Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today was much cooler than I have had in Texas for quite a while and it feels great.  Last night was the coolest that it has been and today is not quite that cool but the whole day today was cool and not just the afternoon.  There was a lot of rain around the DFW this morning causing all kinds of traffic issues but no rain, at least none that I saw, directly hit the Las Colinas area.

I drove to work this morning but was sorry that I did.  It was cool enough that I should have just walked.  I was not confident in the weather when I left home this morning.

For lunch, Dan’s wife packed his lunch with just a letter telling him to “have lunch with the guys”, so we all took that as a sign that we were destined to eat at La Cima for lunch today.  Which we did.

The awesome thing on the lunch buffet today was the Caesar salad on the action station.  Since it was on the action station I was able to get it without the chicken.  It is rare that I can get a vegetarian option from the action station so this was a special treat today.  A larger menu than usual.  The salad was fresh sauteed vegetables with a homemade jalapeno lime Caesar dressing.  It was amazing.

I picked up a buffet lunch to go for Dominica and dropped it off for her on the way back to the office.  From the house I walked back to work.  First time walking to work in weeks.  It felt good to get back into the groove.  Starting tomorrow I plan to begin leaving the car at home again.  I really need the exercise.

When I got home from work this evening both Dominica and I were not feeling too well so decided to cancel on going to La Cima tonight even though it is our pasta night.  We are going to be at La Cima a bit coming up in the next week so little need to be highly concerned about making it tonight.  We are scheduled to be there for dinner this Friday night to celebrate Dominica’s birthday.  That will be our first Friday night at the club, I believe.  Then on Tuesday night, the last night of the month, we are sneaking in to have our monthly dinner.  So that is two large meals in the next six days plus we ate there for lunch today.

We did manage to go for a walk again this evening.  It was not as cool as last evening but still pretty nice.  We took a much longer walk tonight, maybe double what we did yesterday.  We put Liesl in her stroller and Dominica pushes her while I walk Oreo on his leash.  All of us need the fresh air and the exercise.  Oreo is very happy to be getting out and getting some walking in.  It is so hard for an old, blind Boston Terrier to get exercise.

I have tons of work to catch up on so spent much of the evening working.  Liesl and I did get a chance to spend a lot of time together this evening – mostly hanging out in Dominica and my bedroom reading books.  She would run and find a book and then run to me and sit on my lap while I read her the book.  Then she would run off to find another book.

Liesl knows tons of animals now.  We go through some books that she has not seen in a very long time and she knows cow, puppy, toucan, cat (meow meow), monkey, turtle, snake, spider, butterfly and more!  Very impressive.

I was stuck working quite late tonight.  So while I was working and after Liesl had gone to bed, Dominica drove out to Walmart to go grocery shopping.  She was gone for several hours!  She left before midnight and did not get back until after two in the morning.

As the day progressed the weather got cooler and cooler.  This is awesome.  It would appear, and I have been told, that the Texas summer is over and we are heading into steadily cooler temperatures from here on out.  Supposedly it is unlikely that we will head over the three digit mark again until next summer.  After weeks of unrelenting one hundred plus temperatures I think that hovering in the mid-nineties will be very pleasant.

Today Dominica and I started our diets.  We are attempting to just do simply calorie counting like dad did.  Dominica was trying to talk me into a more complicated “lose weight quickly” diet but I just want a slow, healthy, sustained loss.  I am very healthy now and just need to lose weight so that maybe I can qualify for health care.  That makes it tempting to harm myself by trying to lose weight very quickly (thanks American medical system!) but I am avoiding doing that.

I came home for lunch and Dominica made sandwiches, salmon and tuna salad.

After work the weather had cooled way down.  When I got home and it was below eighty degrees Dominica decided that we would go out for a walk.  So we put Liesl in her stroller and harnessed up Oreo and went out for a walk.

It was a beautiful evening.  So nice being able to just walk around outside.  The sun was low and the air was mildly warm and there was a little breeze.  We walked around the new townhouses being built near us and then down to the boulevard and along the ponds there.  It is a really nice place for an evening walk and very few people go out there so it is a lot like our own, private place to walk.

It was just a short walk tonight, maybe thirty-five minutes.  Hopefully as the weather gets cooler we can get out and do this a lot more often.

After we were back to the house I was busy working all evening.  There is a ton to be done and I have been struggling to keep up.  Tonight is the every-other week conference call that I am normally on.  It was a long one tonight running for a full two hours.

After the call I ended up staying up late until well after two in the morning working.  Dominica attempted to stay up with me but crashed before I got a chance to go to sleep.  She is going to be exhausted tomorrow for sure.  Lots of work done tonight, though.

Proof that Jay Leno is out of touch, his audience doesn’t even want to know what he is saying apparently.

I got up at seven this morning in Annapolis which is six back home in Irving.  Pretty early to be sure.  I got up, showered, got dressed, did a little work and packed up so that I would not have to worry about packing anything later today.  I don’t want to scramble at the last minute to get things packed.

I went out into the Florida room and hung out with Michelle for half an hour or so.  Then Curtis arrived, or at least popped in as he had been in the house for a while and I just didn’t realize it, and we headed into the office to work for a while.

It was a really productive day.  Lots of coffee involved and whiteboarding.  We ended up taking an extremely late lunch and heading over to Deep Creek.  Deep Creek just has awesome food.

There was not a lot of time after returning from lunch.  We worked in the office and got more done but mostly I was just on my laptop all day.  My work Blackberry is still not set up from when they forced me onto a new device so I am Blackberryless at the moment.  A bit of a pain when traveling like this because normally I would work from it in the airport.

At seven John drove me up to BWI and dropped me off for my flight.  We were there at a quarter till eight and by eight I was sitting at the bar across from the gate.  I ended up at the bar sitting next to a girl who was headed for my flight and a guy who was from Rochester, New York.  Weird.

I had plenty of time to hang out at the bar, I was over an hour early.   Better early than running to make the flight.

The girl from the bar ended up sitting across the aisle from me on our flight and the flight was pretty much empty so we were able to talk the whole flight back which helps to pass the time.  She is newly married and she and her new husband have just recently moved down to Grapevine from Western Michigan arriving just a week or two after Dominica and I moved to the area.  They have been looking for a place like La Cima and so might end up trying it out to see if they might like it.

We arrived at DFW about forty minutes early.  Dominica and Liesl picked me up and we were home before the plane was even scheduled to land.

John at the office turned me on to the latest Internet video sensation, the double rainbow video.  Now, what makes this awesome is not that the video is good, at all, but that the guy is so insanely stoned and yet still manages to make the video and then, when conscious sometime later I imagine, posts it to YouTube.  Now why would he do this?  I have no idea.  But if he hadn’t decided to expose his rainbow fetish to the world we would not have had the chance to then be blessed with the instant classic Double Rainbow Autotune Remix.  All I can say is, “whoa, so intense.”

The plan was to have the alarm go off at three o’clock this morning.  Yup, that indeed was the plan.  What actually happened was that I woke up to Liesl crying.  I said to myself, “That’s funny, Liesl doesn’t normally wake up before thee in the….. OH NO!!!!”  Yes, it was four thirty when Liesl normally wakes up and I had slept through the alarm by an hour and a half.  Craptastic.

Dominica and I were up and out of bed in a heartbeat.  It was four thirty, on the nose. She ran and grabbed Liesl and got her ready to go out the door while I started brushing my teeth and getting my last minute items packed.  It took only five minutes from waking up to being out the door and on our way to DFW.  Impressive.

We figured out a little bit more today about how to get in and out of DFW.  We were able to drop me off at the actual terminal for a change.  That really worked out well as I was able to run right in, print my boarding pass and get out to the gate.  I actually had time to watch CNN for a good fifteen minutes before boarding the early morning flight.

The flight itself went well and uneventful.  I read the latest issue of Visual Studio magazine on the flight and even fired up my laptop and ran through the entire life of the battery doing some software installation of stuff that I had downloaded and prepped while still at the house before I went to bed last night.  I am very glad that I had done that as having that stuff ready to go now worked out perfectly.  I really was able to make great use of the time that I had on the plane.

We landed in Baltimore at nine thirty in the morning.  I emailed John as I landed and he headed out to find me.  I had no checked baggage so was able to get out of the airport pretty quickly.  It was awesome to step out into the cool, sub eighty degree temperatures in Maryland.  I have not felt air this cool in a very long time.  The last few times that I have been in either Maryland or New York it has been very warm – Texas-like temperatures.

John picked me up in the yellow Corvette.  Even though he has owned it for four to six years I have never actually ridden in it.  I don’t fit very well with the firm, sport seats designed for people much smaller than myself.  It was a tight fit.

We headed right over to Old Country Buffet for breakfast.  I had not eaten a bite all morning.  John and I ate breakfast and then Michelle, her mother and the girls arrived – right as they switched over to lunch rather than breakfast.  We got a bigger table and had lunch all together.  That worked out pretty well getting two meals all in one fell swoop.

After lunch we went to the house and spent the afternoon working.  It was quite productive.  I did manage to take a shower and freshen up as well.  I had had to skip my morning shower in our panic to go from being asleep to being in the car in five minutes today.

For dinner, John and I hit the grocery store and got salmon pinwheels that looked quite tasty.  We picked up veggies and fruit and headed back to the house.

I watched Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen with the girls while John slow cooked dinner.  It ended up being more like smoked pinwheels than grilled which was awesome – it just took about two hours.  We ended up having them on hamburger buns with dijon mustard.  They were very delicious.

After Transformers 2 John and I watched the last half hour of Jennifer’s Body starring Megan Fox from the previous movie.  We were very glad that we only caught the end of the it because that movie was really awful.

We weren’t tired yet so we found that Pineapple Express was just coming on and neither of us had seen it nor knew what it was so we watched that.  Had we realized that it was a Seth Rogan movie before we selected it we probably would have just gone to bed.  But since we were already invested we watched it.  Not that it, or most of Seth’s movies, are actually “bad”, they just fail to be “good.”  The movie was boring and pointless.  It had a few funny moments but mostly was just insanely boring.

Off to bed after that.  It was getting close to midnight.  Not really that late but definitely time for some sleep.  It has been a very long day.  But fortunately I did get that extra hour of sleep this morning 😉