Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning Datamation published my article on The Differences Between Managing Engineers and Support Professionals, one of my article series on IT management that I write for them.

For some reason I was really exhausted today.  I ended up sleeping in late and then working from home for just a little big this morning before heading into the office.  I got in around nine thirty.

No interviews for me today so I am using the day to catch up on the “normal work” – ho hum.  Around ten thirty I ran out and picked up coffee for the team from Panera Bread.  Traditionally everyone on the team seems to drink Starbucks but since being down in Texas I have made several runs to Panera for their light roast, which is very different from what you get at Starbucks, and several hard core Starbucks fans have made a point of telling me how much they love Panera’s coffee, that they now drink it regularly and how it had never occurred to them to even try it previously.

I am always surprised because I think of Panera as a premier coffee destination (along with McDonald’s McCafe and Tim Horton’s) where most of my friends would choose to go for coffee naturally should they be out looking for some and not brewing their own at home.  With their free and easy to use WiFi Internet access, wide range of food options and casual atmosphere that makes reading and working easy to do I am surprised that more people do not use them all of the time.

This evening Dominica and I had originally planned to go to La Cima for pasta night but we were pretty worn out after I got home and decided against it.  We figured that it would be best to just stay in instead.

I can’t believe that August is over already.  This year has been flying past us.  We have now been in Texas for almost nine months which is very hard to believe.  We have been in Texas longer than we lived in North Brunswick, I think.  In several weeks we will have been in Texas as long as we were in Peekskill before finding out that we were moving to Texas!  Now that puts it into some perspective.

I was really tired this morning and overslept a bit.  It was a rush to get in to work today.  Today there were several more interviews in my week long interview marathon.

Not much news today.   Busy day but nothing too interesting.

I came home  a little early so that we could get up to La Cima for our dinner reservations.  Tonight is the last evening of August and we have to use our “Plus Membership Benefits” tonight or lose them.  We had a lot of benefits to use during the month of August and we were struggling to get up to the club enough to get all of our benefits!

Our reservations were for six which is perfect because it means that Liesl has only just woken up from her afternoon nap in time to go to dinner.  Liesl has been napping later and later recently and has shifted from napping during my lunch break to not going to sleep until after I normally would go back to work which is better for me getting to see her during the day and better for going out to dinner.

We had a good dinner tonight.  I opted for all kinds of food that I do not normally eat including salmon and cucumber tartar for my appetizer and the shrimp and crab cioppino for my main meal.  Very healthy.  The cioppino was a lobster broth and very tasty.  My father would love it, I think.

I was very wise tonight and got my dessert to go.  That made for a more appropriately sized meal for me.

Liesl did really well at dinner tonight too.  She is getting more and more mature and getting used to how to behave when she is at the club.  We have also learned more of what to feed her and how to pace the evening.  It is very encouraging to see how well she does eating in a fancy restaurant all of the time though.  It is very good training for her.

The cutest thing is to watch how well Liesl does with her napkin.  She keeps it in her lap just like she is supposed to do and after almost every bite of food she brings it up and wipes her mouth – just like an adult. She is so proper and elegant.  It is truly adorable.

I needed to be in to the office early this morning as I have some errands that need to be run during lunch today so I wanted to get in and get as much squared away as possible so that I would have extra free time.

I got to the office and discovered that I am involved in some serious interviewing this week.  That caught me by surprise.  It has been a while since I have done solid interviewing.  This week is looking like it might be a bit of a marathon.

I had a busy morning and then had to run into downtown Dallas to run an errand.  That took much longer than necessary due to the atrocious parking situation that downtown has.  I hate having to park (or really drive) anywhere down there.  Dallas is not big enough to warrant the parking headache that it has.

My errand was much faster than I had planned on so I was able to go home and see Dominica and Liesl for lunch and eat at the apartment before going back to the office for the afternoon interviews.  It is nice doing interviews as it really breaks up my work life giving me something out of the ordinary to do.

After work, Dominica managed to get the latest episode of Doctor Who, “The Waters of Mars”, to play now on Netflix so we watched that.  We are nearly caught up at this point.  Just waiting for the last two episodes to get released to Netflix.

We all slept in this morning.  Way too much because tomorrow I need to be up early and it is going to be very hard if I let me weekend schedule skew too much.

Today was a mix of productivity with family time.  I got to play with Liesl a lot and we all spent a bit of time just relaxing.

I spent a bit of time working on a BASH / cURL script on my laptop while we watched some Netflix.  Yesterday, Dominica and I watched two episodes of Doctor Who from the latest episodes being released to Netflix.  There is one episode that has been released but does not appear to be working so we are hoping that they get that fixed soon.

This evening we watched the movie Camp which is a movie from, I believe, 2003 and was going to be, I thought, a parody of camp movies but it was actually serious and pretty decent.

Very little to report today.  Have to be up early tomorrow.

Top Ten Failed McDonald’s Products.  Some of these are quite funny.  I especially like the Jason Alexander commercial, boy does that take me back.  I used to watch that commercial and would sometimes get the McDLT.  I always wondered what happened to it.  It was especially interesting that it still exists today, just called the Big and Tasty (a.k.a. the Big and Nasty.)  What is most funny is… what is the difference between the different McDonald’s burgers?  Except for the Big Mac, I really can’t tell them apart.

It is a nice, quiet Saturday at home.  I needed some down time and while I am still quite busy today at least I got some time without people needing my immediate attention for pretty much the entire day.  We all slept in a bit this morning not getting up until around nine.

My first task this morning was wrapping up an article that I had been working on and getting it submitted.  I’m not too sure that it will be accepted but at least I turned something in.  My schedule has been so crazy that I have not been able to write anything for a very long time.  I am trying hard to get back into the swing of writing on a regular basis.  Although for quite some time there was a billing issue around my writing and so I was not anxious to submit anything new until that was resolved anyway.  So the timing was not all that bad, in reality.

Overall I was pretty productive today.  I got a lot of stuff done and got quite a bit of time to hang out with the family.  Liesl and I played a lot today.

We spent a bit of time this afternoon just relaxing in the living room.  I worked hard all morning and decided that I needed to just relax with the family.  Liesl spent a lot of time sitting on my lap on the sofa with Oreo snuggled up next to me.

Liesl has a new game that has just started over the last few days.  Dominica likes to sit in the section of the sofa that is right by the window.  The moment that Dominica gets up and leaves the room Liesl takes off at an all out sprint to get to the chair and leaps up onto it and lies down like she has been there forever before Dominica can make it back.  This has been going on for a few days and it is completely hilarious.

We watched the Hindi film Singh is Kinng tonight.  It was cute, a bit hard to follow at first.  I never quite understood how the beginning of the movie tied in to the later bits.  For the most part I followed it but there were some references at the beginning that I just could not piece together.  But I asked friends and they were confused as well, so it wasn’t just Dominica and I who were unclear as to what was going on.  But the movie was cute and enjoyable.