed cupcakes.  It was a very low key birthday party.  The real party will be in a week and a half down in Houston.