Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Another nice day in the mid-nineties.  I can handle this.  I was pretty tired this morning and slept in a little late, which is fine as my Fridays start off with a conference call that I just do from home since it is early in the morning and there is no point to my being in the office prior to the call.

I ended up having so many little things going on this morning that I just worked from home until lunch.  That worked out quite well, actually, and I got to see Liesl a lot today.  Dominica made an early lunch which I ate and then went into the office.  I walked today, it seemed warm out but was not as warm as yesterday and the walk was quite nice.

Work was exceptionally slow today which was great.  On a Friday, no less.  How cool is that?

I got to leave work at a nice time and came home for a little bit before it was time to get ready to go out to dinner at La Cima.  Dominica and Liesl ran out to the store before we went to dinner as well.

It is a busy Friday night, being the last Friday of the month, and it was hard to get in to La Cima at all let alone at the time that we had wanted.  So our reservations were for eight which is very late for little Liesl.  She has been napping quite late and staying up pretty late at night recently, though, so we might be okay.

I checked in with FourSquare tonight at La Cima and earned my first Mayorship.  We knew that that had to happen pretty quickly.  For those who don’t use Foursquare, that won’t mean anything.

Dinner was super cheap tonight.  We ate sensibly getting just salads and dinner.  Dominica’s dinner was free as it is her birthday month and we had a fifty dollar gift certificate to use tonight so we paid almost nothing for our dinner tonight which was very cool.  We decided to splurge and got the BBQ shrimp with grits too to split which is very tasty.  Liesl got mac and cheese and started yelling “mac and cheese” with a big grin on her face over and over again which was adorable.

Liesl is, without a doubt, the center of attention at La Cima.  Everyone comes over to see her many times.  She has her own fan club.  She adores all of the attention although she does get shy from time to time.  Mostly she is just having a great time.

We came home and Liesl stayed up for about an hour watching Dora.  Dominica did some cleaning and I worked on writing an article and doing some last minute work for the office.  We ended up staying up pretty late.

The weather warmed back up a bit today and we are back into the mid-nineties now.  But it is so much cooler than it has been for the last few months that it feels cool to us.  I walked to the office this morning.  I’m so glad to be walking again.  Driving that short distance just feels wrong.

Very slow day at work today.  Yay!  Came home for lunch and got a chance to hang out with the family a bit.  I’m trying hard, whenever feasible, to be home when Liesl is awake during the lunch times so that we can hang out.

I got a chance to speak to Ramona today.  She left China several days ago and has been traveling across Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which I bet is awesome.  She is now in Moscow and well connected to the rest of the world.  I bet that she is in financial shock going from a year in Yulin, where life is insanely cheap even by rural American standards, to Moscow, the most expensive city on earth having just recently surpassed Tokyo.

This evening was spent working and hanging out with Liesl.  Lot’s of stuff needing my attention and no time to relax whatsoever.  A very busy night.

Liesl was up late tonight.  We finally decided that we needed to put something on to get her to calm down and fall asleep.  So pretty late we put on a few episodes of The Suite Life On Deck and she snuggled with me on the couch to watch it.  I had my laptop and was working on a Visual Studio project so that worked pretty well.

By the time that Liesl fell asleep I was barely able to hold my eyes open.  At around eleven Dominica and I worked to get Oreo’s dog food all packed up and into the freezer.  Dominica had cooked for him today.

When I took Oreo on his final walk for the day we noticed that the sidewalk directly in front of our entrance to our building has been completely overrun by fire ants.  They not only worked their way under the main sidewalk after having set up their nest under the tree there but have now worked their way up the sidewalk and own quite a bit of space there.  We really cannot use that entrance anymore, it is too dangerous as we are likely to track them in!  They have “bubbled up” all around the sidewalk for quite some space and tonight were pouring all over the sidewalk as their went about their little ant chores.