Sheep Guarding Llama

I ended up working from home this morning.  Just one of those mornings where you get caught going from one call to a project to an emergency and after a few hours realize that you have just worked most of the morning from your bedroom and never managed to get out the door to the office and now it is so late that you might as well just get lunch half an hour early and get on with the day.  But I did manage to get to see Liesl all morning so that was awesome.  We are getting more than normal time together this week.

Brian and I grabbed lunch and then I got into the office for the afternoon a little on the early side.  The afternoon at work was quite busy and I did not manage to get home until quite late.  More like the old days in New Jersey when Friday nights were always very, very late.  It was around eight when I finally walked back home in the dark.  Several people on my team have to be working again at two in the morning.  I’m glad that I just had to work late tonight and do not have to start again in the middle of the night.

Brian was out at the Ranch this evening so Dominica, Liesl and I had the apartment to ourselves for the evening.

Six days until dad comes to visit us in Texas.

This week is flying by.  Getting Tuesday “off” breaks up the week nicely, if I do say so myself.

This morning was spent dealing with financial issues, primarily our health insurance which we have been paying an arm and a leg to get but have not had actually turned on yet.  So, since August 1st, we have paid thousands of dollars of insurance while also paying thousands of dollars of medical bills out of pocket.  Not a good combination.  We have gotten a little desperate to get this all fixed.

After over an hour, maybe even two, being bounced from one call queue to another, I finally managed to track down our insurance folks, figure out who to call in the future and got everything straightened out.  So now, we actually have insurance that we can use.  Good thing because we absolutely needed to have it turned on today.

I came home from work at lunch to watch Liesl while Dominica went into the doctor to get a regular checkup on the baby.  She ended up having to wait like ninety minutes for her appointment which ended up only taking five minutes.  Argh.

The good news is that everything is good with the baby.  The heartbeat looks good and all the measurements are fine.  Not a lot of details today but as we had announced our pregnancy a little on the early side there is always that extra concern that the regular checkup will reveal something unexpected so we all feel much better after today.

Liesl and I had a grand time hanging out while mommy was away.  We played together the entire time.  We don’t get a lot of time just the two of us so that was a lot of fun and a nice excuse to be away from work extra long.

Dominica got home and I ran back to the office.  Mostly a nondescript day other than that.  Brian is all set to drive to Houston on Wednesday and fly back to Philadelphia on Thursday morning – a week from today.  Dad comes down to Texas to visit us for the first time a week from today as well!  Hard to believe that we are finally going to see him down here.

I’m feeling quite a bit better today.  I went to bed early last night and slept in pretty late this morning and with all of that extra sleep I was able to mostly recover.

Busy day at work today but that is to be expected when I am loaded up with anything that I could push off from yesterday left for me today.  Filtering through my email alone was a daunting task.  Most of it, though, I just delete in bulk.  No choice there.  I average ten thousand email messages per day.  Average.  Ten thousand.  It is ridiculous.  And it isn’t like we get spam.  These are internal email systems.  This is just useless crap that the company can’t figure out to stop sending in a neverending internal storm of useless email.  The amount of money that this poor planning must cost amazes me.  You could run successful companies on the money lost from bad email management and culture in this place.

After work I went home around five thirty and had a short call with Dell and then Souder, Maggie and I went over to La Cima to meet up with Watson and have dinner.  It was a long night at La Cima!  We didn’t get home until just before one in the morning!

Fell into bed.  Catch you tomorrow, world.

I woke up around two thirty this morning and didn’t feel so hot.  It wasn’t that bad, just enough to get me out of bed and send me out to the kitchen for a glass of water.  Most likely it was heartburn that was causing the discomfort that woke me up.  Within a few minutes, though, I was not feeling well at all and it was off to the bathroom for me.

I was up until around six in the morning!  It was pretty awful.  I was really, really sick.  Luckily there was just enough battery left on my office Blackberry so I was able to get caught up while being incapacitated and was able to let my managers know that I was going to be out sick today.  No chance of me making it in today and I can’t imagine that I would be able to even work from home much.  Really not feeling well.

I managed to get back to sleep around six and slept until around ten in the morning.  That helped but I was still very ill when I got up.  I needed the sleep, though, or I would really have been bad all day with exhaustion on top of everything else.

I’m pretty sure that I have food poisoning.  Not sure what else it could be.  I got sick about fifteen hours after eating seafood which is a pretty likely source of food poisoning.  I had two things of shrimp and clam chowder at lunch yesterday all of which is a high likelihood of carrying toxins – no way to cook that out.  Nothing serious, just really inconvenient.

Liesl insisted on watching Racing Stripes several times today.  I’m already getting pretty tired of that movie.  She really loves it though and it is good that she wants to watch something other that Dora, Diego or Wonder Pets.

Later on in the day, snuggled up on the coach with Oreo at my side, wearing my sweat shirt and sweat pants and covered in blankets, I got to play Oblivion for a while – one of the fringe benefits of being home sick.  Oreo thought that the whole day was great – we snuggled the entire day.  Dominica couldn’t believe how cold I was with the apartment being near seventy five degrees and me being so bundled up and snuggled with the dog and still being very cold.

I managed to finally complete the Thieves Guild quest line in Oblivion which basically puts me at the end of the main game.  Technically I do have a few loose ends left – I never did the little daedra quests but I’ve been told that they are pointless and not worth the effort.  No real story to be had with them, just some work collecting tidbits from around the game and then you get some silly reward that you don’t even want.  I might do them at some point but for now I am just skipping them.  Beyond that, the only quest that I know that I have left is the wrap up the “Fingers of the Mountain” quest which I will come back to.

Now, what Dominica has been waiting for, I am leaving the main Oblivion game and venturing into the expansion content of the Shivering Isles which was, in many instances, sold as a separate game from Oblivion itself.  From what I have seen online, the Shivering Isles should provide around thirty additional hours of gameplay which, when added to the miscellaneous wrapups that I need to complete yet, should put the complete Oblivion game pretty close to two hundred and fifty hours by the time that I am done with all of it.  At least done enough to put it down and move on to something else.

I only played maybe twenty minutes in the Shivering Isles before putting it down for the day.  This evening we watched James Stewart in Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation from 1962 which wasn’t bad but I would not call it a classic either.

Liesl has a new routine now when going to bed.  She likes to count her bears.  She started doing this the other night and we were so excited when she counted to six.  Tonight I asked her “Liesl, how many bears do you need?” and she said counted from one to eight several times and once went to nine!

I can’t believe that 2010 is almost over.  That seems just crazy.  Our first year in Texas has been flying by like nobody’s business.

I got up early this morning and got on email and got to work straight away.  Always too much to do and no time for sleep.

This morning, Brian Souder and I got to go out to Addison Airport near where we are in the Metroplex to see Fifi, the last flying Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber still in flying condition.  It was very cool to get to see it come down the landing strip and be right there on the tarpac with it.  We were running a little late (not our fault, the plane came in early and our ride wasn’t ready to get to the gate until the plane was making its descent) but we got to see the plane still in motion and pull up along side of it while the propellers were still spinning.

I managed to take quite a few pictures of Fifi while it sat at Addison Airport.  The plane is available, currently, for rides ranging from $595 to $995.  If it was cheap I would totally do that but I can’t afford to be spending a thousand dollars for a less than an hour ride in a World War II bomber.  Boy that would be cool though.

After checking out the plane, Brian and I grabbed an early lunch at Rockfish and then Brian dropped me at the office and went back to walk Oreo and pick up take out Indian from Chaat Cafe for Dominica for her lunch.

I had a lot of work to catch up on at the office even though I had been diligently on email all morning.  Just too much to do.  Lots of server issues, it seems, continuing from this weekend.

We had a fairly relaxing evening at home tonight.  Dominica made dinner and we just stayed in.

When I got home, Dominica told Liesl to tell me what movie she had seen today.  Liesl said “Run Zebra!” which turned out to be the moving Racing Stripes which is about a zebra that thinks that it is a race horse.  This is, apparently, Liesl’s new favourite movie and she made us watch it again tonight.  Fortunately for me, I have never seen the movie before so it was not to bad to sit through.  I will likely see it a lot more, though, as we are moving into the age when the same movie is watched over and over again.

Liesl is so cute when watching the movie.  When the horses (and zebra) race she runs around the house like a maniac pretending to be a horse in the race.