Sheep Guarding Llama

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!

Another hot day.  I walked to work this morning – far too late to make me happy so I was out in the blazing sun again.  I really need to start getting up and running out the door in the morning to beat the insane heat that develops far too early here in Texas.  That still leaves me without a plan for lunch but at least I could start the day without getting cooked on the way to work.

I came back home for lunch.  Liesl napped and we ate and played half an hour or so of Dragon Age: Origins.  Then I logged in and worked from home for an hour before we took Liesl across the street to her doctor’s appointment.  Just a checkup, nothing bad.  She got two shots today which she was not happy about at all.  All of her stats came back quite good.  She is completely healthy and development is in great shape.

The doctor did tell us that it was past time to eliminate the bottle, however.  This is going to be rough.  Liesl loves her bottle and uses it to go to sleep at night – which, of course, is part of the issue as that is really bad for her teeth.  So we need to start developing a plan to get Liesl off of the bottle.  So much for getting regular sleep.

Dominica dropped me at work after the doctor’s appointment and then she and Liesl went right out to go grocery shopping to get the kitchen restocked.  The market closed early today as it is a holiday weekend.  So the Friday night work wrapped up on the early side and at five thirty Dominica and Liesl were able to swing past the office and picked me up so that I did not have to drive home in the heat.

We spent the evening relaxing – lots of Dragon Age: Origins.  Mostly me tonight.  Dominica did run out and do some errands that left me in charge of Liesl for the evening.  This is very odd for me.  I’m always involved but I never take her through her entire bed time routine alone.  Tonight I got to get her all ready and get her tucked in and off to sleep before Dominica even got home.  Dominica was pretty surprised when she got home and Liesl was fast asleep.  She figured that being home with me would have meant that she would be staying up late.  It was very nice getting an entire evening for Liesl and I to just hang out together.

The heat wave continues.  Not too much going on at the office today.  Walked in, home for lunch.  A lot of people are out as of today for the long weekend.  I am stuck covering so no long weekend for me, but I will get a comp day next week sometime, or possibly the week after, which will be very nice.  I’d honestly prefer to work Monday and take another day off.  Breaks up the monotony a bit more that way.

After work I ended up running over to La Cima to meet up with Grey for drinks.  We just hung out in the lounge, which I almost never get to do, and enjoyed bar snacks and a few drinks.  The lounge was basically empty all night but there were private parties going on here and there.  We had a nice time visiting for about two hours then it was off to home for me and back to work for him.

So we learned tonight that Grey, like us, has been to Warwick Castle in central England which is pretty amazing because it is not really a tourist destination for Americans at all and is not well known outside of the United Kingdom.  He is actually friends with the armorer who made the “hands on” demonstration armor that they use there!  What a crazy coincidence.

I had enough free snacks from the club that I just skipped dinner.  Dominica ate at home.  Lots of Dragon Age: Origins tonight.  With both Dominica and I playing that game and being at nearly the same point in it it is pretty interesting to see the progress.

What amazes me about Dragon Age is just how different Dominica and my games are.  We are playing completely different characters and taking very different approaches to much of the problem solving in the game.  She is always amazed that my characters survive at all with the way that I play and I find her game to be much less interesting.  It is very cool that the game lets us play so differently.  It makes it a lot more fun.

We have still not heard anything about the rental offer on our house so we can pretty safely assume that that is not going to come through.  Oh well, we were pretty excited about it but it is better to hold out and get a reasonable price than to buckle and commit to a long-term loss scenario now.  Too bad, though, we were really hoping to be able to deal with cleaning it out and getting it ready for move-in this week.  That would have made it possible for us to buy another vehicle which we really need right now.  We don’t actually need another vehicle as much as we need a much larger one.

Off to work early this morning.  Boy is it warm.  The late-spring heat has really set in here in Texas and we are in the mid-nineties all week long.  I only really mind it when I am walking to and from the office.  That tends to get me pretty warm.  It is extra bad because there is a huge dip in between the two locations so no matter where I am going there is always a significant climb right at the end with little opportunity to cool down before arriving.  There is also no shade between the two leaving me very exposed the entire time that I am walking.

The AIX crew from work and I hit La Cima for lunch today. I was there for lunch just yesterday but I do love the buffet and the chance to relax.  So the three of us went and had a nice time.  I get the buffet now regularly.  The deal is just way too good to pass up.  The dining room was packed too.  Very encouraging.  I also grabbed lunch for Dominica and dropped it off for her on my way back to the office.  Since Liesl completely sleeps through my entire lunch period it isn’t so bad when I run out to lunch with the office crowd.

My friend from work moved into our apartment building today.  She is living one apartment away from being the farthest point in the building from us so she is still a rather significant walk away even though we are in the same building.  She is not only the farther point horizontally in the building but as she is on the first floor and we are on the top floor she is also the maximum vertical distance from us.

Just before leaving work this evening, my friend Grey from Denver shot me an email to say that he was in Dallas for the next few days.  Grey and I know each other from the SpiceWorks community and we hung out quite a bit down at SpiceWorld 2009 where we had met up at the opening night social event.  He was able to escape the office around the same time as me so we had him meet us over at the club for dinner.

After work this evening I came home and then we headed right out to go to La Cima for our usual pasta night.  Grey beat us by a few minutes but we coordinated pretty well.  He seemed to be pretty impressed by the club.  I checked and there are no ClubCorp clubs in all of Colorado, quite surprising, so this is not a type of club that he is too used to having.  It was an extremely busy night in the dining room too.  I actually had issues getting reservations because it was so busy.  We are very happy about that – once the club is turning people away that means that they must be making money just fine and not in any sort of risk situation.  The market tends to impact places like this pretty heavily so we were concerned but the flow seems to be pretty healthy.

We had a really nice time hanging out with Grey, but Liesl was pretty tired and got awfully fussy towards the later part of dinner.  I took her out for a long time playing at the water fountain out front and that kept her kind of entertained but she was not very happy with that situation and was only happy while actually playing in the water and getting herself all wet with stale fountain water.  Eww.

Liesl was asleep before we even made it home so it was straight off to “night night” with her.  Then some Dragon Age: Origins for us and off to bed ourselves.

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.