Sheep Guarding Llama

Thus my weekend begins.  The goal for this weekend, for me, is to complete my class at RIT.  I have about thirty papers that I have to write before class is completed and I really, really want to have them done before the week begins.

I slept in some this morning.  Wow was that ever nice.  I really needed some time to sleep.  I’ve been getting more and more run down recently.

I got right to work this morning writing my papers for RIT.  Almost thirty papers to write this weekend.  What a long weekend it is going to be.

Really very little to report today.  The weather was nice but I was hold up in the bedroom office working the entire day.  Very boring.  Good progress, though.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.  In the morning Liesl and I are taking Dominica out for a Mother’s Day Brunch.  So off to bed at a reasonable time so that we can get up and get moving tomorrow.

It has been a very long week.  Between being crazily busy at work and trying to get caught up on my coursework for RIT I’m just worn out.

I was feeling awful when the alarm went off this morning and I had to stagger into work.  At least the weather is awesome.  Cool and breezy and overcast.

It was another crazy morning.  No chance to write any papers.  Then I walked home for lunch and spent some time with Dominica and Liesl.

This afternoon was still crazy too.  After yesterday’s market issues we are dealing with a lot of residual problems today.  So again, no time to write at all which is really tough because I am past due on some stuff and have a ton of more papers to get done and out of the way.

Because so much work was cancelled for this weekend I was able to go home at not too bad of a time.  Not early but not all that late. I decided that I was so tired that I really needed to relax tonight and get to bed early rather than writing more papers.  I do not have to get up super early tomorrow as the early morning work has been cancelled.  I still need to work tomorrow but the schedule is loose.

My entire weekend is going to be spent writing papers.  My window to get this class completed is closing quickly and I want to get things done sooner than later.  I am very worried that if I go past this weekend that I will not have a chance to finish them in time.

It was a big day around here.  It started innocently enough very early in the morning.  Got up and got out to work around seven thirty or so.  Work was very busy this morning.

For lunch today Dominica made sandwiches and had them all packed up when I got home.  Then we went down to the pool with Liesl and took her out for her very first time swimming!   She had a really good time.  The water was pretty cold, but we had the entire pool to ourselves for about an hour.

There is a lot of really shallow areas in the pool where Liesl could splash and play without us needing to hold her.  She thought that it was great fun.  She played for a long time even though the water was pretty cold.

After swimming for a while I showered and changed into more “going out to La Cima” appropriate clothes and ran down to the front office and picked up a shipment of computers that had arrived while we were in Houston and I had not had a chance to pick up yet.  It was a very heavy box so I needed to take the X3 down to the front so that I could put the box straight in.

Then it was back to work for the afternoon.  It was a rather busy afternoon too.  We had a major market event today.  Due to a massive accident with an autotrading platform we accidentally plunged the market (the Dow Jones Industrial) by nearly one thousand points – the largest intraday drop in the history of the market!  What a day.  So it was a bit of an “all hands on deck” afternoon.

When five thirty rolled around I was most definitely ready to escape the office.  I was well dressed this evening with sport coat and everything.  I ran out the door at five thirty and headed straight over to La Cima for the “firsh Thursday” Happy Hour.  Since yesterday was Cinco de Mayo today was a delayed party to celebrate it.  We had melon margaritas and free appetizers.  It was nice.  A good turnout of about seventy five people.  There were a few people from the office too so we got to hang out there.  People from another division that I only know through La Cima that I have never met at work.

Dominica ate dinner while I was at happy hour so I got fish and chips and hung out with Brian and Mahesh.  I got take away salad for Dominica and came home around eight thirty.  I got to hang out with Liesl for a little while then she went to bed just after nine.

I had a ton of work that is late for my class at RIT so I ended up staying up until two in the morning working on papers.  I was so tired when I finally got the chance to go to bed.  Tomorrow is going to be a really long day.

United States Scores Extremely Low on World Motherhood Rankings

I was not happy at all when the alarm went off at six this morning.  I was exhausted and felt like crap, but there is a ton to do today so I dragged my butt out of bed and left my snuggly Boston Terrier behind and got into the shower and tried to wake up.

I logged into work and did a little work for the office while also working on wrapping up the DRBD project that I was working on late last night.  That went pretty smoothly and I was able to get into the office physically by just after seven thirty.

Dominica had a really rough morning with Oreo.  After he had two accidents last night he had another one sometime this morning.  Now she has a laundry disaster on her hands.  I walked him before I left the house this morning but apparently that did not really help.  So I had to go get twenty dollars worth of quarters so that she could start doing laundry first thing this morning.

This morning was insanely busy so at lunch Dan and I decided to escape to La Cima.  I ran home at eleven thirty to bring Dominica her quarters.  Oreo was banished to the outside balcony.  The balcony is tiny so he was laying on his little pillow hoping that someone would let him in at some point.  I think that he kind of liked the fresh air and lack of toddler chasing him around, though.  It was a nice day and it is shaded there.  If it had more room I think that he would really like it.

Dan picked me up at noon and we ran over to La Cima.  Lunch was awesome, as always.  Dan got the special guest treatment.  We are hoping that he joins the club this week.

After lunch Dan dropped me at home and I walked Oreo then walked back to the office.  The afternoon was crazy busy again.  What a week it has been.

I got stuck kind of late and did not manage to get home until after six.  Dominica and Liesl had been out shopping so they swung in to the office to pick me up on their way home.  A quarter after six does not sound all that bad but when you consider that I started around a quarter to seven this morning, it is pretty late.

We went home and got ready as quickly as we could.  It was just about seven by the time that we were dressed and able to get out the door to go back to La Cima for dinner.

We met up with Brian in the lounge but skipped drinks and went straight to dinner as Liesl was already pretty tired by the time that we arrived at the club.  We knew that our time was limited and we didn’t want to waste our valuable “happy toddler” time having drinks in the lounge.

It is pasta night and tonight’s special pasta sauce was poblano cream.  It was delicious.  Liesl was pretty restless, though, so we were fighting with her most of the evening and had to spend a lot of time walking her around empty rooms to keep her occupied.  It is too bad that she cannot fall asleep easily anymore while we are out now that she is older or she probably would have just got to sleep and been quite happy.

We headed out around nine.  We went right home and Liesl was asleep before we even got there even though it is just a few blocks away.  I was pretty tired too and was in bed myself by eleven.  I have not been getting enough sleep this week at all.

I have to be in the office early again tomorrow.  I am leaving slightly early to go to happy hour at La Cima before heading home.

Today was super busy.  I was up at a quarter after six and left for the office just after seven.  I sent and read a ton of emails in the interim as well.  Quite a lot of work done before seven thirty.

It is bright and sunny today after the big thunderstorm passed through the area last night.  Very wet today though.  But not so humid.  I’m able to wear heavy jeans to the office still even with me walking in the bright sunlight.

It was a crazy morning.  I was constantly scrambling to keep up with all of the work.  At a quarter till ten I had to run back over to the apartment so that I could do some work from there.  I was there from ten until almost two.  I worked from there, had lunch, walked Oreo and then it was back to the office.

This afternoon was awful as well.  Really busy and exhausting.  We had one of those days where clients kept calling and screaming at us for things that were their own faults too, which is a bit frustrating.  Three times this afternoon we had to escalate a personnel issue to management because it got so bad!  At least we got away without any of the issues being our fault but that only makes you feel so much better.

There was so much going on that even though I started working around seven this morning I did not manage to escape the office until after six putting me home around ten after.

I walked in the door to Dominica consoling Liesl after Liesl had fallen, face first, off of the couch and slammed her face onto the coffee table!  Fortunately I had just missed the horrible screaming and Liesl was calm by the time that she saw me.  She did not hit her nose or else, Dominica felt, it would have been broken.  She hit her right cheek bone and has a pretty serious bruise but no serious damage.  Dominica was icing it when I got there but Liesl was just about done putting up with that.

I did not have much time to do anything before I had a six thirty conference call to be on that lasted until eight.  Dominica and I had been hoping to have been able to have gone out for dinner tonight but it ended up being just a work night.  So we ordered in Chinese from Hunan Dynasty which was a little on the expensive side but really good and different.  Not our normal Chinese take away at all.  We watched an episode and a half of Soap.  Liesl was already in bed and asleep before dinner even arrived.

Then it was time for me to get back to work.  I am working on a DRBD project for a pair of Linux-based SAN devices.  That ended up taking me to around one thirty in the morning when I decided that I just needed to get some sleep and deal with the rest of the setup and configuration in the morning when I would be a little more alert.

I got into bed and discovered that Oreo had had an accident earlier.  What a time to discover it.  So at one thirty in the morning Dominica got up, we moved Liesl and we changed the bed.  Luckily we have a water-proof liner just for this.

So it was almost two by the time that I finally got to lay down and try to get some sleep.  Oreo was restless because we had gotten him up and kicked him out of bed so that we could change the coverings so he was up for fifteen minutes itching and walking around as he does.  I probably didn’t fall asleep till a quarter after two or later.  Pretty crappy considering that I need to be up by six in the morning at the latest.  Not much sleep for me tonight.