Sheep Guarding Llama

The week continues to be very, very hot.  Expected to touch one hundred degrees again today.  Rather unseasonably warm, even for Texas.  I got up at six thirty and was in to the office at eight.

Today was actually very busy at work, not like it was yesterday at all.  So I got very little free time.  What free time I did have was all spent dealing with getting bills paid which we are struggling to get paid after having had one of my entire paychecks go missing.  It all arrived yesterday so we are no longer technically behind but getting everything situated again and all of our ducks in their row takes some effort.  I got that pretty much all cleaned up today.  We had a $50 bonus on our rent for Liesl winning it at the Easter egg hunt and $300 off for a referral to the apartment complex so our rent was down significantly this month which was awesome and perfect timing.  Our entire rent is just $1,076 so a $350 is very significant.

While I hate paying bills, boy did it feel good to take care of all of that.  That has been hanging over our heads for weeks now.

For lunch I walked home around twelve thirty.  I met up with Dominica and Liesl who were down in the pool which was empty today.  Normally it is swarming with people by early afternoon, even during the week.  Maybe the intense heat is keeping people away?

What really amazing Dominica today was that, while out at the pool, Liesl took a plastic watering can that Dominica had brought out for her to play with and started watering the flowers!  We have no idea where she learned to water flowers.  Maybe she has seen that on Dora the Explorer or maybe she had seen me watering our one, small houseplant that we have now or maybe she has memories to when she was just one year old and I used to water the plants around the house all of the time.  We have no clue.  But she knew exactly what to do.

Dominica then told Liesl that “those flowers have enough water” – so Liesl took the watering can to another set of flowers and started watering them instead!  Once they had enough water, Dominica told her again and she moved on to the next set.  Dominica was amazed that Liesl was understanding so much of the conversation including concepts like “those” flowers being different from “these” flowers and what “enough” meant.  She is really developing her language skills quickly.  What amazes me constantly is her ability to transpose pronouns correctly.  I say “Do you know x or y?” and Liesl says “I know.”  She also says “nope” all of the time.

I played a little Dragon Age: Origins over lunch.  I managed to start and complete Shale’s Quest during lunch and got that out of the way.  I’ve made it far enough in the game that I am getting pretty bored and would like it to just wrap up.  Having seen Dominica play most of the game through once already and having her playing through at about the same place that I am currently really adds to the repetition and drudgery.  Having us playing the same game at the same time is definitely a bad idea.

Back to work this afternoon.  This afternoon ended up being incredibly busy and I did not get to leave the office until it was approaching seven thirty!  It worked out, though, as Liesl was exhausted and was not going to be able to handle going to pasta night at La Cima anyway tonight.  So we just gave up on that and decided to have dinner at home.

I spent the evening working on fixing the Windows server systems that died last night.  I did one fresh build tonight on Xen.

I got set up today with a TechNet Plus subscription.  I have not had TechNet in a very long time.  I am hoping that it will be more useful this time around than it was last time.  Some of the contents have changed and I am pretty sure that I can make much better use of it now.

My new book, “Head First C#, 2nd Ed.” arrived today from Amazon a day early.  Awesome.  I have been looking forward to reading this book, which covers .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010.  Perfect timing too since I am off from work tomorrow and will be home all day.  Not that that will allow me to read a lot of it but it will give me time to read quite a bit more than I normally would have an opportunity to read.

We are working on finalizing our plans for traveling up to New York this summer.  Dominica and Francesca are planning on leaving for New York on Wednesday of next week, I believe.  The plans are still in flux so I am not totally sure.  But they will be leaving in approximately one week.  I will be in Texas for almost ten days after that most likely hitting the road to Virginia on the nineteenth where I will visit with the Nicklins (in Maryland) and then pick up the Ralstons arriving from the Congo on the morning of the twenty first.  Then up to New York.

We will be in New York for several weeks not returning until roughly July tenth.  We have no idea how we are getting back at this point, though.

Liesl got me up at six thirty this morning.  It was probably best as I needed to get ready and get into the office.  I have been sleeping in far too much recently.

I made it into the office around eight.  It was a very slow morning.  I guess many people are still out from the long weekend and people are slow getting back around to doing work.  No complaints here.

For lunch, the La Cima menu looked really good and Nicki wanted to go and Dominica wanted the buffet so Nicki and I went over to the club.  It was quite slow.  Dominica and Liesl would have gone had Liesl not fallen asleep but she did so I had to just get lunch to go for Dominica and bring it back to the house for her.

This afternoon was very slow at the office, it was great.  I was able to leave at a very reasonable time, five thirty, to head back home.  Not much time for me to relax this evening, however, as there is much needing my attention.

I ended up on conference calls this evening for about three hours.  A very busy night.  I did manage to squeeze in just a little time on Dragon Age: Origins tonight before turning in.  I am above sixty hours in on that game now and that means that I have been playing about as long as it took for Dominica to complete it her first time through so chances are that I am quite near to the “end” of the game.  I expect to complete it this week.

Liesl went to bed at nine thirty.  After about ten minutes or so we noticed the bedroom door open just slightly.  We were ready for her to emerge but she did not and Oreo came trotting out.  Very suspicious.  We were watching the door to figure out how he could have opened it when suddenly it closed again. Ah ha, there is a little girl who got out of bed and let the dog out who just realized that she is going to get caught if the door is left ajar.

We knew that there was no way that she was sleeping at that point.  So Dominica went to check in on her and discovered Liesl hiding behind the door trying to hold it shut!  Once she knew that she had been caught she said “uh oh!”  How funny is that?  It was all that we could do to keep from laughing out loud.  It was so cute.

I really slept in this morning.  Liesl was up much of the night and we got very poor sleep.  She is still struggling with not having a bottle in the middle of the night and we don’t have any solution for it yet.  She wakes up around four and wants a bottle but she won’t accept a sippy cup or a bottle with a straw and she wants soy milk not water.  So she ends up screaming for an hour until she loses her voice.  Last night she got up and wandered about for a while.

So it was almost ten before I got myself out of bed this morning.  Dominica and Liesl were already up and presumably had been so for some time.  I have to work today as so many people are not just out of the office but completely unavailable this weekend.  So I got logged in straight away and made sure that I was caught up with whatever might have needed doing today.  Fortunately everyone internationally is aware that this is a holiday and there is very little going on.  It is actually a great day to have to work as it is a change from the normal and then I will take my holiday at some other point this week.

It is not supposed to be as hot today as it was yesterday, but still it is supposed to be in the mid-nineties all afternoon.  I looked at the forecast for the week and by Friday we are supposed to hit one hundred degrees and on Sunday it will be one hundred and four!  I guess June is busting out all over here in Texas.  This is when it starts to really feel hot.

This evening I got to watch Liesl go and get Cheer Bear, collect a diaper, grab the changing pad and lay Cheer Bear down exactly like we change Liesl’s diapers!  She even said “poo poo” while doing it!  She is growing up so fast.  It was so cute to see.

I got a lot of time to hang out with Liesl today.  This weekend has been great for us getting a lot of good quality time in together.  We got to play, read books, sing, dance and do all kinds of stuff.  We have so much fun together.

Liesl is eating much better now.  Now that we really are not giving her soy milk like she was getting before her appetite has really picked up and she is eating a lot more solid food.  She is starting to ask to have meal time which is a major improvement.

I got to play with my first SNOM VoIP phone today.  Setting it up was a breeze and, from what I could tell, the sound quality was very good.  After having been so disappointed with the Cisco VoIP phones I am hoping that Snom lives up to their reputation of quality.  The Snoms are a fraction of the Cisco price too and give a much more professional appearance.

I managed to get in a bit of Dragon Age: Origins today.  I am making great progress and am nearing the end of the game, as far as I can tell.  I played a bit at lunch and then again after Liesl went to bed.  I might have gotten four hours in today.

Liesl tried going to sleep at nine but got herself right back up and decided that that was not going to happen.  She needed oatmeal before going to bed and so it ended up being ten thirty before she finally went down for the night.

It was around one in the morning when Dominica and I finally turned in for the night.  Probably a bit later than we should have.  We really need to work on getting ourselves onto a more reasonable schedule that provides for a greater amount of sleep and coincides more with Liesl’s schedule.

Links for the day: The Day That the Easter Bunny Died and Teddy Bear USB.

Back into the office tomorrow.

Liesl had a rough night last night like she has the last two nights.  Not having her bottle in the middle of the night is tough and she is so used to waking up in the middle of the night, getting a bottle and going back to sleep that this is causing some serious interruptions.

I slept in quite a bit this morning.  Dominica was up baking by the time that I got out of bed.  It might have been as late as nine thirty.  Liesl gets up no later than seven or seven thirty at a stretch so she had been up watching Dora the Explorer for a while before I got up.

I spent the day closing tickets, installing OpenVPN, writing web copy, working on a little web design, answering questions on SpiceWorks, etc.  It was a rather busy day.

Liesl and I hung out a ton today, just as we did yesterday.  She has really missed me and makes a point of spending a lot of time with me.  She loves coming in to the office and just sitting on my lap at the desk.  Today she really started using the mouse just like it is supposed to be used.  She was watching the mouse pointer move around the screen and everything!  She is really coming along quickly.

Liesl’s favourite book is a picture book of baby animals.  She makes me read it to her many times a day.  She sits on my lap and we look through the pictures identifying all of the animals.  She points and their eyes, ears and noes and says what they are.  She is very good at identifying facial components.  At one point she pointed to a panda’s feet and said “shoes.”

Liesl’s vocabulary is really getting developed.  When we were at the doctor’s office on Friday they had wanted to know if she knew four words.  Four!  Ha.  She must know forty if not one hundred.  She only rarely puts several words together but she says many, many different words.  And for several weeks she has been understanding pronoun transforms – I say “you”, she repeats “I”.  She knows tons of animals, animal sounds, body parts, food items, toys, people and animal names, character names, etc.  I would be very hard pressed to even guess how many words she must know at this point.

I took Oreo out this afternoon and was hit with a wave of heat like I was stepping into a blast furnace.  It must have hit one hundred degrees here today.  I took him for a thirty minute walk around three and during the walk I could feel the temperature dropping.  When we got in from our walk it had dropped to ninety seven degrees with a heat index of ninety eight.  The record for this date was one hundred and two so I am guessing that we must have been very close to setting a new record.

Surprisingly, I have pretty much adapted to the temperatures of Texas and it did not really feel all that hot to me. In fact, it was a really nice temperature for a walk with Oreo.  We took the long way going all the way around the complex which he enjoys.  It was perfect pool weather and the swimming pool was packed with people today.

We made a run to the storage unit again today.  We took back three boxes and picked up two more.  Not a large haul today but every little bit makes a difference.  We just have to pick away at it.  While we were at the storage unit a short rain storm broke out.

We stopped at McDonald’s on the way home to grab dinner.  Quick and easy for tonight.

Dominica spent the evening playing Dragon Age: Origins.  I only played maybe forty minutes all day today.  She managed to get in many hours.  She went from being a little behind me (on her second time through the main game) to being many hours ahead of me now.  She played until well after midnight.

I am very excited that SGL is finally caught back up as of today!  What a relief.  And with tomorrow being a holiday there is a very real possibility that I will be able to keep up tomorrow as well.

I managed to sleep in just a little this morning – that was nice.  I’m loving the thought of three days “off”, more or less, in a row.  It has been a while and I really need a break from the normal.  We have very little planned for today.  Today is a major “catchup” day for me.  I’m going to do my best to knock off as many little tasks as possible.  I’ve got a rather significant backlog of tasks that need my attention so I am very hopeful that today will allow me to eliminate a lot of those.

This morning Liesl was singing Ring Around the Rosie to herself.  She sings it while spinning in a circle and then she calls down at the end!  We couldn’t believe that she knew it because she only knows that song from Madeline teaching it to her.  She is learning so quickly.

My first task for the day is starting on the catch up process for SGL which has been horribly behind again.  I made good progress throughout the day on that and hope to be completely caught up by tomorrow.

Liesl did the cutest thing today.  I found her in her bedroom – she doesn’t actually sleep in there, it is just “her room” – climbing on her rocking horse trying to break in to her pack and play!  She had thrown Cheer Bear (her teddy bear) into the pack and play and wanted to get in herself.  She hasn’t slept in the pack and play for months.  We just store it in the other room.  So I picked her up and put her in thinking that she would be upset and want out in seconds.  But she just sat down.

So I sat down in the middle of her room and waited for her to decide what she wanted to do.  But she just continued to sit.  I tried picking her up and she said “no no”.  So I put her down and she just laid down.  So I grabbed her her blanket and she was asleep in minutes!  How weird.  I would never have guessed that she would ever have done that.  She will voluntarily take naps but she always wants to sleep on our bed for nap time.  Maybe she just missed her pack and play.  Maybe it was nostalgia?

We made a run to the storage unit this afternoon.  We took several boxes back to storage while picking up three more to bring back to the apartment and go through so that we can figure out what we should keep, what we can repack, what we are getting rid of, etc.  Three boxes at a time is a rather manageable amount.  Our plan is to keep doing three boxes at a time until we manage to go through everything.  Already we have managed to eliminate at least one entire box and we have moved lots of empty, storage boxes back to the storage unit so the apartment is cleaning up quickly as is the storage unit.

My big achievement for the day was learning how to use Microsoft Expression Encoder 3 to screencapture a tutorial that I wrote, record it, edit it and encode it into WMV.  That went really well and then I learned how to make it into a streaming file to stream via Silverlight which ended up working really well.  I am quite excited with the possibilities presented by Expression Encoder and Silverlight.  I am very much looking forward to experimenting further with them.

This evening Andy and I ported an application from Toronto to Rackspace in San Antonio.  That was a few hours of work but it was well worth it.  The whole process went well and now it is all done.  One fewer major task on the big, ol’ task list.  So far, everything is working really well.  Now to wait for DNS to propagate.

There was a bit of playing Dragon Age: Origin playing today although Dominica got to play quite a bit more than I did.  I played a bit after Liesl went to sleep but once Dominica turned in for the night I switched to doing some website design and development on Joomla.  I ended up getting a lot done but was up until four thirty in the morning working on it!