Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica had to return to work early this morning so I stayed home with the girls again.  Dominica and the girls are heading to Houston tomorrow morning for the holidays so today is my last day to spend with them until I see them on Christmas.  So I spent as much time today hanging out with the girls as possible.

Dominica had another long day at the office today and decided to just work through lunch rather than trying to come home so that she could move the day along faster (or get in more hours, as is more likely to be the case.)  So it was just Liesl, Luciana and I together all day.  The girls are getting used to being home with just me now and seem to enjoy our days together and Dominica is getting less panicky about leaving me alone with them for a day at a time.

It was seventy six out today so I got all of the windows open and got some fresh air in the house.  I can’t believe that it is in the second half of December already and this nice out.

Dominica and I talked last night about the number of books that I have remaining in the library in my office and how there just is not any room for anything because all of the shelves are completely full and mostly of books that it would be most unlikely for me ever to read again.  Some because the are outdated, some because they just aren’t a book I would use anymore, some because they were college texts that I don’t think were very good but had to buy, etc.  I’m at a different point in my career than I was when I amassed this collection.

So I started culling through the books today to separate out what I want to keep and what I don’t want to keep.  Easier said than done.  These books represent a huge piece of my professional history and a massive financial investment and they look really cool on the shelves.  It is depressing clearing out book after book but I made the determination that any book that isn’t on the very latest iteration just can’t be justified.

Unlike my book clearing of 2007 which I did ahead of moving out of the house at Geneseo I was far more aggressive this time.  I easily cleared out three or four times as many books as I did in 2007.  The volume of books being moved out is really quite staggering.  It is certainly shocking to me.  There are many books that I am very sad to see go but simply cannot justify keeping just to keep.  There are a handful that I am keeping for nostalgic reasons – Apple ][ and GW BASIC programming books, my very first certification book – MSPress’ Networking Essentials 2nd ed. and my four books on BeOS, but that is about it.  Everything else being kept is staying only because it is highly relevant still.  I condensed the office pretty dramatically.  I have so much more space now.  I cleared out some non-technology books too.

I really needed to do this.  I wish that I had done this before moving to Texas.  Moving all of these books over and over again is what I needed to have avoided.  I definitely want to be prepared before we have to move again.  Moving the books is one of the hardest things that we do.  Going pure ebooks from here on out just makes sense.  I can use those anywhere and move them all along with me over the years.

Like I did in 2007, I took pictures of all of the books and posted them both on Flickr and on Spiceworks in the hopes that some people would be interested and come haul away the books.  I would be a lot happier knowing that they are headed off to good homes rather than to recycling.  I posted the Epic Library pictures online.

I even went out to the garage and started taking the boxes off of the shelves there and bringing them in and going through them looking for more books that we should not be keeping.  I keep forgetting that there were about ten boxes of additional books hiding out there buried beneath all of the other stuff that has arrived and piled up in front of them.  Not nearly enough bookshelves were installed in my office by our incompetent Texan contractor so about one third of the books had to remain boxed.  He was clearly told how much shelving was needed but installed only about half what we ordered claiming that it was more than we could possibly need.  Um, fail.

Most of what I found in the garage ended up in the donation pile but I did come across books that I was missing and that I had wondered what had happened to them.  I still have a handful that I can’t quite place where they have gone, but only a few.

We need to go through all of the books in storage still up in New York.  I really, at this point, have no idea what all is up there.

This evening, once Dominica got home, we had some soup and watched the end of the third season of Hot in Cleveland, one of our favourite sitcoms.  The girls were super snugly tonight.  While she was awake, Luciana was on my lap in the arm chair playing games on Dominica’s phone and Liesl was wrapped up in blankets snuggling with Dominica on the couch.

While we were watching the show a cold front moved in and the wind was just crazy.  The wind was whipping through the house all evening.  It was cold too.  Really quite surprising after such a warm day.

Once Luciana went to bed Liesl moved over and sat on my lap all evening.  She stayed up really late, till eleven thirty, even after Dominica had gone to bed.  Liesl announced that we are a “snugly family” tonight.  She is really so sweet.  Every night and afternoon when Luciana goes for bed Liesl runs down the hall to give her a kiss goodnight and says “Goodnight Luciana, sweet dreams!”

Dominica was up and off to work at seven as usual.  I kind of woke up when her alarm went off but went immediately back to sleep and slept till around a quarter after seven when she called me a few times to talk about a computer that had died so that I could assist her in troubleshooting.  This made for an exciting start to her day.  It ended up being a completely different day than she had expected.  She worked on the failed machine all morning rather than crawling around hooking up computers after a cubicle move that they did yesterday while she was off.

Grey slept in and I didn’t see him till around nine thirty.  It turns out that his brother is in town and they haven’t seen in other in many months and his brother happened to be around the corner so he borrowed the car to go meet up with his brother and get breakfast at IHOP before I needed to take him to the airport around eleven thirty.  So my morning was just me and the girls and helping Dominica on the phone with her computer issues.

Dominica came home for a bit and I ran Grey to the airport.  I was distracted and accidentally drove to DFW rather than Love Field.  Oops.  I’m having one of those weeks, apparently.

So at just before noon I dropped off Grey and he got ready for his one thirty flight back up to Denver.

As soon as I was back to the house Dominica had to run out to Fry’s with the company card (yes, they gave her one already) to do some shopping.  We found solid state drives for them for just $99 for really good ones.  They are pretty excited to be moving to Intel SSDs for so cheap.  And they now see that Fry’s charges less than half for parts than the place where they have their “corporate” account.  I think that they will be rethinking that strategy very quickly.

It was a good thing that I was home today because this became another eleven hour plus day for Dominica.  She is getting a lot more time at this job than we had been anticipating – which is awesome because we really need the funds.  Having her working again is really helping.  I’m looking forward to January when we see her income really hit us for the first time.  She only had a one week paycheck come in December.  And our renters in Peekskill go back to regular rent next month too.  Boy things are going to be easier in January – especially if Dominica keeps up the “working more than half time” thing that she has been doing so far.  She seems to be heading for a fairly regular twenty plus hours per week there.  Fingers crossed.

Everyone was pretty worn out tonight and we mostly just hung out at home.  Dominica has to go back to work early tomorrow morning again so we can’t be up too late tonight.

I stayed up decently late working.  It was after three when I finally got to bed.  This is becoming pretty normal for me.

I had to get up and get into the office this morning.  Dominica wasn’t sure if she was going to have to work today or not but ended up being able to stay home which was great because she was able to deal with helping to set up for the class and not having any issues with being able to attend it either.

I worked through lunch, which was good because it turned out to be the company Christmas party anyway, which I had no idea about.  So I got a free lunch although, as a vegetarian, the selection was very odd – a vegetarian paneer (cheese) curry with no starch to put it on except for corn bread.  It wasn’t too bad that way, but certainly unexpected to say the least.

I left work a little early, but there was nothing going on in the evening whatsoever, and rushed home and logged back in just to make sure that everything was still good at the office and helped set up for the class tonight.  We had two last minute cancellations which really left the class at just three people – pretty small.  Dominica, Maggie and Watson were the only attendees with Watson coming late.  I tried my best to sit in on as much of the class as I could but had to spend the bulk of the evening either managing the girls who were hold up in Dominica and my bedroom or running down to Historic Downtown Carrollton to pick up the take away dinner for everyone from the Broadway Bistro.  Chris did come over while I was out picking up the food and put in an hour helping out with the girls who are always very excited to see him.

Everyone decided to take fewer breaks and rush through the class so Grey was able to wrap up after seven thirty and then go into some Q&A on Unitrends.  That worked out pretty well.

We broke down what we could after the class and were all off to bed pretty early.  It has been an exhausting week.

Today is our one day to actually hang out with Grey.  He arrived yesterday and tomorrow is the class (and I need to go to the office anyway) and then Tuesday he flies back to Denver in the morning.  So today is the only really clear day and there is plenty of work to be done while he is in town too.

We pretty much did not leave the house today at all.  But we did get a lot of work done and Grey managed to get everything ready for his class tomorrow evening which Dominica is going to be taking as well.

We did a little setup today and played with the kids a lot.  They really do go crazy when there is someone new in the house to harass.  Liesl especially expected Grey to play with her non-stop all day.

We were decently busy but did not really do all that much.  For dinner Dominica made apple dumplings and Grey made cheddar cheese biscuits and two pineapple upside down cakes.  Probably not the best round of dinner choices but it was all really delicious.

At eight Grey and I went out to Redneck where he had arranged to meet some of his friends from the line game Eve that he plays.  We hung out with them for about an hour and I learned more about Eve then I ever would have guessed that I ever would before Watson arrived to join our group.  Watson and I ended up spending more of the evening out on the patio, the weather was really nice tonight so with a light fleece it was perfect to be outside.

Grey and I stayed until nearly closing time.  It was a fun night.

Lots of house cleaning this morning and moving Luciana from her bedroom into Liesl’s for a few days.  Luciana will sleep in Liesl’s room and Liesl will sleep in her portable cot in our room.  Liesl kind of likes this even though she does not like the bed as much because she likes sleeping in the same room as us.

I got some work done this morning but not much.  The house is looking good, though.  We’ve actually kept it clean, basically, this whole week.

Grey’s flight was supposed to get in at five minutes until four.  I am used to dealing with DFW where that means that there is no need to leave the house until after that point as it takes forever to get through baggage claim and out to the curb.  Love Field is also much closer to us than DFW.

So Grey was actually walking to the curb even before I left the house!  Oops. In theory Love Field is incredibly close to us too.  But, of course, with traffic and lights it took nearly forty minutes to get to him.  Ugh.

So the total round trip was nearly an hour an a half to get down to the airport, collect Grey and get back up to the house.

We spent the afternoon hanging out at the house.  Liesl and Luciana were kind of crazy having someone new to play with in the house.  Grey had work to do, as did I, so he put in a bit of time working from his colossal laptop in the living room.

This evening, for dinner, we all went out to eat at Eat St. on Trinity Mills which, as always, was excellent.  Liesl loves going there and getting rice.  Luciana loves eating naan dipped in a little curry.

We were all off to bed a little on the early side tonight.  Tomorrow will be a busy day.