Sheep Guarding Llama

I feel so much better today knowing that I have completed those two huge, looming tasks that I had on my plate.  Tomorrow Dominica and Liesl are planning on heading down to Houston for almost a week so today is our last day together.

Today was the Microsoft 2010 Launch Event in Dallas.  I went in early this morning getting there around eight and was there all day.  I did the MSDN Developer track to learn about the new features and stuff available in Visual Studio 2010.  Also got to see some cool Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 features which will be very nice when they release.

After I got home from work this evening we decided that we wanted to go out tonight for dinner at La Cima.  We have our monthly “dinner for two” to use before the end of the month and with Dominica being gone for a week we thought that tonight would be the perfect time to use it.

So we got dressed up and off to La Cima we went.  It was nice getting to use our free meals – that meant all out four course meals for us!  It was a great dinner.  Dominica got the southwest salmon which I had last week and loved.  I got the swordfish which was really amazing.  It was a great, and very filling, dinner.  We really enjoyed it.  Getting to go out like this twice a month as part of our membership is really cool.  We will be trying this in Houston soon as well.

Whenever we go out to La Cima, Liesl is pretty much asleep on the very short ride home.  So it is straight off to bed for her.  I played a little Dragon Age: Origins and then it was off to bed for me as well.

Dominica’s laptop has been out of commission for a few weeks now.  It got something sticky spilled into it one day followed by a cup of coffee one or two days later.  She got a replacement keyboard and tried to fix it herself a few days later but accidentally broke a connector on the motherboard.  So she decided to just let HP warranty center handle it (they just charge if we broke it ourselves but they still do the work) and today we spoke to them and released it to be worked on.  Hopefully she will have it back soon.

I still have to work today but at least I don’t have class or a certificate validation that has to be done today.  Small victories.

Went to work and came home to visit the family during lunch.  Today, I decided, I need to just relax a bit and so my spare time was spent starting a new character in Dragon Age: Origins rather than doing extra work.  I really needed the time to just unwind.

I made it several hours into the game today.  I am probably at the three hour mark at the end of the day and am past the intro portion of the game and am no longer playing the “unique” bit that is unique just to the one character.  Dominica watched me play the entire intro as that part is a lot like a movie and there are six unique multi-hour intros to be played in the game.  She has played two of them already herself and so she really wanted to see this one that I am playing.  My character is the poor, city-dwelling elf character.  I don’t expect that I will play the game more than once whereas she is playing it all the way through at least twice if not more.

So far I am liking the game quite a bit.  I’m surprised that Dominica loves it as much as she does but it is definitely a fun game.  The game really does not require any amount of “action” response even though battles are real time, unlike Oblivion or Fable.  She does not enjoy that aspect of those (and really, I don’t either) so that may be why she likes this game as much as she does in comparison to those.

As of midnight last night, when I called it a night, I was just past the halfway point in validating that ASP.NET exam.  That means that there is more than a full day of work left in front of me that I have to get through yet today.

I slept in a little this morning but could not stay in bed very long.  Too much to do and not enough time with which to do it.  I got right to work on the ASP.NET exam and worked all day on it until about two in the morning.  I managed to get it completed but it took the entire day.

It was crappy having to do this on my last day at home with Liesl before she goes down to Houston this coming week. 🙁  I had been hoping to have gotten a lot of quality time with her before they left.

I was up at a quarter till seven this morning.  I hate having to start the weekend like this nearly every week.  Having a chance to sleep in now and then is kind of important.  I worked from seven until nine.  Not a busy day and very unfortunate that these short deployments always require that I be up so early on the closest thing that I get to a day off.

After nine, Dominica, Liesl and I went down to the “coffee bar” in our apartment complex for the special quarterly omelet breakfast that they do every so often.  They bring in a catering firm that does really good omelets.  It works out really well.  They get seventy-five to one hundred residents coming down and meeting up with each other every time that they do these.

After breakfast I settled in to work on the exam for the rest of the day – which I did.  I worked from about ten in the morning till around midnight.  What a long, exhausting day.

Dominica spent the day playing Dragon Age Awakening which she finished.  She has gotten a ton of use out of those Dragon Age games!  I hope to start playing them myself as soon as this exam validation is over.

Work today.  The usual for a Friday.  Very busy all day.  I came home for lunch and hung out with Dominica while Liesl mostly slept.

After work I had to spend what little time that there was this evening working on the ASP.NET 3.5 exam that I am validating.  Doing a test validation, especially one for a programming exam, is an insane amount of work.  In this case there are two hundred and twenty two questions that I need to pour over and ensure that each one is correct, worded well, meaningful, applicable and relevant.  No small task.  A single question can easily take ten minutes.

So I put in an hour or two doing this today but my real plan is to work on this all weekend doing this and to get to bed on the early side tonight so that I am rested and able to really focus once tomorrow comes.  I am also scheduled to be up early tomorrow to do production releases so I do not get to sleep in at all either.

After this weekend, Dominica and Liesl are leaving early in the week to go down to Houston to be with Francesca.  They are staying for the weekend so that I can spend my time at home with Liesl rather than them being gone over the weekend but, of course, with all of the work that I have to do this may not work out as well as we had hoped.