Sheep Guarding Llama

It is much colder today and still rainy.  It has been rainy, at least at night, for nearly a week now.  I definitely prefer the winter rain to the winter snow back home.

Today is the hump day.  The morning was very slow at the office which was nice.  Monday and Tuesday were quite a bit busy but today was nice and relaxed.  Good day to catch up on my writing.  I did a lot of writing, both SGL and SMB IT Journal / Datamation stuff and an article that Spiceworks has been wanting me to write for a Spotlight article.  Boy am I busy writing this week!

I was in the office all day.  Worked through lunch, that’s pretty normal now.

Got home and mixed the evening between writing and hanging out with the family.  We did not do too much tonight.  I stayed up late getting some articles written.  That’s about all.

I am in the office today.  It has been very warm yesterday and today, in the mid-seventies.  It was nearly eighty when Dominica came home last night.  We opened up the windows today to air out the house.  It was raining a little when I headed into the office.

I got a lot of kudos for my work with Python scripting yesterday.  Now I am being assigned scripting projects, of course.  This should be fun though.  I like working in Python and don’t get to do it all that often.

I got home from work a little late, not bad.  I hung out with the girls, did a bit of work, mostly writing, and then Dominica made dinner and we watched some Are You Being Served? while we ate.

Then Dominica sent me out to Walmart to pick up our new “beer fridge” that we got for Christmas.  It just arrived this afternoon as a “ship to store” to our local Walmart.  So we got it tonight but can’t hook it up until tomorrow.

Then I hopped onto a conference call for a while and we got the girls off to bed.

I stayed up working until around three in the morning.  I got a lot done.

It is Monday, my day at home with the girls.  Dominica was up and out the door at a quarter till seven as usual.   I got to sleep in for a bit.   Liesl got me up first and hopping into bed to snuggle for just a little bit.  Luciana slept in quite late.  She has been just exhausted recently.

Both girls were absolute angels today.  Liesl spent a ton of time entertaining herself.  Luciana spent much of the day in my room watching shows on her own.  They kept themselves apart and quiet for an unprecedented amount of time and even when they played together it was quiet and friendly.  No fights, no problems.  It was amazing.  If they were like this everyday I could stay home with them all of the time.  It is amazing what a really good night of sleep will do for them.  Going to bed at or before nine really helped.  It also allowed more story reading time which helps too, I think.

Luciana even went down for her afternoon nap without the slightest bit of complaining.  I was so productive today, it was awesome.  It was really a great day.

Luciana took a really long shower this afternoon too.  I’ve learned that I just can’t let Liesl play with her in the shower.  Liesl is good but Luciana gets upset because she gets splashed and because Liesl wants to share the rubber duckies.  Luciana just needs alone time in the shower and she is perfectly happy with her rubber duckies, Dora the Explorer toy and her pink bucket.

I did some serious vacuuming today with the Roomba again.  Last night Liesl and I picked up her room so that it would be ready for vacuuming today.  So I turned the Roomba loose on the entire “private wing” of the house and it did a great job again.  I ended up running the vacuum for three whole runs of that part of the house.   I also got my office floor completely picked up and ran the vacuum in there for about an hour.  That made a big difference too.  The house is just looking better and better.

Dominica ended up working an insanely long day.  She put in a full twelve hours in the office getting home just after seven and then she had dinner and logged in again and worked all evening remotely taking care of things that had been lined up while she was in the office.  She was really exhausted by the end of the day.

We watched some “Are You Being Served?” tonight but very little.  I had some work that needed by attention.  The office needed me to write and run a Python script tonight that would do some automated work that would going to be impossible to do without a good script so I had to work on that this evening.

Got the girls off to bed at a decent time again tonight.  We are focused really heavily now on getting them to bed earlier as it really seems to be making a big difference in their behaviour, and Dominica really needs them in good moods tomorrow considering how tired she is likely to be.

Dad comes to Texas to visit one week from tomorrow.

We were up too late last night watching Sherlock.  I hate when we get addicted to shows like that.  Today is a “no television” day for Dominica and I to keep that from happening so that we can be a little bit productive instead.  Liesl came into our room at seven thirty and got me up to set her up with the iPad and her morning chocolate milk.  She still drinks one bottle of it first thing in the morning and another last thing at night every day.  It’s a routine but since it isn’t actually chocolate milk but actually that formulated super healthy kid protein shake stuff it actually works out perfectly since she is so bad at eating well during the day.  Luciana slept in a little more.

Dominica had a salon appointment at noon and did some shopping while she was out.  I had the girls.  I got no work done with them hanging all over me today, it was crazy.  They took a long shower together.  They love playing with the ducks.  Luciana at one end staying more or less dry and Liesl just standing in the water the whole time.  They are so funny.

Dominica made dinner and we ate is mid afternoon.  While eating we watching a single episode of Are You Being Served?.  And that was the only twenty-two minutes of television that we saw all day.  We were both at our desks much of the day.  I know that I got a lot of work done and I managed to hang out with the girls quite a bit.

Liesl is really getting in to “doing school.”  Dominica sets her up at her desk with ABCMouse, an online educational site and Liesl just goes crazy doing the lessons.  She really loves it.  She has so much fun and it is the highlight of her day.  She gets so excited when Dominica offers to let her do it.

Luciana went to bed really early, about eight thirty.  And Liesl went to bed before nine, which never happens.  I read her her nighttime stories, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Leo the Late Bloomer and Caps for Sale and while I did she diligently cleaned up her room, all of her own accord without me having even suggested it.  Very odd.  When I was done reading I joined her and we had her whole room picked up in just a few minutes.  She is excited that it is clean and that the Roomba is going to be able to vacuum it after she gets up in the morning.  We are all hoping that the Roomba proves to be motivation for keeping all of the house clean as we can then use it to do the hard work for us if we just do that much.

Dominica went to bed shortly after Liesl did and I stayed up until after three in the morning getting some backlogged work that I had to do completed.  I was very happy knocking out an article that I wanted to do as well on DRBD clusters on OpenSuse.  I got some very positive feedback on that article before the night was done.

Hard to believe that dad will be coming to Texas in a little over a week.  It has seemed like the trip was so far away for so long but now it is only like eight or nine days.

Slept in nice and late this morning.  I got up at nine thirty and Dominica at nearly eleven.  The girls both slept in really late this morning too.  We have all been really exhausted this week and our sleep schedules have been all out of kilter so it was nice to get a nice, late morning to relax.

I am on call this weekend so I can’t really leave home to go anywhere, not that I wanted to.

Lots of family time today, not a lot of productivity.  We did set the Roomba loose on the carpeted part of the house today.  We had it do three runs down there with only Liesl’s room closed.  It did a great job of vacuuming there and didn’t take too long.  The pattern that it does is really wonky and I’m not convinced that it hits everything but overall it did a really good job including investigating way under the bed which is nice since obviously we never vacuum there by hand.  So it is really good at reducing the dust that collects in the house which is important since the kids like to play under there.

This evening we went out to Denny’s for dinner.  Dinner went okay but Liesl was very “not listening” to us by the end of dinner and we had to cancel a trip to Ikea to buy her school supplies (like desks and chairs) that we had planned to do this evening and just grabbed some quick FroYo to go which we ate in the car (none for Liesl, she lost that too) and straight home and the kids off to bed.

We watched the last two (there are only three) episodes in the second season of Sherlock tonight.  What an awesome show.  At the end suddenly it hit me that the guy who plays Dr. Watson is Bilbo Baggins from the new Hobbit movies.  Since we haven’t seen them yet, we hadn’t made the connection.  I looked up the main star, who plays Sherlock and found that he is in the Hobbit movies as well.  What a small world!  Weird.  Now we are a lot more excited to see them.