Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is a bit of a relaxing day.  Yesterday the migration completed so well that there is nothing that we have to do today and so we all get the day to relax.  We are very thankful that the migration went so smoothly that it did not require anything more from us today.

I am the “on call” person this weekend and had to get up on the early side and log in and work pretty steadily all morning.  I was even more tired considering that last night was the time change so we lost an hour of sleep as well.  I sure hope that my children read this someday and laugh about what backwards, archaic fools we were to have allowed our government to do something so foolhardy.  Few things highlight the incompetence of government like honoring the daylight savings time system.

Art and Danielle decided to run out the south side of Fort Worth this evening to look at villages out that way that might be of interest to them.  They were not too happy with the Internet access options in the wilderness out on the east side of Dallas.  They are hoping that there might be a little bit more civilization down to the southwest rather than the northeast.

When they got back they were pretty happy with what they had seen out in the southern direction.  They are hopeful that they will be able to find a house that direction.  Their real roadblock is selling their house in New York, not finding one in Texas.

This evening I had to work on course work for RIT a bit.  I had my second assignment set due this evening and had to work through that.  That took a bit but it wasn’t bad at all.  I am very excited to be on my final semester of classes!

No rest for me.  I had to be up after just three hours of sleep, got showered and drove into the office to work a full day from there for the weekend’s COB test that is going on.  Talk about bad timing.  Combining a very long day yesterday, plus the COB test today, plus I am on support all day tomorrow and I was helping Dominica with her migration, all in one 72 hour stretch.  This is going to be rough.

I was a little late getting into the office but not bad.  COB tests are normally pretty low key for me.  My systems always pass with little effort.

I got to do some serious troubleshooting today which was nice.  And COB tests always mean that there is food in the office.  We had bagels, donuts and fully curry for lunch.  It was a slow day, but I was tired.

After getting done at the office I drove straight up to Dominica’s office where she and Art had been working for quite some time taking care of the finishing touches on the migration and making sure that everything was ready for Monday morning in the hopes that there would be nothing needing to be done tomorrow at all.

Art gave me a tour as I still have not seen the bulk of the facility.  It was really cool.  They actually have an entire mock-up of a convention center floor in there with set-up displays, conference area, presentation space, etc.  You could put on an entire small conference in there.  I got to see the manufacturing areas, graphics design areas and warehouse space too.  Very cool stuff.  I had no idea.  That facility is huge.

We worked there for a couple of hours and then went back to the house, finally able to relax after a lot of work.  I have to be up early tomorrow too as I am covering the on call shift for the post COB test problems.  So that will be a long day.

This evening we relaxed and watched the 50th James Bond film Skyrim which Dominica and I have been waiting to see.  The Ralstons had bought it on DVD so we got to watch their copy.  It was pretty good.

Today is the big MS Office migration for Dominica and Art.  They both slept in a bit this morning and I headed off to my office very early, leaving home around six in the morning having been awake since around five.  This is going to be a long day.  This morning is the non-farm payroll numbers so I had to be in early.

Everyone else slept in this morning as much as they could.  I came home after lunch and spent the afternoon working from home.  I had already been at work a full day before working from home.  That helped a lot for the evening allowing me to watch the girls and later on in the evening for Danielle to go into the office and assist on site.

Art and Dominica went into the office around three and got things started.  Danielle hung back to help with the kids for a while but not too long.

The office was pretty busy for me and I worked around nearly eight.  Ugh.  Not what I really wanted to do tonight but I was really glad that I was home this evening.

Overall tonight was a major success.  Dominica and Art were in her office until something like three in the morning.  It was exhausting.  Danielle was there with them too.  All three of them were running all over the place getting everything done.  It was quite tiring and a lot of physical exertion.  For my part I was logged in through LogMeIn with as many tabs open as LMI could handle and did migrations for them as quickly as I could scroll from screen to screen.  It was tons and tons of manual work but it went smoothly, we caught lots of problems and addressed them and managed to complete the entire migration itself tonight and there is just some final cleanup to do tomorrow.

It was a major night of work but super successful.  I should have tons more to write but realistically, there is very little to say.  This was a very long day for all of us.  I was working for twenty four hours straight by the end of it all and was quite tired.  After they all returned to the house we spent about an hour discussing tomorrow’s plans before turning in for the night.

Exhausting?  Yes.  But we were all very happy being able to go to bed knowing that there were no technical obstacles waiting for us tomorrow and that all we have to do is make sure that all of the machines are ready for Monday morning.  The end is well in sight and we know that we will be able to rest this weekend.  Well the will, not me so much.  When we started this there was the fear that all of them would be stuck working the entire weekend, possibly even overnights.

Everyone but me stayed home today.  This morning was the final morning to relax.  This is going to be a very hectic weekend.  I was in the office all day.

This evening we just stayed in.  There was some early migration work to be done so Art and Dominica worked on that some.  These were the early test machines to get ready for tomorrow.  Mostly everything went smoothly and we got our final documentation done and ready to go.  The plan is for Art and Dominica to go into the office early tomorrow afternoon and start as early as possible.  I will join them once I am out of work to see if we can get them out of their earlier.  I have to work in the office this weekend so we are extra busy.

Off to bed early tonight. Need our sleep.

 

Danielle and I went to Caffe Bene again this morning.  We are loving that place.  This is day three, in a row, that I have been there.  Definitely my new haunt.  We got Belgian waffles and coffee and had a meeting for about an hour before I went on to the office and she got some waffles to take back to the house.  Today I tried the ricotta, almonds and fig Belgian waffle.  Not as the goat cheese and peach, but still very good.

Much of my day was spent dealing with RIT logistics.  I am starting my class today.  I am taking a class on the technical information design.  This is my final semester of classes at RIT and I am very excited.  I can’t wait to be done with the whole thing.  I have been in college continuously for nineteen years.  That amount of time it would be nice to have at least one graduate degree to show for it.  I have to do two classes this semester, one yet to be determined, and then my capstone project over the summer and that will be that.

Normal work day.  After work I drove over to Brookhaven and met everyone there for dinner.  We are really make use of our membership this month!

Art and Dominica kind of had the day off today.  They’ve worked the last two days and starting tomorrow will be working solidly through Monday and we hope that they will be done at that point so today is the one day to relax before the super busy schedule hits.