Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica was up very early “nesting” this morning.  She got up in the wee hours of the morning and completely cleaned our bedroom while I was asleep.  I slept in some because I desperately needed the sleep.  Once I was up it was frantic cleaning time.

The air conditioning, dehumidifier and industrial fan in the den did their jobs and the carpet was decently dry.  I moved furniture as best as I could and got nearly all of the floor shampooed.

The Grices made really good time and arrived hours before we thought that they would.  Joe and Britt were caravaning with them and they all arrived before eleven, I believe.  So we did not get as much done as we had hoped before they arrived but having Joe and Bennie to help move furniture helped a lot.

At noon, Emily and I drove to the airport to pick up Dominica’s parents.  This is the first time for them, as well as for Joe and Britt, to see our new house.

I had to work all day but work was very, very light.  So mostly I just had to check in regularly to make sure that no one was needing me.  Perfect timing on the Good Friday holiday for us to be sure.  It would have been really tough if I would have had to have gone in to work today.

For lunch (or even breakfast for many of us) we went out to BJ’s in the middle of the afternoon.  Then rushed home so that I could work as there was actually work to be done by then.

The evening was spent mostly just hanging out and visiting.  The girls did a bunch of baking as the joint Garrett and Clara birthday party is tomorrow.  Soon it will be a triple birthday part as soon to be born baby Miller’s birthday will fall right in between Garrett and Clara’s birthdays all of them being within several days of each other.  The party is at noon tomorrow.

Dominica and I got up early this morning and found the carpets still quite wet.  I went to empty the Rug Doctor and realized that there was nothing to empty.  Disaster.  Apparently we had done something wrong and the machine is not working.  This isn’t good.  I needed to get off to work and was not able to hang around to try to figure out what to do.  So Dominica did some troubleshooting while I was at work in the home office – I did a work from home morning as this was a bit of an emergency under the circumstances.

We finally got it working and did as much carpet cleaning as we could.  It was really hard to do very much with the carpets still being so wet after the shampooing.  It is very logistically challenging trying to do this quickly.  It did not help at all that it has been raining out and so the air is humid and nothing wants to dry at all.  We eventually had to go to air conditioning and run the dehumidifier as well in the hopes of sucking as much water out of the air as possible.

There was tons of other cleaning to do so there was no limit what there was to do even if we were stalled on the carpets.  We were really feeling overwhelmed by how much needed to be done.

I went in to the office in the afternoon but came home as quickly as I could so that I could continue to help.  Fortunately tomorrow is Good Friday and while I don’t have the day off it is a work from home day and things are going to be super slow.  This afternoon was very slow as it was.

I got home and Dominica informed me that Liesl told her that she wanted to eat at Waffle House – just out of the blue, no prompting or anything.  She just decided that she wanted Waffle House.  So we figured that that was as good of a decision as any and went to Waffle House in Farmer’s Branch for dinner.

We came home from dinner and set to cleaning carpets until quite late.  By the end of the day my back was hurting from moving furniture, servers and pulling that Rug Doctor around.  We rented it for another day so that we can keep working on the floors.  They need it so badly and we have been holding off doing anything with them because of the construction in the garage.

Brian did not get on to the road nearly as early as he had wanted.  It was probably seven thirty, not three thirty, when he started driving.  But still, not too bad.  He is avoiding the weather as much as possible but taking the far longer Oklahoma route.  At least he got to see something new.

I slept in a bit and then went to work.  Nothing really interesting there.  At noon I met Dominica and Liesl at the OB/GYN for Dominica’s final checkup before actually having the baby.  The checkout went well and Liesl, as always, had a great time playing in the waiting area.  She just loves their foam blocks and “busy zoo” wood toy.  While I was in the lobby watching Liesl I checked in on Foursquare, as I always do.  I noticed, completely by chance, that there was a “special” at the MacArthur OB/GYN so I checked to see what it was.

Bizarrely, the “special” available at the MacArthur OB/GYN was that the Mayor (basically the person who checks in to FourSquare the most from there) wins a free 4D sonogram.  I though “Isn’t that funny.”  Then I checked in and was notified that I had become the mayor.  Ha ha.  So I called Dominica to let her know that we had just won one.  She said to go ahead and see if we were really able to get it or not.  They figured out that they could squeeze us in this afternoon, so we schedule to come back in two hours.

The problem, of course, with giving out a sonogram to the mayor like this is that the only way to become the mayor is to come in quite often.  For example, we have now come in every week for weeks for the regular checkups so I’ve been racking up check ins quite frequently.  In order to get enough checkins to become mayor we had to go to our final checkup with just five days to go until the baby is born.  In order to unseat me as the mayor, the next person will have to either wait until my checkins begin to expire or check in even more than I did – which is barely possible.  So basically only people who are way too late in their pregnancy can win the sonogram – it’s a self defeating system.  It is a really neat prize but basing it on the mayorship creates an unforeseen problem, I think.

A 4D sonogram is best done between 28 and 32 weeks.  We are, obviously, at 38.  So the baby is taking up a lot of room and it will be pretty hard to see anything.

We went to Einstein Bagel Bros. for lunch.  Then, as we had a little time to kill between appointments and since I had some work to do, we ran to the office and Dominica and Liesl got to come in and see where I work.  Dominica has not seen my office since she stopped in one night to pick me up at the Warren, New Jersey office long, long ago, probably in 2007.  It was a very long time ago that I moved from Warren to Wall Street and then I worked from home for over a year then moved down to Texas a year and a half ago.  So it had to be quite some time ago that she was last in the office.  Amazing how time flies.

We went back and did the sonogram pretty quickly.  There really wasn’t anything for them to see.  Everything looks good but all that is really visible is the back of the baby’s head.  The baby is already into the birthing position and ready for delivery.

This evening is the beginning of our crazy cleaning schedule.  We ran to Kroger and did quite a bit of grocery shopping as well as picking up the Rug Doctor that we need to clean all of our carpets.

We got home, had dinner and then go busy cleaning out some rooms and cleaning the floors.  That was a lot of work.  We got the den and the back half of the living room clear so that we could shampoo the rugs.  We did one run and decided to save the rest for first thing in the morning so that, hopefully, what we did would dry enough so that we could move furniture back on top of it.  It is like a puzzle game – figuring out where to clean and what to move where when in order to be able to shuffle everything around to be able to clean the floors.

So we went to bed a little early knowing that we needed to be up early tomorrow to keep cleaning.

The baby mayhem has already begun.  It is one crazy busy baby schedule from here on out until next Tuesday.

We are now under a week to the new baby.  Now things really start happening quickly!

Not too much to report from the day today.  At lunch today Brian and I hit the warehouse and picked up the APC SmartX 1500 UPS unit that will power the house as well as the 25U four post rack to hold my server gear.  This is some seriously heavy stuff.

I went back to work and Brian spent the afternoon assembling gear.  There is a lot to be done tonight.  He is leaving for Philadelphia first thing in the morning.  He hopes to be on the road around three thirty!

I got home and we spent the whole evening working on the office.  Putting that rack together proved to be quite the challenge in the small space that we have to work and with Liesl trying to “help” as much as possible.  Not hurting her was as much work as assembling the thing.  It took most of the evening.

We got the rack together, the UPS mounted and the first server mounted into it.  Then it was time to get Brian ready to go.  I had a lot of other work to do so he mostly did that himself.  There was a lot of desktop coordination to do as he is shipping a lot of stuff on this drive.

It was very late, maybe two in the morning, when everyone finally made it to bed.  I am very excited to finally have the server room about ready to be used.  Dominica is excited because it means that we can actually start cleaning the house.

Brian discovered that the weather is supposed to be really, really bad this week through the entire eastern half of the country.  So rather than waiting until the end of the week he is going to make an attempt at escaping Texas much earlier.  Maybe tomorrow but it sounds like it is going to be more like Wednesday morning.  Just too much to do for him to be able to leave by tomorrow.

Brian got addicted to doing website design today and did that all day.  This evening we ordered the new rack and UPS for my home office.  We had to give up on the full sized, 42U server cabinet because it turned out that it was going to be too long to fit into the server room.  That is too bad.  I was really looking forward to having that.  However, it is going to save a fortune not to have it so, in the end, getting the 25U rack is a far more sensible option.  Not nearly as cool, but sensible.  Everything should be able to be picked up at the warehouse tomorrow.

This evening, Dominica wanted to go out on a date so she, Liesl and I (leaving Brian behind) went to BJ’s Brew House which we have heard about a bit but have not been to ourselves.  It is over in Addison and is a popular semi-local chain.  There are a few near us.  The food was very good as was the beer.  We were really glad that we tried them out.  It was really nice to get out, just us, for a change.  Liesl had a really good time but had a breakdown as we were leaving and it ended up being a really rough night with her.  We have decided that we are misreading her sleepy signs and need to put her to bed much earlier than we are realizing.

I can’t believe that we will have a new baby in less than a week!