Sheep Guarding Llama

Ah, the weekend is here.  I got to sleep in some this morning.  Eventually Brian and I got our butts into gear and we went out to Panera to pick up breakfast.  We ended up eating there ourselves and bringing food back for Dominica and Liesl.  Of course, being the weekend, it was around noon by the time that we actually got back from Panera as we were very slow in getting moving this morning.

I got to play a little Oblivion today.  Not very much but a little.  Maybe an hour.  I suppose maybe two, it is hard to gauge time while you are playing.  I am in the Shivering Isles now and attempting to explore this massive expansion.

Today was mostly a relaxing, stay at home day.  Got a lot of Liesl time in today.  She is getting so good with the Apple iPad, it is amazing.  Now she is able to power on the system herself, unlock it, scroll through the menus, find the Monkey Lunchbox game that she loves, select it, choose “Play” and start her game all by herself!  She also knows how to get out of the game when she is done.  Unbelievable how quickly she figured all of that out.  The iPad is absolutely the best toddler learning tool every because it is so interactive and the direct, tactile interface is something that she can do with basically no training.  It is so much less abstract than a mouse or keyboard.

In her Monkey Lunchbox game, Liesl has learned to count up to eight very well, play the matching game “concentration” with amazing accuracy (it is randomized, she doesn’t not memorize it as people have been guessing), she can pick out the “largest” and “smallest” fruits and she can drag puzzle pieces onto an outline and reassemble a puzzle.  We cannot believe how rapidly she has learned all of the skills used in this game and can now zip through it like a pro.  If you have a toddler, the iPad is one of the best investments ever.

I did have to work today.  Nothing too crazy, just some minor stuff.  I knocked that out this afternoon.

This evening, I got Brian to watch the first few episodes of the new Doctor Who which he ended up liking, even though they are the weak “setup” episodes and the real storyline hasn’t kicked in yet.  After that we watched the first episode of Stargate SG-1 which I have surprisingly never seen.  I’ve seen the original movie, of course, and that was classic with Kurt Russell and James Spader but I’ve never seen the series or any of the spinoffs – not a single episode.  Lots of people rave about what a good series is so I was willing to check it out.  The first episode was really weak.  We will see if it manages to get better.

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!