Sheep Guarding Llama

Another quiet weekend day at home with my girls.  Liesl got me up as she nearly always does and off to the play room so that she can have her morning chocolate milk and watch her shows.  She has quite the routine.

This morning I worked with her to show her how to turn on the television and the PS3 all by herself and how to navigate the menus.  She has been using the remote to control Netflix for a very long time already but she was not able to actually navigate the PS3 menus themselves before so this is a good step.  In theory she can turn everything on and watch things without us around now.

It was a slow day.  The time changed last night so we are well rested but the girls were up very early.

Liesl’s new show is “Jem and the Holograms” which is a horribly ridiculous 80s cartoon that Dominica used to watch when she was young.  I remember it but don’t remember having actually watched it.  Wow is it ever bad.  Luciana has mostly been watching “The Fresh Beat Band” or “Timmy Time.”

We started watching the BBC show “Sherlock” tonight which is created by Steven Moffat, one of our favourite television creators and one of the creative minds behind “Coupling” and the “Blink” episode of “Dr. Who”.  It is about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson but set in modern London instead of in Victorian London.  So far, quite good.  We made it through two episodes, which is nearly three hours of television, today.

I spent much of the day getting Zabbix up and running.  I have not worked with Zabbix before and there is a bit of work to get it running properly on CentOS 6 – especially when you want the latest features and so are compiling from scratch.

Luciana went to bed a little after eight.  She is still very good about putting herself to bed or letting us know that she is tired.  She is so good about bedtime.  Nothing like Liesl was at her age.

Liesl stayed up till nine thirty.  She is so funny about her bedtime stories.  She loves daddy reading to her at night.  I always have to read her her stories before she can go to sleep.  We sit on the floor of her bedroom and she picks what to read.  Either one long story from something like Winnie the Pooh or Lyle the Crocodile or three short stories from one of her story books.  For the last two weeks she has been on a kick to read stories from her big, blue story book.  She really loved “Harold and the Purple Crayon” and “Pete’s a Pizza.”  We read those almost every night.  She is also very fond of “Caps for Sale.”

Dominica went to bed at eleven thirty.  She was still pretty tired but not nearly as tired as yesterday.  After she went to bed I went out for a bit just to relax at Redneck.  It’s kind of like Cheers, for me.  They laughed when I said that the other day.  No one was around tonight, just me for a change.

After a week of being apart a bit much, this weekend is a “spend the whole weekend together as a family” weekend.  Dominica was feeling just totally exhausted last night so we let her sleep in this morning.  Liesl got me up at seven, as she does, but at least she hopped into bed and snuggled for a little bit before demanding to have her chocolate milk and movie.

Liesl, Luciana and I hung out together until after ten when Dominica finally got out of bed.  Hopefully she appreciates how much “sleeping in” I let her do.  Considering that I have to be up earlier than her four days of the week and at the same time as her the other day it can be a bit exhausting also being the one to get up early on the weekends too.  My mornings rarely extend past eight and often not past seven.

Mostly today was a family day.  I did a little work but we spent a lot of time just hanging out as a family.  Dominica left for a while this afternoon to go do some shopping and I stayed home with the girls.

Today is one of those days that completely escapes my memory.  I am over two weeks behind on SGL updates and doing my best but today, I just don’t know.  I know that I was in the office today, that Dan and I did lunch together and that tonight I just stayed home with the family since we were all out of town all week.  But honestly, that is all that I know.  So, there it is.

I am alone this morning, it is Thursday.  Dominica and the girls will return from Houston this afternoon, working around the rush hour traffic as best as they can.

I went into the office today.  I have barely been in the office but I have been really sick for a week and was kind of sick before that.  I am still sounding sick today but as of yesterday I am more or less able to talk normally.  So I seem to be getting better at this point.  I’m not concerned.

I went right home after work.  We spent the evening as a family catching up and talking about all that we did in Chicago and in Houston and just hanging out and watching shows together.

I woke up a few minutes before six on my own this morning.  Minutes later there was a knock on the door as my breakfast was delivered.  As I am up north I am taking advantage of the local bagels and lox that you cannot get, at least not of the same quality, down in Texas.  It is pretty cold up here today, just over forty degrees.  Quite a shock coming from Dallas.  Nothing unreasonably cold, but quite a bit colder than I am used to these days.  The weather, though, is pretty decent.  We had really been worried that Chicago was going to be drowning in rain from the hurricane that is still pounding much of the northeast.

I ate breakfast, it was delicious, and set up the laptop and got to work.  I put in several hours working from the hotel room.  It was really productive time, actually.  For more productive than normal.  Doing super early mornings is a great time to get caught up on things because no one is interrupting you either locally or with a constant stream of requests via instant messenger so you can focus and actually accomplish things.  So I did well and was very productive from my little HP Folio 13.

I dropped off my bags with the hotel.  Easier just to keep them there and grabbed a cab to take me out for the day.

It was a busy day and went pretty well.  I was happy with it.

I ended up getting back to the airport much earlier than I had planned, around three thirty rather than more like six thirty or seven.  So I changed my flight and zipped back to the DFW in time for dinner, which was nice.  Unfortunately Dominica and the girls are in Houston trick or treating so there wasn’t very much reason to be coming home early.

The flight back went pretty smoothly.  The people on the plane with me were pretty boring so mostly I just sat and read the in-flight magazine.  Normally I am able to strike up a conversation or something but not tonight.  Ugh.  It was not a long flight, though, so whatever.  It was smooth, at least.  I had flown United up to Chicago yesterday but am returning on American.

I got into DFW very early and got my luggage and was out to the car in no time.  I had a little panic when I got to the car because I could not find the car keys and had this fear that they had fallen out of my luggage while I was packing it in the hotel.  But after about ten minute I found them buried in an obscure pocket of the luggage that I had checked several times but they were pressed beneath something else that had kept me from finding them.  With Dominica out of town until tomorrow evening I wasn’t in total panic but I was rather concerned for a bit.  Digging through luggage in the airport parting garage kind of sucks.

Since I had absolutely no one to go home too I texted Dan and he met me at Redneck Heaven which was, conveniently, on the way home from the airport now that I know how to use Texas Route 121 to get around a bit better.  So we hung out and had drinks there for the evening.  They were surprised to see me since I had been expected to be out of town tonight.

I got back to the house at a pretty reasonable hour and I was off to bed all alone.  Strangely I don’t mind being alone in hotels (maybe because they are so small and because there are people sleeping and awake in the rooms right around me) but sleeping alone at home I find very unpleasant.  I always have.  That is probably why I’ve never really lived alone.  I much prefer at least having someone in another room.

Dominica said that the Halloween activities went well down in Houston tonight.  The girls were dressed up as NASCAR Race Car drivers and the older girls as pit crew.  Luciana spent almost the entire night in the stroller but Liesl enjoyed herself.  She loves the entire Halloween experience and no one scared her this year.