Sheep Guarding Llama

In case you missed in, the US State Department took some heat for turning down a passport application as the Chinese-American applying for the passport was too yellow (or at least in the photograph.)  The State Department claimed that they meant that the photograph was skewed too yellow but there is no colour whatsoever in the picture apart from the man’s skin so on what basis the State Department had to determine what the proper amount of yellow in his skin would be is anyone’s guess.  Apparently they don’t believe that the grass is really greener in California either but Katy Perry insists that it is true.

I was in to the office very early today getting in around seven.  I’m trying to get back to this being my normal schedule.  If I can get out of the house before Liesl wakes up I get out in half of the time and she does not get all upset by my leaving.  Once she is awake going to work becomes rather traumatic.

The morning went fine.  I stayed late at work before going home for lunch today because I had a late telephone call that I needed to be on.

I had a very productive call this afternoon.  I am helping a NAS vendor understand their market.  I do a bit of market analysis these days which is pretty interesting.  It is a nice break from what I normally do.

Back to work this afternoon.  Nothing much to report.  Played a little Oblivion this evening.  Watching a little House Hunters International which gets Dominica excited about potentially moving to Europe.  So we watch them whenever possible.

Last night was pretty rough.  Liesl woke up in her room very early and was on the floor (we don’t think she fell, just got out of bed and fell asleep there) and was very unhappy.  So she came into our room and was awake for a very long time.  She was having fun reading the letters on her new Dora the Explorer pillow cover.  She knows several letters now like E, A and Y.

I probably only got three or four hours of sleep last night, at best, before getting up at five forty five this morning so that I could get ready and get into the office nice and early.  I left the apartment just before seven.  It was actually decently cool outside.

I was in the office nice and early which gave me some time to get caught up with things.  It was very warm in the office this morning, though, which was annoying.  Between the crazy hot garage and the crazy hot office it takes forever to just cool down.  It was at least an hour sitting in the office before I was comfortable.  Normally it is just five minutes.

My new Blackberry Curve 8820 arrived at the office today.  This is my first model with the joystick or touchpad instead of the trackball.  It will take me a while to get used to it.  This one is black like my Tour so that will be a bit more confusing than my older Curve.  At the moment, I have six Blackberry devices!  I have my two current ones (Tour and 8820), then I have my order Curve and Min’s 8830 Worldphone plus Liesl’s Pearl and the old style Blackberry that I keep in a drawer for no good reason.  I have no idea why I got this new one but the one big plus of it is that it shares a power adapter with my Tour so now I do not have to keep two different adapters when traveling.  That had gotten to be a really big pain.

I went home for lunch and made some phone calls.  That did not take nearly as long as I had anticipated so I got to play Oblivion for just a little bit.  Dominica made scrambled eggs, hash browns, toast and Morningstar bacon for lunch.

After work this evening it was off to pasta night at La Cima.  Liesl was in a poor mood this evening so Dominica decided that they should not go.  I would have stayed in this evening but we had a meeting at the club tonight so I needed to be there.  Maggie was driving in from Fort Worth as well.

I was running late when I got over to La Cima but Brian and Maggie were already there.  We hung out having cocktails for a while waiting for the rest of our party to arrive.  There were some awesome happy hour snacks out tonight including a tomato basil pesto whip on bread and goat cheese whip on bread and spinach puff pastry.  Yummy.

We waited about forty minutes in the lounge and eventually gave up on the people with whom we were meeting showing up.  No emails, no calls, nothing.  So we headed on in to the dining room.

Tonight’s pasta was chipotle cream.  It was very good although all of the cream sauces are very similar.  Mixing things up even with just a vodka sauce once a month would be a welcomed change.

We left La Cima at around nine thirty.  We never heard anything from the people with whom we were supposed to be meeting.  It seemed awfully strange that no one ever reached out to us in any capacity just to let us know that they could not make it.  Hopefully there has not been a car accident, which several people suggested might have happened.

Liesl was still awake when I got home.  We got to hang out for half an hour or so before she went to bed.  She is really enjoying having her own room.  She has a place to do everything on her own and her very own big girl bed.  She can come and go as she pleases but everything is sized for her.  It really helps to contain the mess in the house as well.

Pretty much as soon as Liesl went to bed I was off to sleep myself.  I was so tired at dinner that I had felt like falling asleep right there on the table.  I have no idea why I am so tired today.  It just really hit me all of a sudden at dinner.  Completely worn out.

Dominica only stayed up a little while longer than me.  Liesl is getting up earlier in the morning now that she is sleeping in her own room so staying up late is not really an option for us anymore.  Dominica is often tempted to stay up late because she can play Lego Harry Potter on the PS3 after Liesl goes to bed.  My game, Oblivion, is on the PS3 in Liesl’s room, though, so I can only play it when she is awake so my available time to play is much more limited.  That is handy, though, as it guarantees that I am not tempted to stay up all night playing it.

It seems like I can never get out of the door in the morning no matter how hard I try.  One way or another something will happen and there will be no way to escape the apartment to get to the office.  I ended up on the phone and didn’t get to the office until around ten thirty.  I did log in and work from home, of course, but it is such a problem that I can never make it out the door.  It just seems impossible.

Work wasn’t too busy today.  But before lunch Dominica called me to tell me that somehow, whilst sitting on the floor, she horribly sprained her ankle and could not stand on it.  So Liesl, who had just gotten out of the bath, was running around the house naked and in complete control on her own.  Not a good situation.

It was almost time for lunch so we figured that Dominica could wait for me to get home before we panicked about what to do with Liesl.  So Liesl was in charge for about half an hour.  Dominica was able to cajole her into letting her put a diaper onto her so it wasn’t that big of an emergency at that point.

When I got home, Dominica was still in the same shape.  I worked on her foot as it seemed like an actual sprain was unlikely.  I could feel that her Achilles tendon did not feel the way that it should.  We tried pulling on her ankle and foot to see if the joint might be having a problem.  But then I tried working on her tendon and… ta da, her tendon went back into track and instantly her foot was all better.  She went from unable to bend it at all to perfectly fine in seconds.

We watched House Hunters International and had taco salads for lunch.  It has been quite a while since Dominica made those.  She did a ton of work cleaning out our closet today too moving a lot of stuff into the dresser that was recently brought down from New York.  What a difference that is going to make.  Our closet is usable again and we can find stuff.  It had gotten crazy.  We just haven’t had enough space.

Afternoon at work was fine.  A little busy but nothing much.

Once I managed to escape the office I ran home and changed and then drove over to La Cima to meet Watson for the Tech Execs night in the lounge.  It turned out to be a really valuable evening making a lot of good contacts.

We ended up eating dinner at the club and getting home around ten thirty.

It is another very hot day in Texas.  I am sad that we missed all of the rains that came while we were in New York.  Texas summers are great when the rain is falling.  But when the sun is out it becomes rather annoying to have to do anything that involves going outside.

Off to work this morning.  Just the usual routine.  Just before I left Liesl woke up.  Last night was her very first night in her new bed!  She was very happy.  I asked her about it this morning and she said that she really liked her new bed.

Work was decently busy today but not bad.  At lunch I came home to be with Dominica and Liesl.  Liesl was so tired, though, that she had gone to bed for her nap before I had made it home.  So no Liesl visit time and no way for me to play Oblivion since it is in her bedroom.  Maybe that wasn’t the best planning.  On the way home I stopped at La Madeline and picked up lunch for us.  There is nothing to eat at home and Liesl’s nap timing meant that there was no way to hit the club today.

Back to work this afternoon and home at a pretty decent time today.  Work got really slow by the end of the day.

I came home and watched Liesl while Dominica went grocery shopping.  The house is pretty much bare and if she didn’t get food we would have been scrounging pretty hard to find a meal in the house.

While Dominica was out shopping she bought Liesl a potty!  Liesl has been wanting a potty of her own ever since she saw her cousin Garrett’s potty while they were on vacation on Lake LBJ.  She wants to be a big girl and we have had to spell the word in order to talk about it because she would get so excited if she so much as heard us say it around the house.  So we are pretty sure that she is ready to start potty training now.

I came out to the dining room where Dominica and Liesl were and I asked Liesl “Did you see what mommy bought you?”  Liesl said, “No.”  Then I pointed to the potty on the floor and Liesl looked down at it and suddenly got the most excited look on her face.  It was so adorable.  Her jaw literally dropped and she just stared for a minute before dancing all over the room.  Very, very cute.  She is quite proud to have her own potty now.

We tried doing some potty training tonight but it did not go well.  You cannot expect Liesl to be able to do it on the first day though.  Too much pressure if nothing else.

I did get a chance to play a little Oblivion tonight.  That was nice.  We got some cleaning done around the house too.  It is still a complete disaster but it was a move in the right direction.  Dominica got a chance to play her Harry Potter Lego game on her PS3 as well.  It is handy, but lonely, having dualing PS3 consoles in two different rooms.  It is great because we can each do what we want but we don’t see each other now.  It is nice for Liesl because she can run from room to room playing with someone in each room.

We managed to sleep in until eight thirty this morning.  Boy did I need that!

Once I was up and showered this morning I drove out to Panera and picked up breakfast for everyone.  After breakfast Francesca and I loaded her wash stand, which has been at our house the last couple weeks since we brought it down from New York, into her Sequoia so that she could take it back down to Houston with her.

Shortly after Francesca and the kids left the apartment, around a quarter to noon, Liesl went to bed and I hit the road to drive out to Fort Worth to pick up Oreo from his weekend vacation at Maggie’s house with the two pugs.  Unfortunately, on the way both to and from Maggie’s, I hit some serious construction and was stuck on the road for a very long time.  It more than doubled the amount of time necessary to drive between Irving and Fort Worth.

I hung out a Maggie’s for a little while, maybe as much as an hour.  We talked shop and I got to visit with the pugs.  We figured out that Maggie has the same furniture that we have.  She has the regular couch and love seat units that match our theatre seating exactly.  Very strange.

Dominica put Liesl’s bedroom together today.  Liesl’s crib, which had arrived from New York a few weeks ago but could not be assembled because Brian had been using the room and then Francesca, was converted into a toddler bed so that she can use it again.  She has not slept in it since her first birthday, or maybe earlier, back when we were living in New York in 2009.

I showed Liesl her old crib and asked her if she remembered it at all, but she said that she did not.  She thought that it was very cool having her own bed in her own room and got right onto it and checked it out and said that she was very excited but no memory of it from when we lived in New York.  That was eight months of her twenty month life ago so I guess that that is to be expected.

My plans for the afternoon, after a very long time of missing it, were to settle down on Liesl’s couch and play Oblivion.  We have the “old” Playstation 3, the one that we had in New York, hooked up as of last night in Liesl’s room.  The new one, the one that we bought in Texas, is still in the living room.  My Oblivion game was stored on the old PS3 which was in New York and then went to the Lake House for the family vacation and only just made it to our house to really use yesterday.  I am very excited.  It has just been forever since I had my game to play.  Having it is Liesl’s room means that I will not get to play it very often but maybe that is best anyway.

I loaded my saved game file and noticed that my last time playing the game was November 17, 2009.  Wow has it been a long time.  Nine months since I last got to play my game!  A few people recently had asked me how, with my busy schedule, I am able to play so many video games.  Um, what?  For nine months I haven’t even had the game which I was in the middle of playing!  I’ve been playing Oblivion as my main game since before Liesl was born!  I took a break to play Fable II and then went nine months without the console and I played Dragon Age: Origins in the mean time but three games in two years doesn’t seem like all that much to me!  Especially when Fable II is really short, DAO is moderately short and I am nowhere near halfway through Oblivion!

It was not solid play time but I did manage to squeeze in several hours on Oblivion.  I needed that.  I’ve been missing my game and the downtime that it provides for me.  I was so tired, though, that I had to drink several cups of coffee in the middle of the afternoon just to be able to keep playing without passing out on the couch.

It was great to get back into the game.  It took me a while to figure out where I was in it and to get back in to the swing of things.  I bought my second house in the game, in Skingrad, and completed several quests and kicked off my journey through the Arena.  I really appreciated having an afternoon to just veg for a little while.

Liesl spent much of the day just playing in her room while I played Oblivion.  Oreo snuggled on the couch next to me.  That left Dominica mostly alone in the living room to watch PlayOn on her own.

Once Liesl went to bed, Dominica and I watched some House Hunters International on HGTV via PlayOn for a little while before going to bed ourselves a little after eleven.

Liesl was excited about getting to sleep in her new bed.  She likes having her own room and she likes having a bed that is more her size and that is much lower to the floor.  We are hoping that this helps a lot with our sleep schedules as she has pretty much been stuck sleeping with us for the past nine months.  That makes it very hard for us to sleep when we want and means that I have a hard to managing to work in our bedroom after Liesl falls asleep as she is in there and I might wake her up.  Now I can spend the evening hanging out with her and when she falls asleep in her room I can move to the office in our own bedroom and get lots of stuff done at that point which is often when I want to be working anyway.  So this should be very good for us all around, I think.