Sheep Guarding Llama

I recently learned that A&E, the cable television network, is proposing a new reality television series called “Stain Hunters.”  The show would follow the misadventures of a group of professional maids (think Merry Maids) as they scour Chicago or St. Louis searching for the worst possible stains, miscolorations, smells, etc. in carpeting, furniture, clothes, bathrooms, etc.

This follows on the successful franchises in a similar vein where specialists descend on a home to clear out accumulated junk, to pawn their earthly belongings to support a gambling habit, where organizational managers help people red up their homes, where home specialists slap paint onto cheap wood assemblages to make it look passably elegant on standard definition teleivions or where dumpster divers look for lost treasure. This is sure to be a moderate hit surviving at least two to three seasons and will fit comfortably in the existing lineup.  “Stain Hunters” will include a closing tip each episode on ways to either avoid stains or a “secret” insider, pro tip as how to get out a particular type of stain.

You think I’m kidding.  You’re pretty sure.  But you’re not totally sure.  Are you?

We slept in until around nine this morning.  That was some good sleep.  We often don’t get very much so getting a bit more than eight hours was awesome.  I feel great today.  And we have water and the weather is nice too.

We set to work cleaning the house first thing.  That and I had some work that needed to be done for the office.  So I spent about an hour or so working for the office and all morning cleaning whenever possible.  We put tons of stuff away, got the kitchen all spiffied up, vacuumed and more.  We needed some snacks for the crew later on today so Dominica ran to Walmart and did some shopping with Liesl allowing me to keep cleaning at the house which worked out pretty well.

The house is really looking great.  This is the best that it has looked since we first moved in.  We still have boxes piled up in the living room but there is nothing that we can do about that, I don’t think, until we get the garage conversion completed.  Which demonstrates why that needs to be a priority for sure.

Brian Souder arrived a few minutes after one and the rest of the crew started trickling in at around one thirty.  We had Brian S., Brian W., Jen, Maggie, Dominica and I as well as Maggie’s daughter and her friend who were hanging out too.  We hooked the girls up with Liesl and the PS3 with over five hundred movies available on the house server so they were pretty well entertained with that.  Liesl thought that having the two older girls at her disposal all day was awesome.  She had a great time and it worked out really well that we basically had babysitters all afternoon.  Liesl was thrilled and didn’t complain at all – unless one of the girls wanted to abandon her and go use the bathroom or something crazy like that.

One of the cutest things ever was walking in to check on the girls and finding Liesl lying on the bed with her head on her hands over the side of the bed watching the television.  She looked just like a little version of a bored tween.  It was hilarious.  She is so growing up.

The meeting went well today and seemed to be really productive.  I think that everyone is enjoying being able to get together like this.  It is a good use of time.  Having the soda, chips, veggie tray and Walmart fresh made pizzas to pop into the oven worked really well.  It was cheap and very tasty and easy to do.  No big issues attempting to coordinate food for everyone partway through the afternoon.

We went until around seven then everyone headed for home.  Dominica made sausage and peppers again for dinner.  We have finally found potato rolls here in Texas which makes all of the difference between bland, tasteless sausage and peppers that I could take or leave and the meal that I love.

Now that the water is back on and we are into a house of our own, we are making a real effort to eat healthily at home drastically more.  It really does not save very much money.  It does save the tip and tax and most of the cost of driving someplace but the actual cost of food is pretty much a break even, I think.  So it might be a twenty five percent cost savings, in my quick estimation, but it does save a lot of time in the evenings as going out just takes forever.  The downside is that it means that Dominica has to do all of that work to make the meals and then there are all of those dishes to clean up.  It is amazing how much work is actually generated by the creation of one meal.  Oreo very much appreciated us eating at home more.  Otherwise he is left home alone while we go out.

After we ate I spent a while showing Brian, via join.me – LogMeIn’s screen sharing service, how to do a complete install of WordPress on Rackspace CloudSites.  That took at least an hour, maybe as much as two.  While I was doing that both Liesl and Dominica went to bed and were asleep by the time that I was off of the phone.  So at around eleven I went to bed and listened to some more of my book New Europe by Michael Palin which I have nearly completed.  It is a travelogue of his time touring the nations of eastern and central Europe that, until somewhat recently, fell behind the Iron Curtain.  Today the Iron Curtain era seems long ago and far away and Liesl will see it much like I see the Korean War to my parents (they were alive but it seems so long ago and so irrelevant) but the countries that fell behind it are still early in their phases of reconstruction.  The book is far from my favourite travelogue and it fails to tell stories in the way that I often prefer them but it is informative and interesting and nearly everyplace in it is one where I would like to visit.

So it was just after midnight when I fell asleep.  Brian is planning on coming over in the morning to look at doing some additional network cabling in the house.  The next room up on the list is the master bedroom where the PS3, XBOX 360 and AppleTV all need to be plugged in to the network.  We had tried using the PS3’s wireless capability for a few weeks but it was horrible.  Even with the Apple AirPort Extreme right across the hall the speeds that it was getting weren’t enough to play Netflix reliably and not enough to even begin to watch something streamed at higher rates inside of the house.  So we resorted to stringing a cable across the hall from my office / the nursery into our bedroom which is somewhat dangerous and definitely an eye soar.  Plus it uses up the only available network port left on my AirPort.

The plan is to have all of the house connect back to a central cabling plant in the garage.  There my twenty four port Netgear GigE “Smart” switch (managed but not managed via SNMP) will do the trick of consolidating all of the traffic rather than having it split out to a couple of low end, very small home switches like it is at the moment.

Our first full day with water.  We were getting pretty stressed out without it.  No idea what to do.  It feels so great to get up, shower and be able to go to the office. I’m not the go to the office type but having the flexibility to do so is nice.

I got caught working from home for a few hours today so it was ten by the time that I went in.  It is in the forties today so pretty nice here in Texas.

I went out to lunch at Mercado Juarez with one of the admin teams at work.  Fish tacos, but not very good ones.  The quality is good, just not a style that I am in to.  I will stick with their cheese enchiladas, I think.

The office was not too busy today.  There was a fair amount of evening deployments but while the volume was pretty high, they were mostly done on the early side so I was able to leave the office at a pretty good time.

I got home and Dominica made veggie sausage and peppers for dinner which we ate while we watching some of Battlestar Galactica: Season 2.5 which we are almost halfway through by the end of the evening.  It, like the season before it 2.0, is rather short.  The two together are only barely the length of a normal season.

We did some light cleaning around the house but decided to get to bed on the early side.  We are all so tired.  We have a busy day tomorrow with the Brians, Jen and Maggie coming over in the early afternoon and staying for much of the day.  So we need to get up in the morning and do some serious house cleaning.

We are liking our house much more now that we have water again!

I found out at work today that Monday is Martin Luther King, Jr. day which, of course, I was oblivious to.  So this is actually a three day weekend for me which is awesome.  I love getting unexpected holidays.  After so much of my life working places where I didn’t get anything like a holiday it is continuously amazing to me that I get days off from time to time.  And since I never got them before I have no inherent feel for when they are in the year, either.  Having one this soon after the Christmas and New Year’s holidays really throws me off.

Enjoy your long weekend everyone!

As expected, no water again today.  We knew that there was no possible way of having water today as it was only twenty four degrees outside last night so rather than potentially getting better, we are getting worse day by day as more and more of our pipes continue to freeze with nothing that we can do about it.  We have high hopes that with the extended period of above freezing temperatures today that are supposed to start around eleven this morning and last for about twelve hours that we might have just enough heat energy to get a trickle of water through the pipes.  Once we get a trickle, we should be okay.  But as we have been frozen solid for three full days now, it might take a lot more than that for the pipes to actually thaw.  This could be very bad.

Tomorrow we are predicted to be in the high forties, nearly fifty degrees, with lows only barely dipping below freezing.  In theory, everything should be thawed by tomorrow night but no guarantees, of course.  Today is probably pretty unlikely.  Our plan is to blast the garage with the forced air heater today and to heat the pipes in the atrium area with the smaller electric heater to see what we can do to spread some heat down the metal to the pipes underground.  I’m guessing that we have a fifty percent shot, at best, of getting water today.  This is no fun at all.

On top of that, the cockroach that we have had captured for well over a week that we thought was about to die when we first caught it is doing better than ever and wandering around attempting to figure out an escape from his confinement.  What a pain.

Dominica had an eight in the morning doctor’s appointment in Irving this morning so she was up and out of the house around seven while I stayed home to watch Liesl and Oreo and to look after our disaster of a house.  I was going to take Liesl down to the apartment in Las Colinas so that we could use the facilities there but when I went to get her ready I realized that Dominica had taken the Acadia rather than the Mazda and had left me without a means of transporting Liesl so we were stuck in the house.

Liesl and I hung out until Dominica got home around nine thirty or so.  She ran to the store and picked up some emergency water while she was out to make sure that we would have enough to get through the day.

I worked from home the rest of the day.  Around eleven thirty the temperature outside finally rose above freezing.  Time to kick on the heaters to see what we can do.  We are forecast to have a twelve hour stretch during which time it might be warm enough to get a real thaw and get the water moving from wherever it is stuck.

I worked for a while.  Then, in the early afternoon while making a pass through the house doing an inspection, I took a peek out the back door just to be safe.  A glitter caught my eye.  In a flash I realized that the glitter was flowing water in a large pond that had formed in our back yard.  About a third of the yard was under water!  Well, it would appear that we have water now.  Unfortunately it is all in the yard and none is in the house.

So Dominica and I ran out to inspect.  There is indeed water.  Lots of it.  Not just on the ground but there is a geyser spraying horizontally out from the copper tubing leading to the, as we were informed, defunct water softener that sits outside in the yard.  Apparently this piping is still in use contrary to what we were told before buying the house.  Some sort of cap or valve must have blown off of this portion of pipe causing the leak.  It isn’t really a leak, it is completely open tube.

Fortunately there was a shut off valve right there and I was able to turn off the water.  I found the “leak”, stuck my finger into it as well as I could and turned the water back on.  This produced enough pressure to get water to all of the faucets in the house proving that this was the problem and that our water was working.  Looking at this piping, it is no wonder that it froze.  This is completely exposed copper pipe just sticking a few feet out of the ground. Of course it froze.  We can see that the previous owners had had heating tape and insulation on this pipe at some point but not for a while.

We weren’t sure what to do with the broken pipe, though.  So we called the plumber that we had come out two days ago but they weren’t answering their phones.  So we called Dwayne the contractor who had been over two days ago as well.  He was over to the house in fifteen minutes.  Shortly after he arrived, Maggie arrived who had been planning to work with Brian for the afternoon.

It took less than an hour before there was water in the house again.  Hallelujah!  You really don’t realize what a problem it is not having water until you don’t have it.  The number of things that you do every day involving water is unbelievable.  Just watering the plants becomes an ordeal.  Now we can shower, do the dishes, do the laundry, water the plants, etc.  And now we can get back to cooking at home which we had been trying to do but had to stop once we lost water.  Something always seems to stop us from being able to cook for ourselves.

Now to get back to normal life.  Before it got dark, Brian and I ran over to Home Depot to pick up new insulation for the copper pipe which Brian put on.  The “new” pipes are much lower to the ground and will be easier to insulate and now that we know where the problem is we should be pretty good.

We spent some time with Dwayne as well going over plans for the garage conversion which he will be doing.  It’s not technically a conversion, since that was already done before we bought the house, it is just a repair of that conversion with every little thing being replaced.  When we are done it should be really nice in there.  But there is a lot of work to do.

Dominica cooked dinner and did dishes while I showered.  It is great to have our house back!

We really were not expecting there to be any water for us this morning.  It is so cold over night, dropping into the low twenties, that there is no way that there would be water if there was not during the day.  And it is not due to be warm enough today that there is even really any chance of us getting water even this afternoon, even with the sun shining brightly.  It is only ever supposed to break the freezing barrier for a tiny period and only just by the smallest of margins.  We are effectively trapped until at least tomorrow when the forecast at least gives us several hours worth of thawing temperatures and at least several degrees above the freezing mark.  Maybe, just maybe, there will be water tomorrow evening.  Maybe.

I’m obviously working from home.  It’s not like I can shower or anything.  We are in really rough shape – just like we thought that we were going to be in a month ago when we couldn’t get our water turned on.  We can’t use the bathroom, can’t shower, can’t get drinks, can’t do laundry or dishes, can’t clean up after Oreo or Liesl make a mess, etc.  The plants are taking it pretty hard too as the heater is really running trying to make the house warm to avoid any additional freezing so the air is super dry and the plants are all wilting.  But we don’t have the water that we need in order to water them.  This is pretty rough.

Late this morning, Dominica, Liesl and I drove over to Las Colinas and I worked from the apartment rather than from the house.  We took showers there which was awesome.

While we were at the apartment suddenly I got the calendar reminder that Dominica had a doctor’s appointment right then.  She had forgotten about it entirely but fortunately had used the calendar and had added it to mine as well so I told her and, in a panic, she ran out the door and made the appointment.  Good thing that we were at the apartment just ten minutes away rather than being over twenty minutes away as we would be if she was coming from the house instead.

On the way home from the apartment we stopped off at Jack in the Box and got a bite to eat.  We are not cooking anything at the house as we cannot add water, don’t have water for safety and have no means by which to wash up afterward.  So any food on dishes is rather a problem already.

I’ve decided, after this meal, that I am going to start fasting – for obvious reasons.  Issues with food are far less centered around the creation and acquisition of it as around the disposal of it.

No luck on water this afternoon.  It never got very warm and we were back below freezing by evening.  Fingers crossed for tomorrow.

I skipped dinner, as intended, and we watched a few episodes of Battlestar Galactica 2.0 before heading off to bed at a reasonable time.  Dominica has an eight o’clock doctor’s appointment tomorrow so she has to be up hours before her usual time.  Liesl is enjoying BG and likes snuggling up in bed with us to watch it.  Much like I probably did at the same at as the original Battlestar Galactica was new on television at the same age for me that we are watching it now with Liesl.