Sheep Guarding Llama

I went into the office this morning.  Nate and Bob managed to fly out of Philly early this morning and arrived just after ten this morning at DFW airport.  Their travel time, from the time that they left work to head to the airport until they arrived in Dallas took them almost exactly the same amount of time that it takes to drive the same trip.  Not an impressive feat, really.  It’s amazing how often driving is just as fast as flying, even when going across the country.

So I left work when Nate texted me that they were on the ground and I drove over to the airport to get them.  My office is so close to the airport that I was sitting outside their gate waiting for them more than ten minutes before they even had their luggage!

Once I picked them up I drove them downtown to the Hyatt at Reunion Tower downtown and dropped them off.  We made plans for dinner and I drove back to the office.

I worked until late because there was a lot going on, then ran home, changed and was back out the door in thirty minutes.  Dominica, Francesca and the kids went to Brookhaven for dinner while I was going to be out.  Nate and Bob thought that checking out the Tower Club downtown would be fun.  So I drove down to Trinity Mills station to catch the train.  I hate parking downtown.

I was buying my ticket on the east side of the station when the southbound green line DART arrived.  I bought my ticket as quickly as I could and literally ran the length of the train, rounded the south end of it, ran back up the other side of the platform and dove onto the train as it was ready to pull away.  Thankfully there was a human running the train and knew I was trying to make it.  So the timing was “perfect” and I didn’t waste any time on my journey downtown.

I got to the Thanksgiving Tower a bit ahead of the guys, they were lost wandering around the city.  So I got to wait a little bit for them.  Then we went up and had dinner at the Tower Club.  They were dutifully impressed.  And it worked out well to provide nice views of the entire area.  I went for the striped bass.  Bob had the venison with pumpkin bread pudding on the side.  Nate had the pork chop.  We stayed until after nine just enjoying the atmosphere.

It was a bit early to call it a night and they are sort of on vacation so they decided to ride the train back up north with me and go out for a bit.  So we grabbed the car and drove up to Redneck Heaven in Lewisville and hung out there for a few hours before I drove them back to their hotel and called it a night.  This is our first time hanging out in around four years or more!

It was rather late night for me after driving the guys back downtown to their hotel and then driving back home to Carrollton.

March is just flying by for us.  I still feel like it should be February and March is nearly halfway through.  How did this happen?  We have been so busy and so many people have been visiting us that I have lost all sense of perspective on time.

I spent in a little this morning not getting up until eight thirty.  I need some time to recover from the time change.  I am one of those people for whom the time shift really throws me off significantly.

My left foot is still really bothering me.  Overall I think that it is better today but not my much.  It is only better today because yesterday was so bad.  I can mostly walk but every so often I do something that ends up being really painful.

The Grice Family left Houston really early and drove up for Spring Break.  So our cleaning window between the Ralstons leaving and the Grices arriving was very small.  Dominica did all of the cleaning today.  I had to get logged into work and also couldn’t really walk or be very useful.

Francesca hit some major traffic issues on the way north so it took them a lot longer than it should have taken.  But they still arrived pretty early.  It was before eleven.

Work was heavy today, I was really busy.  I did not get very much time to relax at all.

After work we took the family to Brookhaven for kids night.  That went really well.  Everyone really enjoyed their dinner.

Nate and Bob ended up having their flight delayed and then cancelled tonight, but not until after they had flown from Ithaca to Philadelphia.  So they were stranded in Philly overnight.  I will be picking them up in the morning.

We got Francesca to watch the Doctor Who episode “Blink” which she really liked.  Then Dominica tried to get her into the second season of the show but she fell asleep halfway through the episode.

Today is the big “after day” for the weekend’s exhausting migration.  So everyone but me is at work with Dominica today.  Danielle took in a baker’s dozen dozen of donuts (does that make it a baker’s gross?)  That went over well.  Dominica and Art were able to handle the very few issues that came up without any problem and Art and Danielle were able to head back to the office late in the morning, pack the car and get on the road long before noon to try to make it back to New York as soon as possible.  They were really excited about that, they are looking forward to being home again.

So by noon it was just me at home watching the girls who were both very good today and I barely knew that they were there at all.  Dominica worked a full day and came home and worked some more.  She is really tired but is only going to do a half day yet on Thursday and consider the weekend to be her working hours for most of the week.

I had to work a lot today and this evening we just relaxed for the most part.  This is our one and only night in which we have the house to ourselves for the next week.  The Grices will be arriving around ten tomorrow morning and Nate and Bob are expected to arrive from Ithaca sometimes tomorrow evening.  The Grices are planning on staying until Sunday.

We watched some Rick Steves shows that have recently been added to Hulu Plus.  His seventh season still has not shown up but some of his longer, special episodes have. So we watched his Best Hidden Spots in Europe, Christmas in Europe and his show on Iran which was really excellent.  The first two were mostly made from other shows that we had seen previously but his trip to Iran was all new content for us.  Liesl was very excited to watch the one episode that showed Hallstat in Austria where we spent a few days.  She remembered it and thought that it was great seeing it on the big screen.  This is Dominica and my first time seeing film of Hallstat since being there as well and it was really cool to see houses, boats, restaurants, path ways and more than we knew and remembered well.  That’s not something that you get to do very often.

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.