Sheep Guarding Llama

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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.

My new article on Datamation is up: The Case for Early Windows 8 Adoption

Dominica was off to work early this morning, leaving just before seven.  I got up around six thirty and Liesl was up around seven thirty.  So I got Liesl her chocolate milk and set her up in the play room so that she could watch the Care Bears while I got ready for work.  We couldn’t find the Care Bears that she wanted on Netflix, then she told me that “no, it is on the green one.”  This took me a while to figure out but luckily I did because she is so smart and was frustrated that I couldn’t understand her.  By “it’s on the green one” she was referring to the colour of the program that we were running.  Netflix is red, Hulu is green!  I switched to Hulu and there were her shows.  Impressive.

I jumped in the shower to get ready for work.  I thought that Kayla was coming at a quarter till nine, not a quarter after eight.  So when I got out of the shower and heard Liesl talking to someone I panicked.  It was eight eighteen and I found Liesl sitting on the windowsill of the front window talking to Kayla who was standing outside.  Luckily she had only been there about three minutes.  I thought that I had another half an hour or so before she arrived.  Oops.

Luciana woke up just as Kayla arrived so I got her up so that I got to see her for a few minutes before I left for work.  In theory Kayla will only be babysitting for a little while since I leave around nine and Dominica should be home just after eleven.  She works just a four hour Thursday, from seven to eleven.

Work was pretty normal today.  Everything was fine and I was set to work through lunch when Dominica said that she was stuck at work (it was nearly noon already) and that she had an issue that was not going to be resolved anytime soon so I had to run home to relieve Kayla so that she could go to her normal job which she works in the afternoon.

So I relieved Kayla as the babysitter around twelve twenty, thinking that I would just be doing lunch at home and that surely Dominica would be home by two since that would be nearly a double length Thursday for her already.  Ha ha, what do I know?

Dominica came home around three just long enough to grab a coffee and talk about plans for the day.  She was home for no more than thirty minutes.  What a crazy day she is having and she is already up to nearly eight hours.

I chatted with Chris over Lync and he said that he could be over shortly to babysit so that I could go help Dominica.  So she returned immediately to work so that she could get as much done as possible while waiting for me to come help.  Not that there is much that I can do to help since the issue is one of hardware failure, but an extra set of eyes and some additional experience can’t hurt, either.

So I worked like crazy to get wrapped up at the office and Chris arrived just after four.  By no later than four forty I was able to take off and run over to Dominica’s office and help out.  It was a frustrating night, hardware failures always are and there is never enough equipment or information around to fix things easily.  We tried everything that we could think of for about another two hours.  They actually left us alone at the office and we had to turn out the lights as we left.  Very weird for her second day.

It was nearly seven when we left, we would have worked longer but Chris could only babysit till seven as he had a client to go see. So that was our cutoff time.

We got home, Chris took off, we hung out with the girls, ate some Joe’s that was ordered in and watched Family Guy and got all caught up on the latest season on Hulu.  We were all exhausted.  Dominica and I were both falling asleep trying to stay awake for Liesl.

We got Liesl in bed by about a quarter after nine, very early for her but it couldn’t be helped.  Luciana had gone to bed around eight.  She loves going to bed, no complaints from her.  Dominica was in bed around nine thirty and I was just before ten.  I have to be up early tomorrow for the non-farm payroll announcement that I cover the first Friday of every month.

So suddenly, instead of working one eight hour day and one four hour day, Dominica has now done eight hours and eleven hours on her first week plus I was there for an additional two!  And not only that but it is our guess and expectation that they are going to have her working there tomorrow as well as they have three major things going on all at once: the continuation of this particular issue, the installation of the large new archival storage system and a cubicle move for Dominica’s workspace (of just two days) where they need her to help identify what to keep and what to toss.  So she could very easily be putting in another two to four hours tomorrow!  And I am guessing that I might be wanted as well during lunch which would be awesome.