Sheep Guarding Llama

I worked until late last night, about three in the morning.  Probably not the best idea but there is just so much work to be done.  I can never get to everything.  So today started off with me being pretty tired.

I went into the office this morning.  Just the usual.  Dan finally got in and said that he had gotten stuck working until midnight yesterday!  Good thing that I hadn’t tried to stay at the office waiting for him.  That would have been bad.

At lunch I ran over to Dominica’s office.  She actually got a new office since I was there on Thursday.  She has been moved to a new location.  She has a really large cube with two Dell Windows desktops and an Apple Mac Mini desktop.  Quite the setup.  Nicer than my office by a long shot.

I set up two Drobo B800fs NAS units and got one of them racked and the other set up on Dominica’s desk.  That took a while then it was right back to the office.

I raced home as quickly as I could after work was over but traffic was bad so it took longer than it should have taken on a normal Tuesday evening.  Dominica had spent the whole day cleaning the house, setting things up, baking and getting things ready for SpiceCorps DFW tonight.  We have thirty one people RSVP’d but we never get as many as commit.  Hopefully something close to that will actually show up.

Maggie was the first one there, showing up around five.  She ran some errands for us, like running out to pick up beer for the event.  Normally Watson does that but he texted that his municipal bus was running about an hour late due to traffic coming from downtown.  Kim, coming from uptown, texted to say about the same thing (although she was driving, not taking the bus.)  So it appears that traffic is going to be a painful factor tonight.

Turnout wasn’t too bad, we ended up, in the end, getting nineteen people tonight.  The last several didn’t arrive until between seven and seven thirty, though.  Starting at six appears to just be too early.  It is just so hard for everyone to get there then.

Matt from Drobo came in from California to demonstrate the Drobo SAN equipment and talk about it.  We ended up having a really informal night but I think that the format worked out well for him as several people talked to him for an hour or more before he did the presentation and considering how many clients and potential clients he had there I think that it was really valuable for him.

After seven thirty he did do a formal talk too which went well.  I skipped doing my talk tonight partially because I was never able to have prepared as much as I had hoped that I would have but also because there just wasn’t a good time in which to do it.  It worked out just fine.  Drobo got us all pizza too.  Dominica made Francesca’s new bread dip in a bread bowl, brownies and more.  It was a pretty good spread.

As always, we intend to wrap up the meeting at a reasonable time but we actually went until three in the morning with the usual crew remaining – Chris, PSX and Matt were the last to leave which is pretty common.  Randy didn’t manage to quite hang on until the end but probably made it until at least two.

So it was around three when I went to bed and I need to be in Austin first thing tomorrow.  Tomorrow is going to be a very, very long day.

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We did a little work today to move the house in the direction of being ready for Tuesday night’s event but did not really get much done.  I had a lot of work to try to do but it was hard to get to it.  We got in a bit of family time today.  This week is mostly a lost week with the SpiceCorps event on Tuesday and me traveling on Wednesday and Thursday.  We needed time just at home today.  Even after my travels are done, I am only going to be home for one day before Grey arrives from Denver for four days so while I am home we are still going to be pretty busy and not really able to get in a lot of family time.

Today was our day at home to get things done.  We did very little today.  I worked from the office in the back of the house much of the day.  The kids were happy to just have a day playing at home.  It was pretty low key overall.

We did quite a bit of cleaning around the house today.  It was getting pretty bad and we got it halfway decent by the end of the day.  That was a lot of effort.

Dominica went out to the salon and did a little shopping today and I stayed home with the girls.

I did quite a bit of setup on my desktop today getting it prepped so that I can get back into working on my Ruby on Rails project and I got some work done on it too.  Just a tiny bit, but a little.

We stayed in tonight.

I got up at five fifty this morning.  That wasn’t fun.  But after going to bed at ten last night, it was fine.  Really messes with my schedule, though.  Liesl had gotten me up at two this morning too.  This was an odd one.  She woke me up and had me tuck her back into bed because her blankets had fallen off.  It reminding me of Oreo a little bit who never, for his entire life, learned how to get himself under a blanket and would wake me up regularly at night to ask me to cover him up.  So I went into Liesl’s room, lifted her up into her bed, tucked her in, checked my email and went right back to sleep.

I was on the road to the office by six thirty five.  At six forty one, while driving south bound on the George Bush Tollway, I got to see high to my left, a very low meteor streak across the sky and burn up over Farmer’s Branch or Irving.  It was really intense as the sun was already starting to come up, just a tiny bit, and there was significant cloud cover.  So this was way under the clouds and lit up the sky a little.  Very surprising.  It was really cool to see.  Only my second meteor to be seen up close like that.  The last one was a decade ago while driving south on 81 through Pennsylvania much later at night.

Got to work at six fifty so that I could cover the non-farm payroll announcement call at a quarter after seven.  Spiceworks was down this morning when I got in and had been apparently for a little while.  Now what do I do?

Non-farm payroll announcement was great this morning, 146K new US jobs.  Much higher than had been expected.  That plus the healthy retail numbers suggest that things are actually improving and that we are pulling out of the economic slump that we have been in for the last many years.

By nine this morning I was completely caught up on SGL and was talking to Dominica all morning on Lync and had two hours of conference call under my belt.  A very productive morning.  It is amazing what you can get done when Spiceworks is down for a while.  Normally I am so busy trying to keep up there, now all of that has turned into free time.

After an extremely busy morning, around ten Dominica and the girls met me in historic downtown Carrollton and we got ourselves a nice, early lunch at the Broadway Bistro there right on the main square.  We had to check it out because I needed a chance to talk to the owner and see if they would be able to host Grey’s upcoming Backup 101 class that he is going to be teaching there on Monday, 17th of December.  Danielle and I had checked it out when she was here and we had thought that the venue was awesome and the food is really good.  It would be perfect.  Historic downtown Carrollton is great too.

We are all set to use the Bistro for the class.  That is going to be really cool and I am glad to have that worked out.  Now we can focus on getting ready for the class.  We are going to be swamped with Dominica working at least two days next week, SpiceCorps DFW on Tuesday night, two days of me being in Austin for Dell World, Grey arriving at the end of the week and staying with us, then Grey’s class on Monday afternoon.  That’s about eight days of just “go go go.”

I got back to the office by noon and it was just an insanely crazy day from there on out.  I never had a moment to relax at all.  I never managed to even get a coffee or an energy drink like I normally do let alone go for a walk up to the corner to get it as a bit of exercise.  It was a rough one.  And I have to work tomorrow morning too.

I was stuck in the office until nearly seven this evening making for nearly a twelve hour day.  I was exhausted by the end of the day.  Definitely ready to call it a day by the time that I was done.

I got home and we pretty much did nothing.  We just took it easy.  I hung out with the girls as much as I could and Dominica and I were heading to bed a little after ten.  I have to do work for the office tomorrow so I don’t really get to sleep in.