Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Having it be just Oreo and I at home last night made for an opportunity to get some serious sleep for the first time in a very long time.  I miss my family but it is good to get some rest.  I have been very run down lately.

Off to work today and La Cima for lunch.  Came home twice to walk Oreo.  This evening was my one day to truly relax.  I pretty much just spent it playing Dragon Age: Origins and hiding away from the world.  I am making some real progress on that game and enjoying it.  It has been at least six months since I had a chance to play a video game except for the three hours of Final Fantasy XIII that I managed to squeeze in when it first released.

The XKCD blog has an awesome post on colours that people need to take the time to read.

I have a really sore throat today. I got it from the MSDN show on Tuesday.  I drank Starbucks all day and had nothing to eat until dinner time and it really tore up my throat.  I can barely talk at all today.

This evening I got a chance to talk to Ramona in China for a while.  Haven’t heard from her in quite a while so it was great to get to catch up.

First thing this morning Dominica and Liesl got up, packed the X3 and hit the road for Houston.  So now I am going to be home alone for almost an entire week.  This will be pretty lonely but at least I have a lot of work to do and could do with some extra rest and time to catch up on stuff.

Normal work day today.  It is really starting to get hot down here in Texas.  My walks to and from work are getting harder and harder every day – especially as the sun starts being higher and higher in the sky earlier and later in the day.  It used to be easy to go in while it was still dark but now, walking there in the blazing sun makes it that much warmer.

This evening, after work, Brian and I went over to La Cima for the usual pasta night sans Dominica and Liesl.  I haven’t missed pasta night for about a month and a half now.  We hung out for a while after dinner in the bar and closed them down – which is not actually very late since they close around nine or nine thirty.

Then home and time to feed Oreo, play a little Dragon Age: Origins and then off to bed.