Sheep Guarding Llama

Finally Dominica, Liesl and I have a quiet day with nothing going on whatsoever at the house.  We have no plans today at all.

We did more work around the house.  We have been going through all of the remaining boxes over the past few days to make sure that we know where everything is and have a place to put everything.  We are attempting to identify all of the boxes of books and to make sure that that is all that is really in there.  There are so many book boxes, it is crazy.  We have nowhere to stage them while we wait to do the work in the garage so that they will have a final home.

At the moment, all of the boxes of books are just piling up in front of the den area where they await a new disposition.  It is very inconvenient to have them there but we are not really sure what else to do in the mean time.  The garage can’t be done soon enough.  Suddenly we will have all kinds of extra space in the house.  We can’t wait.

We relaxed, we ate at home.  We watched a lot of “baby people” as Liesl calls them – the Fisher Price videos of Little People. This is Liesl’s new favourite show.  She just loves watching it over and over.  We bought these two Little People DVDs at Walmart in Geneseo while we were at home.  We weren’t looking for them, I just saw them on a shelf while we were shopping for something else.  What an awesome buy they have turned out to be!

Liesl loves using the term “baby” instead of “little”.  It is very funny.

I got up at a pretty decent hour this morning so that I could get up and get to work for the office.  I put in a few hours of work.  Then Dominica and I did some work around the house and played with Liesl.

Early this afternoon Souder and then Watson came over to the house to work for several hours.  It was probably five or six hours and I think that it was pretty productive.  We are all getting together again tomorrow evening but this was good prep for that.

Not much to really report today, it was a rather uneventful day in general.

It’s Friday.  I love short weeks.  Only three days of actually being in the office this week.  Very nice.  I drove down to the office this morning.  Doing lunch at the club today.

I picked up Souder at a quarter till noon and we run over to La Cima where we were meeting Tim, the other Souder, for lunch in the dining room.  We had a nice lunch and got a chance to relax.  It was a good lunch today.  I skipped the buffet today and went for the real menu for a change.

Today is the last day of the SEC freeze so there is pretty much nothing going on at work except for incessant explanations as to when the freeze actually ends, which is midnight tonight eastern time.  So while there is no real work for me to do tonight there is a fair amount stacking up for me to do tomorrow.

After I got home at a decent time tonight, we relaxed and watched the first season of the remake of Battlestar Galactica.  We managed to finish the entire original 1978 series.  We had wanted to go back and watch the ten episode long 1980 series but realized when we went to start it that the first three episodes were not available on Netflix OnDemand and that we would have to get it via emailed DVD.  What a pain.  So while we are waiting on that we moved on to the remake series from 2003.

We are totally loving the new Battlestar Galactica.  The remake is completely awesome.  Great writing, amazing updates and explanations that make the original series seem even better.  They’ve done good things with most of the characters, made interesting changes and, I think the best part, they went back and explained why so many things in the original series were so quirky.  Like why this advanced culture was using wired phones.  They actually explained that in a reasonable way.

We are totally addicted to watching Battlestar Galactica now.  Even Liesl really likes it.  It is neat watching these with her because I was two when I first watched these and now she is watching some of the same episodes that I watched long ago at her age as well as watching new ones that are from her own generation.

I am in the office this morning.  Dominica is at home awaiting the power delivery provider to come out and deal with our missing neutral situation.  The team last night indicated that they would be bringing in a trencher this morning to dig up our yard and likely replace the line coming in from the street.

The team from the electric company arrived quite early this morning and ended up finding that the issue was not in our yard at all and so they did not have to dig up our yard in any way.  They were able to fix the issue of the missing neutral in short order and had Dominica test everything in the house to see how it was working.  So far so good.  She turned on all of the lights and kicked off some laundry.  Rock solid power.  This is awesome.  We can now safely turn on our computers and appliances without continuous fear that something disastrous is going to happen.

I came home for lunch today and got a chance to check out the newly working electric.  I am very excited now.  Having the electric be unreliable made being in the house not so much fun and was a constant worry.  Now we can, with much more confidence, move forward with other projects.  And with the repairs being free, we have more funds with which to pursue other work as well.

Most likely our first project is going to be the conversion of the garage.  Getting more working space in the house would be great.  But more importantly having that space as an additional guest bedroom is really a big deal.  That will, in theory, give us the “nursery”, the garage office and the “den” as potential places for guests to use when staying at the house.  Quite different from places that we have owned previously.  We’ve never really owned a place that could house so many people.  With the garage being able to act as a guest bedroom, in theory, that makes the house function much like a four bedroom house.

Possibly the biggest advantage of getting the garage conversion completed, however, is the addition of the one wall being shelving which we will use to house all of the sprawl of books that currently fill the house.  That is the top source of “stuff” around the house.  There are easily twenty boxes of books, plus loose books, books that haven’t made it to the house yet and more than need someplace to go and until we have those shelves will not have anyplace to call home.  Many of those boxes remain in the living spaces of the house making the place a bit of a mess while the rest remain in huge piles in the garage.  In fact, now that I contemplate it more, there might be closer to thirty boxes.  It is truly that bad.

Additionally, if all goes to plan, those shelves will also be used to hold my collection of rare and antique computers interspersed among the books.  I plan to have my Commodore 64, 128 and 16, Vic=20, TRS-80s, XO-1 and others on display there.  I have several interesting items that I would like to display.  I want to put them on stands behind plexiglass or something similar and have little LED lights shine on them and have little museum-style labels that say what each item is.  I think that it would be a really neat use of the space and really fit with the office.

It is Wednesday and after spending yesterday at home I am back to work as usual today.  Jeff and Sarah are on their way to their new lives in California.

Once into the office I settled in a little and got down to business.  I was sitting at my desk and thought that I heard a voice that I had not heard in a very long time but sounded incredibly familiar.  Then I realized that it is my “boss” back from India!  I haven’t seen him in a couple of years.  If I remember correctly, the last time that I saw him was at a bar in New Jersey sometime in 2008.  It is unbelievable that I have not seen him in this amount of time.  That is crazy.  This is his first time ever in Texas.  It took three days of flying for him to reach here.  The weather has been affecting flights all over the world.

This evening, before leaving the office, I finally managed to call TXU (Texas Utilities, I believe that that stands for) and talked to them about the power issues that we have been having at the house.  John, our electrician, had guessed that the issues were internal to the house and not external but had felt that there was enough concern to warrant testing by the power company so had asked us to call, just to be safe.

TXU said that given that this was an ongoing surge and brown out situation that we should escalate directly to OnCore and let them handle it as they are the actual service delivery providers.  So I called OnCore and, after getting them to understand the issue, they realized that it was very serious and rushed someone out to the house.  I asked to get an estimate on arrival time and they said that they couldn’t give me one.  So I didn’t know if it would be an hour or two days.

OnCore was at the house in under an hour!  I guess that they are considering the power issues to be more serious than we had imagined.  Dominica IM’d me to tell me that they were there so I instantly shutdown at the office and hoped in the car and zipped home.  Unfortunately it was rush hour traffic so it took a good hour to get home which made the whole exercise a bit pointless.

OnCore had left long before I got home but Dominica had good news: OnCore had discovered that there was no neutral going from the street to our house!  Well that explains it.  It does not explain why the former owners of the house lives, presumably for several years, without working electric.  So OnCore said that they would be back first thing in the morning to get this fixed as it was dark and very late this evening.

This is very encouraging.  We were in a panic that the electric was going to cost us thousands of dollars to get resolved and would require us to rip the house all up.  Not the case.  Now we are confident that our electric is going to be fixed and we won’t have to pay a dime.  The Lord watched over us big time on that one.  We are quite relieved.