Sheep Guarding Llama

This is one busy weekend for me.  I am continuing to work on a combination of storage and telephony projects that are sucking every waking minute out of the day.  At least now I am working from the new office.  It is far from being done but just being in here is a huge step.  Today is my first real day able to really take advantage of it.  I now have my good Snom deskphone to replace that awful Cisco excuse for a phone that I have been stuck with for a while.

My desk sits in the middle of the room still which is a bit of a pain but there is wall work to be done yet so that will remain for a while.

I had to work doing a SAN migration this morning so I was up pretty early, we started at eight.  I worked until eleven then Dominica, Liesl and I drove down to Mansfield to hang out with the family for a birthday party.  Brian is continuing to feel better today after his ER trip yesterday and is staying at the house to await the electricians who are scheduled to be wrapping up today.

We hung out with the family for about six hours.  Once Dominica gets into party mode it is hard to get her motivated to go back home but I have tons and tons of work needing my attention and don’t have the flexibility to take the day off, unfortunately.

So it was early evening when we got back home and discovered that the electricians never showed up.  What a pain.  They never, ever respond to email, phone, text…. nothing.  They never proactively tell us that they aren’t coming or when they might be coming.  I called and emailed over and over trying to find out why they weren’t there.  Even our general contractor could not find them.

So yet another week of work on the office skipped.  This will never get completed.

I spent the evening working and was decently productive.  There is a lot of work for me to do tomorrow, though.

Tonight is Watson’s birthday party at La Cima so the plan is that we will be going there this evening.  Dominica and I have not been at La Cima in a while.  We have just been so busy with the baby coming and all of the house stuff.  Plus not being paid for a while made us attempt to pull back on the finances as much as possible.

I worked a normal day.  Quite busy.  After work I managed to get done early enough that I was able to run home, pick up Dominica, Liesl and Souder and then drive them back down to Irving to go to La Cima.  It is a bit of a pain doing that but it doesn’t actually take any extra driving and it lets us park more easily and get to and from the club easier since Dominica is not in any condition to really take care of rambunctious Liesl at this point.

Souder spent the afternoon in the emergency room again.  He was really in rough shape today but after an afternoon in the ER he is in much better shape this evening and was even able to go out to the club with us.

It worked out well for Dominica and I who had our monthly meals to use at La Cima.  It is nearly the end of the month and we had no other plans for how we were going to squeeze in our meals before it became April so that worked out rather well.

It was Souder, Dominica, Liesl, Watson and I along with Mo and Chris, two of Watson’s friends that we had not met previously.  They were waiting for us in the lounge but we went in to dinner pretty much right away.

For a Friday night it seemed rather slow at the club.  We had a great dinner.  As I am apt to do these days, I ordered off menu which threw our newcomers for a loop.  Chris even commented “I don’t even know how to order like that!”  The club lifestyle is beginning to show after a year of membership, I think.  Although it could be all of our “foodie” vacations to Disney World where we, as vegetarians, really learned how to eat outside of the bounds of the menu as well.  Eating at the club is not really unlike being in Disney World in many ways.

My dinner was excellent, probably the best meal that I have yet had at La Cima.  Pan fried striped bass with crab topping and an almond cream sauce or something like that.  It was excellent.  Everyone was quite jealous.

We had a really nice time out tonight.  It was a lot of fun.

No real news for today.  Brian seems to be getting a little worse rather than better, but it is hard to say. It was a busy day but nothing newsworthy.  So I am keeping today short and sweet.

Enjoy your Thursday.

Today is Dominica doctor’s appointment.  I went in to the office in the morning and then went down to the doctor’s to take care of Liesl while Dominica had her appointment.    It actually turned out to be a really fast appointment so we were out of there in no time.

For lunch we went over to Einstein Brother Bagel Cafe which we like down on MacArthur.  They do a good lox bagel, mostly like what I used to get back in Westchester.  Not too much good salmon down here in Texas.

Brian met us there and he and I went to check out a bulk desktop supplier that I recently discovered in the DFW.  That ended up being a great trip.  We got a chance to meet with the owner of the supply house and dealt with him directly.  We picked up ten dc5850 desktops all of which are as good as my own current desktop.  A very impressive haul indeed.  And a great price.  We are very happy.

Dominica continued with the painting today.  She got most of another coat of primer on.  The room is looking pretty good even though it is just primer and no real paint yet.  You can really see the house getting brighter.  Now I am excited about the idea of getting the rest of the house painted.  It will feel a lot bigger, brighter and more modern.

Nothing much doing tonight except for being at home and trying to get as much work done while hanging out with the family.

I worked from home this morning so that I could sleep in a little and help to deal with getting Brian’s prescriptions filled.  That ended up being an all morning project.  We did a few errands while out getting the meds.  We decided to hit the seafood cafe that is very close to the new house.   I have been looking at that place for a while and wanting to try it out but Dominica does not like to eat seafood when she is pregnant so I have not been able to go there to try it out yet.  So this worked out well today.

After getting lunch we went to Jack in the Box to get food for Dominica and took it back to the house for her.  While we were out she and Liesl went to the park to play for a while.  This is their new thing.  They have the park to themselves during the day and Liesl loves getting to go outside and play on the playground.  It is nice because we do not have very much of a yard and what we do have is pretty much full of stuff or needs to be manicured making it really hard for Liesl to get to use it right now.  So having the park so close works out really well.  They could walk there but do not.

Then it was off to the office for me.  Brian was still really sick this evening.  It’s going to take a while for this medicine to really help him out.

After work I went over to the Microsoft offices in Irving for the monthly SharePoint users group meeting with Souder, Watson and Maggie.  This month it was Pizza Hut pizza and Shiner beer.  Now this is how to do a users’ group!

I came home as soon as I could after the group.  I haven’t had a chance to make it out for the SharePint gathering that they do monthly after the users’ group meeting.  I definitely won’t make it next month.  One of these days.

Dominica started painting the “den” area today.  The original room was very dark with a deep burgundy paint that looked attractive but made the room feel like a cave.  At night it was really depressing and even during the day it was pretty dark even with four large windows to give it natural light.

The new colour is a light beige that will eventually match the rest of the house when we get that painted too.  At some point we are going to repaint the entire house top to bottom as all of the colours are too dark and dated and there are many patch jobs on the walls following all of the electrical work that has been done.

Once the room is painted the next step is painting the old, dark wood veneer cupboards to white.  That should modernize it considerably and really brighten it up.  At this stage we can’t really tell how the room will look when it is done but it was so dark that something had to be done.  Once the office is completed, this room is going to be emptied out for the first time since we moved in to this house and we will actually get to start using it.  We are pretty excited about that.  It will be like we magically gain two new rooms at once.  Like a fifteen percent growth in the size of our house all in one fell swoop.  It is hundreds of square feet of house that has been unusable for months.

Brian is still pretty sick tonight.