Sheep Guarding Llama

I was so busy that I ended up working from home this morning until lunch time.  I was up early and thought that I would get into the office in good time but I logged in from home first, always a mistake, and ended up not having enough time to make it in.  It worked out well, though, as I had a very long conference call this morning that I was able to do in my pajamas.

Liesl is on a much more regular sleep schedule now after her latest trip to Houston.  She goes to bed between eight thirty and nine thirty every night.  We don’t even have to tell her.  Right around nine she comes to us and says “Night night?”  And then it is a rush to get her into bed as quickly as possible and she goes right to sleep without any fuss.  What a good girl she is!

Then, she sleeps almost exactly nine and a half hours.  So if she makes it to bed at nine she is up at six thirty.  She then goes down for a nap around eleven and sleeps for about two hours!  So much different than even just a few weeks ago.

While I was working from home the daily menu from La Cima arrived and it looked really awesome.  I sent it over to Dominica (who was working from the other room) and she thought that it looked great too.  So at eleven thirty we set out for the club.  This is the very first time that we are able to all go to the club as a family for lunch.  Dominica has never really even gotten to see the amazing lunch buffet before so this was all new for her.

After lunch Dominica dropped me at the office and she and Liesl went out to do some very much needed grocery shopping as well as to run to Walmart to see what could be done about returning this defective microwave that we have.  That actually went about as well as it could have considering that we did not have the receipt or the box!  Dominica probably spent close to an hour dealing with just that but she did, eventually, manage to get the microwave swapped and we now have a new microwave that, for the moment, actually works.

I have a new coworker who started today.  He has the desk directly next to mine.

After work I came home and we went right out and did some test driving of some “cars”.  We have decided that we just really need a second vehicle with the way that our lives are and we really need one that is a bit larger than the X3.  The X3 is fine for puttering around town but for trips to Houston, Austin or, especially, New York it does not cut it at all.  We are primarily looking at the Chevy Traverse / GMC Acadia and the Mazda CX-9.

We went first to the local Chevy dealer.  They have nothing on the lot and really look like they have gone out of business already.  They had nothing in stock except for one used Acadia.  So at least we drove that just to figure out if it was spacious enough and drove such that we would like it.  We actually really liked it, quite a bit more than we had been expecting.  It was very comfortable and handled quite well.

Before we could leave the dealer, however, some insane salesman came out and assaulted us.  Our main salesman had been fine, not the best by any stretch, but the market is bad and we had been feeling bad for him having nothing to sell and no one to sell to.  He was polite and helpful if nothing else.  He knew that we were just looking and that we had to sell or rent our house before we could even consider anything and that we were only considering new – which this vehicle was not, it was just a sample to drive.  But this other salesman came out, claimed that he knew us, told us that we absolutely had been there before and that he had been our salesman and implied that we were lying that we had not been there before.  We said that we had just moved to Texas and he asked when.  We told him December and he jumped all over us “Yes, December, that’s when you were here.”  Of course, we were in Bayou Vista in December celebrating Christmas so I doubt that I “sleep walked” all the way from Galveston to Irving, test drove a vehicle I had never heard of at this creepy little Chevy dealer and drove all the way back without anyone ever knowing, including myself.  The guy was actually scary.  He then started seriously pressuring us to take this car that we weren’t even test driving with the intent of considering.  He was rude, scary and insulting.  This is what you get when you go to a Chevy dealer I guess.  We’ve gotten so used to buying BMW and Mazda that I forget that when you shop for American cars people just assume things about you.

So we were pretty happy to get out of there and go to Freeman Mazda where we had wonderful, polite, helpful salespeople who helped us do a very good testdrive of the Mazda CX-9.  The Mazda drove very well but, unfortunately, we don’t feel that the cabin area is sized well for us and the legroom just isn’t there (side to side) and we felt that the space was very confining.  So, while we feel really badly not being able to buy a Mazda from the really nice people at Freeman the CX-9 just does not appear to be going to fit our needs.  We are doubly unhappy as we are loyal Mazda owners (we own two currently and have owned two others as well) but the CX-9 just does not seem like it is going to be the car for us.  We will likely give it one more test drive just to be sure but our first impression is that the Acadia will work much better for us.  The Mazda was definitely more luxurious and sporty with amazing handling and power but utilitarian needs are our top priority at the moment and we were both very happy with the Acadia – much moreso than we had anticipated.

After our test drive we hit Taco Bell and returned home.  Liesl was exhausted and went straight to bed.  We played a little Dragon Age: Origins and called it a night ourselves.

I was woken up this morning to a rather unpleasant twenty minute raving phone call which was not at all how I was hoping to start my day.  The moment that I was out of bed and on the phone it was apparent that I had no voice at all and it was all that I could do to make a sound.  Apparently it is going to be one of those days.

It was already later than I wanted it to be as well.  I guess that my throat went from “almost better” to “really bad” during the night and now I am in horrible shape.  I emailed into the office and let them know that I was staying home.  Being in the office would just mean that people would be trying to talk to me all day and I wouldn’t have as good access to water and hot beverages needed to keep my throat in good condition.

Dominica and Liesl left Houston fairly early this morning to head back up to Irving.  They are expected to arrive mid-afternoon.

I had originally thought that I would have to go see a doctor about my throat but by around noon it started to improve a bit.  I am pretty sure that what happened was that my CPAP mask came loose during the night which always gives me a horribly soar throat and post-nasal drop for forty-eight hours.  It is only because I have been fighting this other throat problem for nearly a week that I assumed that this morning’s issue was related to that.

I was quite productive today, being home will do that, and at lunch I was able to relax and play more of Dragon Age: Origins – my final window of video gaming freedom.  I am probably thirty-six hours into the game at this point and very much entrenched in the storyline.  I definitely do not like DAO as much as Dominica does.  It may be her favourite video game of all time although she admits that Fable II is likely better.  She thinks that it is way better than Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, however, which I do not think is true at all.  I feel like DAO’s gameworld is vastly more shallow even though there is some really cool party-member storyline and interaction stuff and some great main character development and backstory stuff that Oblivion doesn’t touch.

The girls arrived late afternoon and we were able to spend the evening hanging out together.  The pickings in the kitchen are extremely slim as it was pretty much bare when they left to go to Houston and I have been picking through the remains, since I didn’t have a car, ever since they left.  On top of eating all of the available food, save for some frozen fish, the microwave died last night leaving me with one less means of easily making food.  That microwave is under a month old too!

My throat seems to be doing just a little bit better today.  Fortunately yesterday it was pretty easy to take the entire day and talk to no one whatsoever.  Oreo is pretty happy if I never say a thing so we pretty much just left it that way.

I am working as usual on Sunday so there was plenty to be done.  When I wasn’t working for the office I snuck in some serious Dragon Age: Origins time and managed to get pretty far along in the game.  There are several really key “sections” of the game and I have completed the Dalish elves, much of the introduction, many sidequests, all of the downloadable content (except for the Awakening expansion and the brand new Darkspawn Chronicles that we have no downloaded yet) and am very far along on my quest for the sacred ashes.  Dominica will be very proud when she sees my progress.

Most of my day, however, was spent working on a Vyatta router and attempting to set it up for OpenSSL VPN access.  That turned out to be a major problem because I was running a beta of the router software and I ended up having to build a completely new, production release router and start the entire router configuration from scratch.  So that turned into no small project.  Easily eight to ten hours of work.  At the end, though, I have an awesome, stable Vyatta router running the latest software and running a robust OpenVPN installation that is working great.

Dominica and Liesl return from Houston tomorrow after work.  Oreo is looking forward to not having to be alone all through the day on weekdays.  I guess my chance to make extreme progress in Dragon Age: Origins is now over, however.

Now the lonely weekend begins.  Two days without having anywhere to go (or any form of transportation to get there) with just Oreo and I at home.  I got up early this morning and got to work doing my usual Saturday morning deployments for the office.  That just took a few hours.  I got to spend the rest of the day writing C# code, playing Dragon Age: Origins and working on setting up an OpenVPN server – which is a rather sizeable project, actually.

I ended up having an extremely busy day and got a lot done.  Oreo is kind of enjoying having the quiet time to relax and catch up on his sleep.  We have gotten a lot of quality time together since it is just the two of us.  That has been very nice.

We got a low-ball renter offer on our house in Peekskill yesterday.  It was so low, though, that we could not seriously entertain it.  We countered with a more reasonable price but have not heard anything back so we are not very hopeful.

It’s Friday, whoo hoo.  I went into work this morning, my throat still very soar and I am barely able to talk.  It was a very long day in the office and I was pretty exhausted by the time that it was done.  Of course, while having a soar throat, it was one of those days when absolutely everyone felt the need to call me on the phone to talk rather than simply emailing me what they needed me to do.

I came home during lunch to take care of Oreo, of course, and got home after work as soon as I could.  I spent the evening at home.  I managed to get Visual Studio 2010 Professional downloaded and installed and spent the evening playing with C# which I have not used in some time.  This has been a development heavy week after validating the ASP.NET 3.5 exam and then spending an entire day learning about current .NET development practices.

I played just a little Dragon Age: Origins this evening as well.  I could not stay up very late, though, as I have to be up and working early tomorrow morning.