Sheep Guarding Llama

I wonder how much of 1970s design that I love is not so much because it is the design of my childhood but it is the design so prevalent in the EPCOT of my memory?

Liesl has a new thing that she likes to do: she goes and lays in bed and watches Dora from bed.  The good thing is that she loves taking naps and will come ask to go to bed quite often.  The bad part is that she doesn’t always fall asleep and she watches more than she should.  It is also hard for us to manage turning the PS3 and television in her room off without popping in and disturbing her if she is not completely asleep.  So no good solution there yet.

Liesl has also started a new thing where she says “I Love You” when we leave her room.  So we open the door and say it back to her.  Then she says it again, louder, once we close the door.  This goes back and forth for several minutes.  She finds it very entertaining.  She is the cutest little girl ever!

I got up and worked for the office for a while this morning then we rushed out the door to take the X3 to the dealer for service.  The only dealer that we could find in the area is thirty minutes away which is a bit of a pain.

Dropping off the car turned out to be a major ordeal.  It took the shop over an hour just to check us in!  Massive inefficiency.  Everyone was friendly and the place was clean and attractive but the staff was all confused and there was no clear direction as to how to get service and when I finally managed to do the “right” thing… the concierge handling me just left and left me standing there waiting for him.  After half an hour and several other people offering to help me I finally decided that he had left for the day and left me there so someone else helped me.  Not very coordinated at all.

While I was waiting at the dealer I got to see a guy drive his BMW 528i into the side of the garage because they made him, a clearly not-very-focused older guy, back out of the long garage bay area.  He drove out at a twenty degree angle or so and just hit the one garage door post.  Did quite some car and garage damage.

After dropping off the car we drove back to the apartment and dropped off Oreo.  Then we went on to Waffle House for a really late breakfast.  So late that it was kind of late for lunch, even.  Liesl ate an entire half of a waffle.  She is really getting good at eating her meals now.

We went home and I worked for a little while and Dominica napped.  I took care of Liesl until Dominica woke up after almost three hours.  She has been really exhausted growing this baby.  Far moreso than with Liesl.

It was almost four when we drove down to Mansfield to hang out at the Newpowers’ for the evening.  Liesl is getting more and more comfortable with the family and knows where we are now when we arrive in their neighbourhood.  She immediately leaves us and is happy to go visit with the adults and play with the kids.  She knows to run upstairs to get to the toys and play area.

It is amazing how quickly Liesl is becoming independent.  She will even go outside with just the kids and play on her own.  She doesn’t need to have Dominica or I around at all.  She is growing up so fast.

We had to take off early this evening because Oreo was waiting at home for us and we have to get up early tomorrow so that we can go do the house inspection at nine up in Carrollton.  So we need to get some sleep tonight.

I slept in some today and got up just in time for my first morning conference call.  Friday mornings are so boring.

As soon as my first call was done it turned out that there was another call on my calendar.  Oh fun. So I jumped on that one.  That call ended up going all morning.  It actually went into the afternoon.  Dominica made breakfast and brought me food while I was on the call.  Then later she made lunch and fed me while still on the call.  One of those days, I guess.

All morning was crazy.  I made it into the office, finally, at around two thirty, believe it or not.  People were pretty surprised to see me but it is Friday and there is as much to do after three as there is before so I was still in the office for the bulk of the day.  Probably best that I was home for a while as I am so much more productive when I am home.

The afternoon did turn out to be just as nuts as the morning.  By the end of the day everyone was totally burnt.

Jeff, Dan and I headed over to Rockfish for Friday evening martinis.  Rockfish didn’t order the gin that they were supposed to get for me.  They gave some excuse that made absolutely zero sense and so I guess the real answer is that they don’t special order drinks but they shouldn’t offer to do so.  It isn’t like I asked them to, they volunteered and then when I showed up to order it they got all weird.  Whatever.  Watson was waiting at Rockfish when we arrived.

We had dinner and hung out for a while.  While we were there Dominica and Liesl went to Kroger and did some grocery shopping so it was a good use of the time.  I didn’t miss out on Liesl hang-out time while being out.  Prasanna joined us just before we broke for the evening – we are lightweights and consider nine thirty to be really late.

I grabbed Rockfish’s bread pudding for Dominica and Watson dropped me off at the apartment.  Then it was some 30 Rock and off to bed for us.

We have out house inspection scheduled for Sunday morning at nine.  Tomorrow we have to take the X3 into the shop to get its seventy thousand mile service done.  Just what we need this month, another expense.  We are just bleeding cash at the moment.  It seems bleak but once the house is done we should be saving a little bit there, a hundred or more per month we hope.  And the BMW should be set for quite some time.  And I finally filed our tax returns for 2009 today and we are getting an amazing refund so that will help immensely with everything.

Tomorrow evening we will be down in Mansfield hanging out with the family.

We ended up being up way too late last night.  It was around one thirty when Dominica and I finally turned in.  Liesl was the culprit, she was up using her Tag Junior and reading her Curious George book on colours and having a really good time so we decided that as she was reading that she should be allowed to stay up.  So it was between twelve thirty and one when she finally went to bed.

Sometime around four thirty, I am guessing as I did not look at a clock, Liesl had problems sleeping and came into bed with us.  This happens only once a month, or so, now that she is older.  She likes sleeping on her own in her own room normally.  She does not sleep well when we have to share a room.

At five thirty I was paged out for a server that should not have been alerting but due to several systems at work not working properly the suppression of the alerts failed and I got paged – as did support around the world.  So, since I was already awake, I just showered, walked Oreo and headed on into the office.

It was a brisk morning, maybe fifty five degrees as I walked to the office.  This is when the Texas weather is really awesome.

CNN Money Magazine ran an article recently on the Best Jobs in America.  Not surprising, a very large percentage of the top jobs are in IT including number one!

Dominica and I are still waiting to hear any news about the house on which we put an offer four days ago.  We are really hoping to have this resolved today.  It is quite crappy to just wait and wait to find out about something like this.

Big news in the world today that the Chilean miners who have been trapped underground for over two months have been freed!  This is major world news as this is the longest known human entrapment underground in history in which the people in question survived.  Truly amazing that they were able to save these miners stuck for so long beneath the desert.

Ancestry.com has reported that US President Obama is distantly related to a number of odd people.  Somehow this makes news in the US but this should come as no surprise to anyone.  The relationship level goes back ten generations in most of these cases.  For most Americans, especially those who come from families which have been in the Americans for a significant amount of time and even moreso for those who come from highly affluent backgrounds such as major political figures, there should be no surprise at all that they share relations going back to early settlements.  America only had so many people in it in the sixteen hundreds and those people’s decedents number in massive figures today.  Most Americans can trace themselves back to early settlements – often through many different paths.

In this particular base, Obama’s family history was traced back ten generations.  If you have two parents, four grandparents and eight great grandparents (which you do) then at the tenth generation you have one thousand and twenty four ancestors to choose from.  When you consider the tiny American population that long ago and then take over one thousand predecessors of Obama and one thousand predecessors of someone else there is a decent chance that you will have one of them overlap.  If you then look for hundreds or thousands of famous people in America today, each with over a thousand relatives against whom to compare, you will find seemingly highly coincidental matches for just about anyone – but when you do the math this is completely expected.

For Dominica and I, both of us having been in America for around fourteen generations, the numbers get astronomic with sixteen thousand early ancestors coming from a very tiny pool (first colonial generations) which suggests a very high likelihood of being distantly related to almost anyone with a few generations of American heritage.

You don’t really realize how likely you are to share American heritage until you realize that there is a single couple from the New Netherlands Colony (they came on the very first boat, in fact) who were newlyweds when they left Holland and today are believed to be direct progenitors of roughly one out of every ten Americans!  That means that one of every ten people is related to one out of every ten other people through just one of sixteen thousand optional fourteenth generation ancestors.  Do the math and that means that it is highly unlikely that any two people with any significant American heritage to not be related to each other!

It’s amazing how different the world seems when one applies math to it.

At ten o’clock this morning Dominica called to tell me that we had gotten the house.  They accepted our initial offer too!  We had made a really good offer – we offered the asking price asking them to pay the closing and to hold off on the closing until November 30th.  They were pretty happy with that deal – which in reality they should be as the house has been on the market since July and we are rock solid buyers which you don’t seem to get too often down here.

We are very excited to have plans now.  And Dominica is relieved that she now has a plan for where to hold Liesl’s birthday party.  We had no idea what we were going to do if we did not have the house in time to use it for the party.  Now we have to plan a house warming party too.

At eleven Dominica, Liesl and I went to lunch at Panera and from there went over to sign some documents and turn over some funds for the house.  That went pretty quickly.  Not too much to do.  Between all the stress, excitement and lack of sleep I was barely able to keep myself awake at that point.

After dealing with the paperwork we drove up to Carrollton to take a look at the house again.  We could not get into the house but we did manage to take some pics of the yard so that we could do some planning.  The yard is smaller than we had remembered and it is going to be tough to put the shed in the yard that we had been hoping.  We are considering a partial garage conversion which are pretty popular here to put a storage space and an office into one of the garage bays.

There is a lot of work that is going to need to be done on the outside of the house.  Part of the yard appears to have been treated as a dog run and it is just small rocks and no grass.  It looks awful but is easy to fix.  The middle of the main yard is just plain dirt so we will need to get grass growing there too.

The back yard as a really awful, old jungle gym thing that needs to be removed, and I think that we need to plant another tree in the back and one in the front of the house.  There is an abundance of sunlight and very little shade.

We also discovered that there is a generous amount of decorative flora in the front of the house that will require our attention.  Having a yard, garden and other areas that we need to keep up with is new for us as both of our previous homes were townhomes and had the outdoors managed by the homeowners’ associations.  So now we have to learn about that stuff.

We need to do fence work too.  Already just on our first trip through the house we are racking up the things that need more or less immediate attention.  December is going to be a very busy month as we attempt to fix everything on the outside of the house.  Most of it is pretty minor but there is definitely a lot of stuff.  I’ve never had to do all this type of stuff so it feels a little daunting although it will probably be fun to work in the garden some.

This is the first time that we will own a place where we have the right to make pretty much any changes that we want.  We actually own the whole house, not just the inside of it, so we get to screw all that stuff up now.

We could not get into the house or even into the yard today so I took the iPod and took as many pictures as I could to get a feel for the yard space.  We walked around the block getting a feel for the neighbourhood and down the alley behind the houses to see what our approach was like.  With the iPod I was able to take pictures over the fence in the back which helped us to get an idea of how much space there is there.  Not much is the basic idea but it should be enough.

I think that our focus in the yard will be in shoring up the fencing for safety and cosmetic reasons.  If we don’t take good care of the fencing then Oreo could hurt himself being blind.  There didn’t appear to be able places where he could get out but there were some spots of concern for safety.  Mostly we will be working on making the lawn healthy and getting some garden plants going.  There isn’t enough space to do too much.  Maybe we can get a water feature in at some point.  We both love water features.

After finishing with the house we drove back to Las Colinas and Dominica dropped me at the office.  I wasn’t at work for even an hour before our agent needed to stop back by with additional paperwork for us to sign again.  So I took care of that and, in theory, we are all set.  We did not get a chance to sit down with the bank and get everything straightened out today because our banker had a baby today!

This evening was just a quiet evening at home.  We are very excited and obviously spent a lot of time discussing plans for the new house.  We ordered in Italian and just ate at home.  We watched some 30 Rock and it was time for bed.

Another day and so far nothing has been said about the house.  Very frustrating.  We are so not used to how things are done in Texas.  It is amazing that anything gets done down here with a pace like this.

I managed to get up this morning, get showered, Oreo walked and out the door before Liesl woke up.  It still wasn’t that early as she had gone to bed pretty late but anytime that I can sneak out before she wakes up works out really well so that we don’t go through the drama of me leaving her or trying to get ready while she is awake.

It was a very busy day at the office.  Fortunately the coffee that I brought in yesterday was still there so I was able to just drink that.  Cold but perfectly good.

I managed to take a very late lunch and spend a little bit of time at home with Dominica and Liesl.  If we time it right I am able to get home, hang out, watch something while Liesl calms down heading towards a nap, walk Oreo and get out the door just before Liesl falls asleep for maximum family time.  Then Liesl will sleep pretty much until I get home after work so I really don’t miss much time with her.

The afternoon was a long, busy and stressful one today too.  I tried to leave work around five but didn’t manage to actually leave until almost six thirty.  I got home and ended up on a call until seven.  As soon as I was free we ran out to get to La Cima for pasta night which we missed last week.  It is just us this week, Watson took the night off.

Liesl was very good tonight.  She is always getting better and better at going out to eat.  Her food attention span slowly increases as she gets older and as we get better at managing the situation.  Tonight we thought to bring along the iPad so that she could watch movies on there over the WiFi via Netflix when she got bored.  The iPod Touch had worked out so well two weeks ago that we were hopeful that this would be an improvement on that – which it was.

When we got home we saw that we had missed a call from our real estate agent.  Of course, no message was left so nothing went to my email and when we called back we just got her voice mail.  Our call wasn’t returned.

We had spoken to our agent at one o’clock when I had just gotten home for lunch and at that time she had said that she was supposed to have heard something by three.  But we never heard anything and had not managed to reach her before leaving for dinner at seven.  It was probably nine thirty when we called her back.

So another day has passed without any news on the house.  Very frustrating.  We will both feel much better when we know the actual status of the situation.  We would really like to be able to do some planning.

Speaking of planning – next week is going to be crazy.  Brian and Dave are flying to Austin on Wednesday afternoon.  I drive down to Austin Wednesday evening.  Thursday and Friday are SpiceWorld.  I am speaking at the conference on Friday morning at ten thirty.  I found out the other day that I have been voted the number one attraction for this year’s event!  How weird is that?  I will be returning to Dallas on Saturday morning, laden with Round Rock Donuts.  Then, around Monday, Kevin and Pam are coming to visit us in Dallas.

I worked from home for a little while this morning.  There was a bit of work to do so I logged in to work early and just got caught up trying to keep up with all that needed to be done.

Before going into the office I needed to swing over to the real estate office to sign some paperwork.  So I did that and then went over to Panera Bread to pick up a thing of coffee to take back to the office.

Getting coffee turned out to be an hour long project.  Fortunately I had my iPod Touch with me which I had loaded up with Audible books yesterday and last night I had started listening to Alexis do Tocquville’s Democracy in America which I have wanted to read for many years but have never gotten around to doing.  So I listened to that for a while and ate an early lunch.  So it wasn’t the waste of time that it might have been.  But still, an hour for coffee.  That is a long time.  And when they finally brought it, they were out of their normal coffee totes so had made a makeshift coffee tote out of a box that they found.  I appreciated the effort but it was doomed for failure.

I got to the office and, of course, there were several coffee spills.  I guess that it couldn’t be avoided.  And no creamer today.  Argh.  At least Panera coffee is so good that drinking it black really isn’t a problem.

I took a very late and very short lunch.  After work I had a meeting up in Plano so drove up there as quickly as I could after work.  This was my first time in Plano.  One thing that I have learned about the DFW Metroplex is that all of these places that Americans know by name and feel much be major cities, like Plano, Carrollton, Richardson, Irving, Arlington, Grand Prairie, Denton, etc. are just random designations for random areas of population.  It is all endless suburbia and nothing differentiates one bit of it from another.  None of these places has any identity on its own at all.  They aren’t cities in the way that we think of cities in the rest of the country.

The meeting went well and afterward we all went to Waffle House for dinner.  That didn’t take long and then it was off to home.  I was home by a little after eight.

No word on the house today.  Nothing other than me signing that paperwork earlier in the day.  We made it all day without any feedback from the sellers.  This would never happen in New York.

We also had to deal with the furnace in our Peekskill house this weekend.  Apparently it is not turning on properly so we have to send an HVAC company out there to deal with it.  That is not fun.  Who knows how much that might end up costing.  These are the pains of being a landlord.  Although this issue would have hit us whether it was us living there or if it was renters.  This is our first major issue since getting someone into the house to rent it.  Before we had renters we had that shattered back door but that has been about it.