November 15, 2018: Play Date at the House

Thursday. This morning we are leaving Texas to drive to Wisconsin. I am excited as I am going to get to see several states and regions that I have never seen before. A number of states to cross off of my “never been to list.” After this trip, I will be down to only four states that I have never been to: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, and Utah!

We drove from Texas to Iowa today.  My first new state since I went to Oregon in the autumn.  Not the most exciting of new states as I have been near the border on three sides previously, so nothing in Iowa is really “new”.  But it is an entirely new state and I get to check it off of my list.  And that makes me happy.

It was a pretty easy drive.  Paul does all of the driving and I ride in the back with the girls because Dominica cannot handle being out of the front seat.  So I was doing DuoLingo much of the day and made some incredible progress.

Got a hotel in Iowa and are crashing for the night so that tomorrow we just have an easy drive to Minnesota and then on to Wisconsin.

November 14, 2018: More Siding Work

Three below freezing this morning. So cold!

Wednesday, our last day in Texas for a while.  This morning was an all hands house cleaning day as Isabella and Juan are coming over later to play with the girls.  In reality, this is the very first time every “having friends over” to the house in Texas, or anywhere in America.  They used to do this a lot when we lived in Romania, but it is something that just never happens here.  So this is a really big deal.  They’ve had friends here, but it has always been associated with their parents coming to visit or whatever, or their cousins.  And even both of those things are really rare.

So until about one, we just cleaned and cleaned.  The house is looking pretty decent, though.  Liesl did a great job of cleaning all morning.  Luciana found it a lot more stressful and wasn’t exactly helpful all day, but she did have her moments.

The girls’ room is the big winner of the day’s cleaning.  I can’t remember so much of the floor being visible.  I’m not sure we had it this clean even when we were painting it!  They have room to play and everything.

Isabella, Juancho, and their mother Stephanie came over from four until six this afternoon.  So the girls had a fun afternoon playing with their friends.  Last chance to really see them for quite a while.

Ken after we hunted him down till after 2am.  The siding is “good enough” to get us through for a while now.

Rachel was supposed to come by this evening but was unable to make it.

The girls and I watched Fuller House this evening.  And we played chess together for a while.

The girls and I went on an ice cream run to Sonic tonight.  Yummy.

November 13, 2018: AT&T Issues

Tuesday.  We got a light freeze last night, just dipped during the night.

Today I had a fun day working with AT&T because they sent a tech on site without checking with anyone first.  And they didn’t check to see if they had shipped a router to us first.  So the tech was on site all day looking for a router that it turns out that they shipped to the wrong address and totally lost!  So now our deployment has been pushed way out now.

It is a busy week as we prepare to head up to Wisconsin and New York shortly.  There is a lot to do in the office and we are going to be doing so much traveling!

November 12, 2018: Onboarding

Monday. Had a very busy morning today. Two hours or more of craziness just trying to keep up. Then at ten I got busy doing onboarding for a new team member. That kept by day very busy. Our plan had been to do onboarding today because it is a US holiday so we were expecting that our US clients were going to be really slow so our LATAM staff would have lots of time to do onboarding. But that did not work, and instead we were slammed all day and going crazy trying to help out the new girl while doing everything else. We have our first worker who does not speak English so that makes things extra challenging for training.