Sheep Guarding Llama

It is an all out Oblivion weekend this weekend!  Whoo hoo.

I woke up at six fifty this morning – just five minutes before the alarm that I had forgotten to turn off was set to go off so I disabled it before it woke Dominica up.  Five minutes after that, Liesl woke up on her own.  So no going back to sleep for me.

Liesl and I hung out for a while.  I did the morning chores and eventually Liesl wanted to watch her shows which she likes to do early in the morning while eating breakfast while still pretty drowsy.  When she settled in with Dora or Diego in the living room I fired up Oblivion in her room (which is mostly our “den”.)  Today’s goal: complete the main quest.

Dominica got to sleep in again today.  She is enjoying having me home this weekend taking care of Liesl.  She has been rather under the weather this week and especially this weekend.

I managed to get a lot of time playing Oblivion today.  It was great.  For a while this morning, Dominica and Liesl came in and hung out in Liesl’s room with me while I played but there isn’t really a very comfortable way to do that in there.  There isn’t really all that much of a comfortable way just for me to play as there is just a traditional couch and no ottoman there.

Dominica suggested that we move the PS3 from Liesl’s room out to the living room so that I could play Oblivion there.  That was a bit of a pain but made it much more comfortable for everyone to hang out as a family.

Because I was focused on wrapping up the Mage’s Guild quest line and the main quest story there was a lot more plot and character development in my gameplay today so Dominica watched it a lot more like a movie than most of my Oblivion game play.

For dinner I ran to Rockfish in the middle of the afternoon and picked up some takeout.  I didn’t realize this but appetizers are half off during a football game (I didn’t realize that there was one of those either) so it is crazy cheap to eat there if you plan correctly.

This evening I managed to push through after wrapping up the Mage’s Guild this morning to finally, finally complete the main story arc.  I started playing Oblivion when we first bought the Playstation 3 when we moved to Peekskill before Liesl was born!  She turns two next month.  That is two years of playing Oblivion.  I am far from done but the main story, the one that kicks off the game, is finally done.

Total playing time to get to the end of the main story… one hundred and seventy five hours.  A very, very long time and I’m sure that there are at least twenty five hours of game play left.  Maybe many more.  I have only just started the thieve’s guild arc and have not begun the Dark Brotherhood arc yet and I haven’t even so much as set foot on the Shivering Isles.  I know that there are a few miscellaneous quests left scattered around for me to find and I did not even touch the daedra quests yet.  Lots and lots of stuff left for me to do.  My guess is that this game will scale to around two hundred and twenty five hours in total with me still missing little things here and there.  I certainly have come nowhere near having seen the entire game yet.  I’ve probably only covered 10-20% of the countryside and only half of the dungeons!

Liesl discovered that she could make a blanket fort with the fleece that I was covered up with on the couch.  My legs were on the ottoman and she would climb between the couch and the ottoman under this king-sized fleece.  She thought that that was great fun.

I managed to get a lot of Liesl time this weekend.  Tomorrow is going to be tough when I have to go back to work.  She hates Mondays just like I do.  She just gets used to having me around and then I am gone again.

Had to get up at a quarter till seven as I have deployments for online trading in the Middle East plus a SAN migration going on this morning.  Nothing too crazy but it is all pretty early so no sleeping in for me.

Work went well and Liesl was awake around seven thirty so we got to hang out quite a bit this morning while Dominica and Oreo slept in.  We read books, watched Dora, played, ate breakfast and just hung out.  We got several hours of time together just us which was nice.

Once Liesl was bored with playing with daddy I put Oblivion in on the PS3 in Liesl’s room.  Fable III releases later this month and my goal is to have Oblivion done and out of the way so that Fable III can get my full and undivided attention.  I’ve been waiting for about two years for Fable III to release so this is a very big deal.  Dominica is excited as well as I am guessing Francesca is as she is playing through Fable II right now.

As of early this morning I was one hundred and fifty three hours into Oblivion and still heavily involved in discovering new areas and finding new quests.  I just can’t get over the scope of this game.

One of the things that I had wanted the iPod Touch for was the ability to look up video game help while playing games without having to go to another room, have a laptop sitting next to me or making Dominica do it for me.  This morning was the first test of that and as expected it worked great.  I was able to easily use the iPod for web surfing and looking things up on it was almost as easy as doing it on a regular computer.  Win.

After Dominica got up she wanted donuts so I drove out to the corner of Story and Northgate to Story Donuts and got us a dozen donuts for the weekend.  We’ve been wanting to do that for a week or two now and finally managed to pull it off.

I managed to get quite a lot of time in playing Oblivion today.  It was great.  This whole weekend is planned as “do nothing” time.  Dominica and Liesl have been napping extensively and I am getting enough time to actually “get into” Oblivion again and not just be pushing through trying to complete a single quest before having to turn it off again.

For dinner we just ordered in from Domino’s Pizza which we do about once every two weeks.

Overall it was a very relaxing day.  Pretty much nothing to report.

I did my Friday morning call from the house this morning which allowed me to sleep in and spend some time with Liesl before going into the office.  It was a nice morning although I could already see that it was going to be a very busy day at work.

It was crazy from the moment that I got to the office this morning and just went and went.  I did manage to out late for lunch and come home for a little while.  Liesl’s nap schedule has been matching my lunch schedule pretty well for a while now which is awesome because we are getting so much more time together than we used to get.

The afternoon was completely crazy too.  By three I was feeling pretty exhausted just from trying to keep up.  It makes the day fly by but boy do you feel worn out by the time that it is all done.

It was a rough day for everyone so after work three of us went over to Rockfish for dinner and martinis.  It is not very often that the guys from work go out for drinks so that was a really nice change.  We ate there and I got food to go for Dominica who hadn’t felt like going out tonight – we were out at the club just last night.

It was eight thirty when I got home (I know… what a party animal) and we hung out as a family for a few hours.  I had to work at ten but that didn’t take too long.  Fortunately because after a really long day having to work tonight and then again tomorrow morning at seven makes for little chance to catch up on my rest.

This weekend we have nothing planned and will just be home hanging out.  We need a weekend of downtime!

I had to be up extra early this morning.  I got up before six and was in the office before seven.  It has been rather a while since I have been in the office that early in the morning.  Surprising there were a couple of people who were in before me.

It was not a super busy day but there were issues needing my attention very early.  I went home for lunch around one and it turned out that FedEx and just beaten me there and my new Apple iPod Touch 4th Generation had arrived.  That is amazing since I only ordered it on Sunday night and I had opted to get it with engraving so it was supposed to take an additional three to five business days before shipping and here it is, only four days later, and I already have it in my hands.  Just three and a half days from the time that I ordered it, with engraving, on a Sunday.  Considering that these things are such a hot commodity that you pretty much cannot get one in a store, that is really amazing.

I got no time to play with my new toy, however, as I had to get back to work.  I only had, at most, five minutes to check it out before I had to get back to work because it takes forever to get it set up enough to even let you really turn it on the first time.

So we got work on the house this afternoon from our real estate agent.  The counter offer from the sellers is not good at all.  Basically, like the first sellers with whom we dealt, instead of coming back with a decent counter they just effectively repeated the asking price even though the market here has been hit pretty hard this month locally and the prices should be coming down a bit more.

So that means that we are not going to be dealing with that house any more either.  Dominica and I talked about it at length and the asking price for the house is just too high considering the scale of the work that we would have to put into it on day one.  Things like completely replacing the fence and gutting the entire kitchen are a bit much and we were only happy to do them if the house was cheap enough.

Now we get to start the process of looking for a house again.  Not fun.  House shopping is really not something that we enjoy.  But it is several months before we really want to close and houses close weeks faster in Texas than they do in New York so we might have been looking a little early anyway.

As soon as I got home we packed up and headed off to La Cima for our monthly membership dinner.  Normally we would not go on a Thursday night but we had our free meals to use so we had made reservations several days ago to be sure that we could get in and take advantage of them.

Watson was sitting at the bar when we arrived so he joined us for dinner.  I was in a “crabby” mood tonight and had the Maryland-style crabcakes as my starter, the corn and crab chowder instead of my salad course and for the main course had the crab-mandarin salad which I had never had before.  So every course (except dessert) was crab.

We were all pretty full and got our desserts to go which was much more responsible than we normally are.  Liesl did very well tonight.  The iPod was a hit when she was getting restless towards the end of dinner.  I was able to put on Dora the Explorer via Netflix streaming over the La Cima wireless and Liesl was completely entranced by the sudden appearance of her favourite show right in my hand.

We went home and pretty much were right off to bed.  Busy day tomorrow.

This weekend we have no plans, except possibly visiting a pumpkin patch with our little pumpkin.  She loves pumpkins and we think that she would really enjoy it.  She is the perfect age for that kind of stuff.

Managed to sleep in a little this morning.  Still wanting to make sure that I am totally rested to be as ready as possible to fight off the stomach bug that has been plaguing the family.  I am likely fine now; it has been long enough.  I don’t want to push my luck, though.  Once I start getting exhausted my schedule does not have very much time allotted for making up sleep so I need to be sure to stay rested.

I was up kind of late last night.  Was talking to some people in Australia, discussing Netgear’s latest ProSecure UTM50 product which looks awesome.  I really want one of those myself.

I was up until almost one in the morning.  It was good, though, as I was amazingly productive and managed to fight my inbox down to just nine items which feels great and I got completely caught up on SGL which is always a major challenge.  I also did that write up on testing the waters of IT that dad had requested.

The morning flew by at the office today.  Quite busy.  Not slammed or falling behind, just quite busy.  Makes the time just zip right by.

For lunch, Dominica had a hankering for Jamba Juice and we had a free Buy One, Get One Free coupon so that was a total score.  They make awesome, healthy stuff and it is a great source of fruit which we often struggle to get.

For lunch, Dominica felt like Jamba Juice so I walked there (yes, I walked to the office today) and picked up our lunch smoothies and then walked home.  Feels great to be out and walking again.  Boy have I missed that during the hot summer months.

After work this evening I went to La Cima with Watson for a “quick” dinner.  Dominica and Liesl did not feel up to going so the two of us just went and did our usual pasta and wine flights.  It was a good dinner.  We were not out late.  It was about eight thirty when I got back home.  Plenty of time to hang out with Dominica and Liesl for four hours before we all turned in for the night.