Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is the day, my family comes back from New York.  This is the longest that I have ever gone without my family.  Not having the children here is really hard.  Thankfully I have been able to talk to Liesl over FaceTime, what a difference that has made.  We have probably put in four hours or more talking like that.  That’s one of the best tools ever.  Liesl really enjoyed being able to talk to me.  I just wish that it would have worked for Luciana as well.  And I wish that we had newer iPads to do it with rather than just the iPhones so that we could have a bigger picture.  It was so hard to see.

The family did stay in Tennessee last night and were expecting to get home at four-ish this afternoon.  Dominica did not have a house key and so needed me to be there before they were to let them in.  So I went home around three once they were in the distant outreaches of the DFW and put in a little bit of time cleaning around the house while working from Dominica’s computer in the play room.

It was around four thirty when the family arrived.  It was so good to see my girls.  Luciana is walking so well now.  I am not used to her being able to run around the house and explore everywhere.  I was used to her walking in Europe, of course, but this is the first that I have seen her like this “at home” and it was quite a surprise.  She is bigger, faster and has more hair than the last time that I saw her and she is saying many more words now too.

The Grices stayed for only a few minutes.  Just enough time to unload the truck and use the restroom and then it was everyone back into the truck so that they could push on to Houston and to surprise Bennie who was unaware that they were coming back today.

We spent the evening just hanging out.  I haven’t seen my girls in so long!  Luciana was definitely in a kind of haze or shock as she tried to re-explore her home.  We could tell that she remembered it but we are not sure just how much.  She has been gone for just too long it would seem.

Liesl, for her part, was very excited to get to see all of her stuff again and was investigating all of her toys in no time and telling me all about our time apart and all of the things that she had been doing.

The family left Frankfort at 4:05 in the morning Eastern Standard.  They are stopping tonight, or so they plan, and should be arriving back home tomorrow evening.  If they push through the night they could pull into the “drive” before I leave for work tomorrow.  But they are planning on crashing for the night along the route.  Normally that means central Tennessee.  I can’t wait until they get back here.  I’m really missing my kids.

I was in the office today.  I took Thursday as a work from home day and am in the office the rest of the week.  If they drive as planned they will be getting home right about the same time that I get out of work tomorrow.

This evening I did a mix of Mass Effect 3 and cleaning around the house to get ready for everyone.  The house is still a bit of a mess even though I have been working on it for the last several weeks.  I’ve really been struggling with staying motivated and I have been doing things like heavy duty carpet cleaning that actually makes it hard to do other things since the floors are wet and I have carpet equipment laying about.

I have a new article posted on SMB IT Journal talking about How Hot Spares Are No Longer Effective.  This one has really generated a lot of good interest, especially in the SpiceWorks community.  I had really thought of this one as a one-off article just to address an issue that I saw coming up a few times recently but it really took off.  I am really happy with the reception and it seems to have done a better job at conveying things that I have tried to convey in earlier articles which I was not intending to explain in this article.

I was in the office today.  Noting special.  For lunch I got to go to Red Lobster with Alt-N, makes of MDaemon, the email server.  We had a nice lunch.  It was nice to go to Red Lobster too, I have not been there is a long time.  Alt-N is a local software company over in Grapevine.  I had no idea that they were local.  They are going to be joining our SpiceCorps DFW group at our next meeting.

Speaking of which, I need to get the SpiceCorps DFW group scheduled.  So much to do.  I am hoping to have one together in August.

After work I just spent the evening at home.  I watched some of Pair of Kings on Netflix and then found that the third Transformers movie, Dark Side of the Moon, was available on Netflix so I watched that.  I shouldn’t have, it was awful.  Not even worth sitting through and it was really long too.  And Nimoy making references to his own quotes was just sad.

The family is in New York packing everything up today.  They are leaving in the morning to drive back to Texas.  I have not see them for several weeks now.  I can’t wait to see my girls.  So tomorrow I am going to be focused on cleaning the house as much as possible.

My alarm went off at a quarter till six this morning.  Somehow I had already woken myself up at five thirty, however, so I was awake and just waiting for it to be time to get up.  I felt pretty good on just three and a half hours of sleep and was out the door in under ten minutes to drive down to Las Colinas to pick up Nicki at her apartment.  I stopped at the RaceTrak on the way and grabbed a sixty-four ounce Diet Mt. Dew to get me revved up considering that I had so little sleep.

When I got to Nicki’s place, at our old apartment complex, she was already standing outside waiting for me.  So we were able to head right out to DFW to drop her for her flight to LaGuardia.  She had no sleep last night as she was required to work through the entire night.  Maybe she can nap on the plane.

I got home at around seven.  This is pretty early to be up on a Sunday morning.  So I went into the office to get some work done.  Took no time to get caught up on SpiceWorks and some reading.  Did some system updates, catching up on email and posts.

While in the office this morning I am pretty sure that I heard rats in the attic again.  Just great.  We need to figure out where they are coming from and get that attic sealed off.  What a mess this house is.  I feel like it is falling apart around us sometimes.  Rats, ants, falling columns, crumbling wall, unfinished atrium.  The list goes on and on.  It’s exhausting.

I got a bit done today and played some more Mass Effect 3.  This is a longer game than its predecessors.

I got myself up at seven thirty this morning but decided that today was going to be a mostly relaxing day.  Dominica and the girls are going out to “the lake” today back in New York.  I think that Dominica will be working hard to stay covered this time as her back has started blistering and peeling from her sun exposure at Enchanted Forest last week when she forgot to have someone help her to apply suntan lotion to her back.  I saw some pictures and it is really bad.

I spent the day at home.  The whole day, didn’t leave the house once.  That was kind of nice.  I had to do a little work for the office today but not much.  Just some basic assistance with normal weekend maintenance.  There is always something silly.

I did some carpet cleaning, hoping to get the worst spots hit before Dominica and the girls arrive back.  Although they will be staying at the lake house just two weeks after they get back so even if I don’t get to everything now I have an opportunity to do more then as well.  I am really hoping that Francesca will be able to get the Rug Doctor back to us that week so that I can clean the entire house while none of us are here given it time to thoroughly dry without any foot traffic taking place.  I plan to stay out at the lake house with the family, at least most days, but will be in the office as usual (the lake house is close to home this year) so can easily run home during lunches to steam the carpets and then go back to work and let them dry for an entire day.

By early afternoon I fired up Mass Effect 3 and put in a solid afternoon and evening of it.  I made it through a ton of missions and feel like I am a very good chunk through the game.  It is really great, totally living up to the first two games.  When it first started and the game made such a story leap I was not sure how I was going to feel about it but so far BioWare has really done a good job of making the story grab hold like it did in the first two.  I had similar doubts about their previous title, Dragon Age 2, but it totally rallied by the end and was a great addition to the storyline.  BioWare have really become masters of RPG storytelling.  I sure hope that they continue bringing out titles like this one.

I talked to Dominica for a while tonight and the plans have changed again and it looks like the family will once again be coming back as planned rather than staying longer so hopefully I will be able to see my girls in not too long.  I have been really, really lonely and missing my daughters a lot.  This has been a hard couple of weeks for me.