Sheep Guarding Llama

So here is a pretty neat statistic. Today is the day when SGL becomes, by some standard at least, the longest work in literary history. That’s not quite fair. SGL is non-fiction, so whether it is literary or not is hard to say. But it is an auto-biography. Short of reference books, the longest work is not Proust, that many people expect, SGL and some other things blow that away. Until today, a bizarre Super Smash Brothers fan fiction novel (I have no idea if it is written by a single author or not) was the longest known work of literature. But as of today, SGL pushes over that barrier to become the top dog, at least for the moment. Of course, one has to ask if a blog truly counts. Is it a single work? Does non-fiction count? But if this was a traditional media of pen and ink and called a journal then it would clearly qualify.

Of course as with any record, one has to wonder how many longer works exist that no one knows about. Most people do not know about SGL, and I do not know about that many other blogs. Are there loads of blogs out there that are even longer? Not likely. Since I have been writing almost daily for almost twenty years (okay, one month short of nineteen years at the moment) and since I write rather a lot per day, there is a far better chance than it might seam that SGL might truly be the top dog for a single author, single piece of work. The scope of my writing here is rather unprecedented.

What is really the more interested statistic is that for the last many years, we are pretty sure that I have been the most prolific writer in the IT industry as well. With around four hundred thousand posts, a few books, loads of magazine articles and blog posts, my writing level outside of SGL is actually many times larger than it is within SGL. SGL has been around longer with me writing essentially constantly since February of 2000, but my IT writing has been nearly continuous since around 2009 (so ten years at this point) and by 2010 it was already being suspected that I was writing more than anyone else out there. And things have only picked up over time.

But, for whatever it is worth, this is a pretty big accomplishment even if it does not break any official record. If I stay healthy, SGL is still “only at the beginning.” One of my big regrets is not having thought of doing SGL earlier in my life. Five or ten more years of it would have made it so vastly more interesting. I wish that I had a clearer record of those years. Now that I understand just how important it has been to record the last nineteen, it is sad that the same records don’t extend back to my youth. I hope that my children learn from this and decide to write in a similar fashion. There is so much unique value to this.

I managed to sleep in a little, getting up around nine today. Put in a couple of hours before making myself a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast. Dominica decided that the bad weather was mostly north west of Fort Worth and that she would have a clear enough drive up from Houston so packed up the girls and got on the road a few minutes before noon to drive back up to Dallas.

It is still cold and rainy today. The yard is under water, as it always is. The old firepit thing in the back yard is a tiny pond now. Very strange. So Paul and I started doing dishes, laundry, cleaning, and other things to make it look like we had been cleaning all along.

Dominica and the girls were home before four. They made really good time! There was a huge minivan load of stuff for the house. It was pretty well packed. There was a lot of Christmas stuff in there to bring in. So, once again, even with all of the work that I did to make space in the house, everything is full again.

To make some extra space, we took the giant box of donation stuff out and put it in Paul’s truck to have it out of the way. We have several donation boxes full at this point.

The kids spent the entire evening hiding, Luciana in her room and Liesl in mine. They were really ready for time to themselves after a few weeks with their cousins. Liesl hid on the floor on the far side of the bed so that she could basically disappear! Liesl mostly watched videos, while Luciana immediately broke open her new Lego Elves Fire Dragon set and spent about four or five hours putting the entire thing together. It is a really cool set with great colours and styles. She loves it and it is perfectly up her alley. She needs a lot more of the Lego Elves sets, such an ideal thing for her. And she was able to put the set together all by herself.

I made the girls dinner. Veggie chicken nuggets for Liesl, and a bowl of steamed veggies. And ramen noodles for Luciana. (Which reminds me, Paul and I found a ramen place just a few blocks away that looks like something that we need to try.)

At six I worked with Valentina for several hours. It was nearly nine when we got done working. While we were working, Dominica was watching The Golden Girls which apparently she was not able to watch while in Houston. She was anxious to get back to binge watching it. Once I was done working, I joined her and ate my cheese and cracker tray.

Dominica was pretty tired and was off to bed before eleven. I wasn’t quite ready for bed, so worked on SGL, did some cleaning in the house, and waited for Rachel to come over as she was stopping by after getting off from work tonight to pick up some boxes and luggage and stuff that she has been storing at the house.

It was around one thirty when Rachel finally made it over. We talked for probably an hour. She’s having a really rough week and needed someone to talk to. She got her stuff while she was here, she had a lot of clothes, some boxes, some keyboards. She went home and then I got off to bed. Luciana had fallen asleep earlier, Liesl was getting ready for bed while Rachel was visiting.

Tomorrow is Friday, a normal work day in the morning. Then Paul and I are going up to Plano in the afternoon to do some on site work up there with a customer. In the evening, the girls have the Carrollton Library Yule Ball event that they have been looking forward to. That will be a lot of fun and something really unique. So we have to make sure that we are able to make it to that. It will be very sad if they miss it.

Wednesday. We are back to regular work today, although I expect it to be slow. I slept in a little, till eight thirty. Dominica and the girls wanted to come home today, but the rains started last night and are expected to continue until tomorrow morning. And to make it even worse, it is pretty cold out there so the rain is listed as “wintery mix”, not good for driving, especially in Texas.

Back in the office today things are pretty slow. There is some build up from the holidays, but mostly it is just slow. Because the holidays fell in the middle of the week, it is a good year for people to take the entire week off, rather than just a day or two, so I have a feeling that many of our customers are running on skeleton crews this week.

Luciana’s thumb seems to be improving. She was able to sleep last night and use her hand, but not her thumb, today. It still hurts.

The afternoon got slow. Spent a bit of time on the phone with Allen, this is the first that we have talked in a week since he had his surgery.

For dinner, Paul and I went down to Old Town Carrollton to Twisted Root Burger to check it out. It was pretty good. He really loved his American Burger, said that it was the best burger that he had had in quite a while. I have the vegan Vegabond and it was quite good. Plenty big, I was stuffed after just that.

After getting back from dinner, I worked on some SGL updates, making good progress through May, and watching more of Star Trek: Enterprise. I am nearly done with the third season now.

I put in a few hours of web site work this evening as well, just a little before midnight. After almost two weeks of it being down, we were finally able to get MangoCon’s website back online. That was pretty important.

Once the site was fixed, I went back to watching Star Trek: Enterprise which I was able to complete the third season before turning in for the night. It kept me up an hour or two longer than I wanted to be. But I was able to wrap up the show and the very intense story arc of the “expanse.”

I think Jared is correct, season three gets pretty cheesy and over the top. I felt that Enterprise was doing really well in the first seasons. But the huge expanse arc seems like it is just “too much”. The writing gets pretty weak as it continues. Especially the writing for Archer.

Since I was up I stood at the bar most of the time and kept working on SGL updates. My Chromebook is getting quite a lot of exercise these days.

It is looking unlikely that Dominica is going to make an attempt at coming home tomorrow. Carrollton is predicted to get one to three inches of fluffy white stuff tomorrow and driving in snow in Texas is really bad. So we will probably not see the family until the weekend.

It is a new year, and about time. Last year was tough, I have high hopes for this year.

Of note, this year NTG turns twenty years old! We have been around for a long time now.

Of other big news, as of today we finally have health insurance again. When the “problems” really hit three years ago we had to give up on having health insurance, there was no way to get it or pay for it. Finally after all these years, we have it again as of today and it is such a relief.

Ciana Snapchatted me a happy new year’s this morning. She is at the age that she is all excited about it being a new year.

I did not feel like working much this morning. I put in just a little time doing tickets, making sure customers were okay, that no one was looking for anything, but New Year’s Day is a pretty major day off and really nothing of consequence happened all day. So by late morning, I felt pretty free to relax.

I decided to make it a Star Trek: Enterprise day. I started the day on the final episode of season two, and then on to binge season three.

This afternoon, I got a call from Dominica because Luciana had been hurt. Ciana wanted to talk to me. The kids had been playing at the Grices’ and Ciana’s thumb got closed in a door. It was quite bad. She was very sad, but handling it quite well. We are pretty concerned that it is broken. She is able to move it, though. It seems like it is just a really bad bruise, just crushed. Thank goodness it was only the tip. Even if it was broken, we are not sure what we would be able to do anyway.

We kept a watch on her thumb all day. Dominica sent pictures about four hours later of Ciana’s thumb and it is definitely quite bad. Very red and swollen, even after icing it and giving it a lot of time to recover. It makes me pretty worried. But a lot less worried since we have health insurance now, even though it is catastrophic coverage only, so wouldn’t really do anything for a case like this.

I baked a loaf of bread that Paul and I had for dinner. Earlier in the day I had a bowl of veggies for lunch.

Around six thirty I had had all of the relaxing time that I could handle in a day and set up the Chromebook on the bar and got to work on catching up some on SGL posts. I have now made a serious dent in April.

Dominica was hoping that she and the girls would be able to come back home tomorrow, but I checked the forecast and there is a lot of rain expected from tonight going into Thursday morning. I think she is planning on driving up Thursday now, tomorrow would just be too risky.

Paul has been burning the huge piles of cardboard that we have, mostly from the boxes that accumulated during our move. The house and the patio are just full of them, and more are being generated all of the time. We are buried in them. Now that we are emptying boxes quickly, there are more and more every day.

I did a little research into LED panel studio lighting for the SAMIT studio tonight. Looks like I found some ideas that might work.

I made some mac and cheese as a late night snack.

I had an upset stomach much of the evening. No idea what I ate that didn’t agree with me.

I managed to complete all of April today on SGL! I even got a good piece into May. It took many hours, it was a huge amount of work. I made it through over half of the third season of Star Trek: Enterprise while working on it. Well over half.

The third season of ST:E is really a dedicated story arc which makes it more like a mini-series within the overall show. In some ways, this is copied from other Star Trek series, but it feels a bit unique, too.

Monday and the end of 2018, what a year it has been. This year has definitely been one of the hardest and most stressful of my life. I am going to be glad to see this year behind me. It has been an interesting year, to say the least. Nothing like what we had expected going into it. As I go back and work on SGL updates to get caught up, it really highlights what a wild year it was. Unfortunately much of this year isn’t stuff that I can really discuss in my journal, at least not for some time. And it was the first year, in the nineteen years that I have been journalling, that I have really gotten behind. There was so much stress, and so many things that could not be discussed publicly, that it really left me struggling to write about things. So I got further and further behind.

Big events of 2018 include starting off the year not having been paid for my 2017 job and then having the company flee the country to make sure that they would never have to pay me. So that was a rough start knowing that the money I’d earned from half a year of work was just gone and there was no way to ever collect. So that was pretty bad, and hit us at the end of January. But we had led into the year knowing that there had been about three years of “not getting paid” that had been accumulating (which is what had prompted me to take the risky foreign job in the first place.)

Then in March, Paul moved down and joined the company. So we had a new roommate and the company changed a lot. By early April, we knew what we had long feared, that most of the money that had come through the company had “disappeared” and that we had been lied to for years about customers paying and specifically my work earning money. Everything was gone. Three years of me work, just gone. Money that we had been told over and over again was coming, but just sometime in the future, we now know had arrived and been spent. My personal income, all diverted and vanished. Everything. So that was really rough. Two massive financial hits, or at least the confirmation that our worst fears of both had come true, within just a few months of each other. And then the incredibly emotional impact of finding out that close friends had done it, and had maliciously claimed to not be getting paid either to make us emotionally weak to make it easier to do it, too. It was just an emotionally, as well as financially, crippling set of events.

So that was our first four months of the year. That pretty much consumed us. Then the next four months were really just dealing with, internalizing, and overcoming the disasters that had been thrown at us. Which we did, and by the end of the year, things were looking way better. Finances are really tight, and are going to be tight for a long time to come. But tight isn’t the same as zero (or negative.) For the past three years we’ve been actually paying to work and to be taken advantage of! That’s how bad it got. That’s over. And the silver lining is that we found out that the company is actually healthy and a good, working business model. That was a surprise after years of being told it wasn’t working and wasn’t making money and that customers didn’t pay. So some very good things coming out of it all. And we got to start really hiring by summer, and we now have so many people and locations that we were told were not going to work for the last five years (yes, five years of blocking good hires!) We have new people in Dallas, Mexico, Panama, etc. We have a great new team, great new locations, and a company that is making it!

Of course, the same stress causing SGL posting to take a break put my YouTube channel, SAMIT, on hold, too. That was really rough. I had high hopes for it this year. My plan is to be back at that quickly in 2019. It had so much potential.

This was one tough year, and last year was pretty rough, too. But we are ending 2018 way, way stronger than we went into it. We hit bottom, financially, but recovered and have a great trajectory for the coming year. And are doing so with much healthier people in our lives.

This morning I had to be up at seven thirty. I showered and ran out the door to drive over to the airport to pick up Paul who was getting in from Minneapolis this morning. His flight got in at eight, but he had checked luggage so had to wait for that.

Maggie started network cabling work at her home today. In Panama the walls are thick concrete so running CAT6 between rooms is no trivial matter. She is getting the cable from their firewall run into her “office” so that she can wire up her new desk phone.

It was a surprisingly busy morning. Since I had sent everyone home (although a few people accidentally “came to work” this morning anyway) it was just me covering for both us and our partner’s shops. So I was pretty busy.

Paul assembled the new fire pit or stove for the atrium today and went out and burned some of the card board that we have piling up. It’s just a cheap little unit, but it burns the card board that we need to make go away and it puts out a bit of heat so is going to help a lot with warming up the atrium.

I had my weekly meeting at one in the afternoon, which made things even busier, trying to work around a scheduled phone conference.

By two the day got pretty slow and by three there was really nothing going on and I even sent home the folks working for our partner company, so I wrapped up the day handling coverage alone for two companies.

At four, Paul was getting pretty hungry so we decided to go out for a New Year’s Eve dinner. We went to a new Chinese Buffet that we’d never been to or even heard of before, Wei Buffet. It took some work to find it even though it was only a few blocks from the house. It was hidden behind a plaza that we’ve never been in. It is part of the ever expanding K-Town area that has now moved from being just a small community exclusively north of the PGB to now being solidly established south of it, too.

The food was okay. Paul liked it more than I did. The selection was good and interesting. This was not a restaurant catering to westerners whatsoever, this seemed pretty authentic, which is likely why I didn’t like it as much. More authentic, but less catered to my native tastes. I’m sure the quality was all excellent. It was not busy at all, not surprising given the day and time, which doesn’t help buffets any. The buffet had some good and interesting squid dishes and they made some pineapple shrimp that was quite good.

I finished watching what Hulu has of The Orville this afternoon. And I have to say, while it is sometimes really goofy, it is actually quite a bit more serious than Star Trek is most of the time. Star Trek is shot is a more serious manner, but they avoid hard topics and never address the incredible racism promoted by the prime directive and just ignore the biggest ethical dilemma of the show. The Orville takes that stuff on, peppered with really goofy stuff, and so while it is more disjointed, it is also the more mature show and more morally aware.

I made a two cup batch of simple syrup tonight to refill my bar container. Now I am a real bartender, making my own ingredients.

Paul went to bed before seven thirty. I wasn’t that tired so looked for something else to watch since I was up alone and I found that Hulu has The DaVinci Code which I have never seen. It was a really long movie, almost two and a half hours. And so slow, and pretty boring. And Tom Hanks’ hair in it was so bad as to be completely distracting. But the movie was acceptable. Several top notch actors, but the overall pacing was bad and the story was bland and predictable. At least now I have seen it.

I thought about watching something else after that, it was just eleven o’clock. But I was tired and there was no logical reason to stay awake. I was in bed by eleven thirty. I wished Dominica and the girls a Happy New Year and was kept awake by revelers outside that were so close and so loud that I almost thought that they were inside of the house. Liesl and Luciana were in Houston playing a game of Clue with their cousins. Ciana, Liesl, and Dominica all texted me in the minutes before midnight. (And in the morning I got to see the girls on Madeline’s Snapchat stories, I could even see Luciana missing because she was off talking to me while everyone else was dancing around.) I was fast asleep by five after midnight.