Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica got up early this morning, around eight, so that she could play some more of Dragon Age: Origins.  She is really addicted.  I can’t believe that she is on her second time through the game already.

I was up on the early side and thought that I would be off to work nice and early.  Of course I was unable to pull that off in the least.  I was delayed just long enough that Liesl woke up and saw me getting ready to leave.  So she got up and wanted me to hold her.  Then, when Dominica was changing her, a silverfish crawled onto her and Dominica got really upset (don’t worry, silverfish are not aggressive – it wasn’t attacking her, it was likely confused) so we had to do an emergency cleaning of the entire house, top to bottom.

While we were cleaning Liesl sat on our bed drinking a bottle.  She was so cute just sitting there watching out the window hanging out by herself.  I just had to take some pictures.

Then I was able to walk over to the office.  Another great day in Texas.  I just can’t get over how nice our weather is.

At lunch, which wasn’t until after one, I walked back home and we had leftovers – pasta from the other night.  We watched an episode of Soap and Dominica played a little Dragon Age: Origins.

Back to work for the day.  Then, as soon as work was done, I walked back home and helped Dominica to load up the car.  Then we were off to drive down to Houston.

It was pretty late when we got in to League City.  We had called Brian on the way through the Woodlands.  He has a printer (a very large one) that we need to coordinate moving this week.  We were hoping that we could just pick it up as we passed through but did not realize that it had to be picked up from a business tomorrow so that is going to add to tomorrow’s list of coordination.

So we drove on down to League City and got off to sleep shortly after arriving.

We had some light rain this morning but nothing much.  I got up, walked Oreo, took my shower, played with Liesl, made coffee for Dominica and I and walked into the office.  Had to wear a light jacket.

Busy morning at work.  I walked home today and we just had pasta and watched a little bit of Soap while we ate.  Liesl was very sleepy but stayed awake the entire time that I was home so we got some time to hang out today which was nice.

I found out today that my training materials for my class are arriving on Thursday – the day after I leave Dallas for almost two weeks.  Could they have procrastinated any more?  For how expensive these training classes are they sure don’t think through how to reliably get the necessary documentation to you until it is way too late to deal with it in any meaningful way.  So I am trying to figure that out now.  The only option that I can think of is to either have the stuff overnighted to Houston, which is risky as I will only be there for one day in which to pick it up, or to have it overnighted to Philadelphia.  No matter what it is going to be a huge pain.  Red Hat didn’t leave any room for error on those books and there was error with an entire month in which to have gotten the books out to us so that this would not have been an issue.

Busy afternoon as well.  I walked home a little after six.  We spent the evening watching Soap and playing with Liesl.  Just had veggie hotdogs for dinner.  It was a very casual evening.

Liesl stayed up late – the product of Daylight Savings Time, grrrrr.  After Liesl fell asleep Dominica tried to get the latest content for Dragon Age: Origins that released today but discovered that the new content is actually a disc that you have to go to the store to purchase.  So now she has to wait a week and a half before she will be able to play her new game.  So once she figured that out she stayed up for an few hours playing her new game of Dragon Age: Origins.  She is probably a dozen hours or more into her new character.

I put in some time getting iTunes set up and my iPod loaded up with tons of technology podcasts to listen to in the car this week.  I haven’t been using my iPod recently and I need to get back into the habit.  I am way behind on my listening.

The big news happened this evening at half past midnight (EDT) when RIT sent out alerts that there was an armed, suicidal gunman on campus and told everyone to take cover.  I immediately Twittered and Dominica hopped on her laptop to check FaceBook to see where Sara, my cousin, was.  Neither of us were on campus so no worries for us.

By the time that I received the alert to take cover, though, Sara had already received the all clear!  That is not good.  I hopped on Twitter and followed the #RIT tag to see what was going on.  Boy, there was a lot of traffic.  The main thread of the traffic was, though, that why were there so many people talking on modern communications channels and yet RIT was unable to get any information out to us.  They were using TXT and phone calls but weren’t publishing to Twitter or FaceBook and emails were way too slow.  Had RIT put info on Twitter everyone would have known instantly what was going on.  But instead all the RIT students were just stuck discussing how incompetent RIT was and how little they were doing to protect us.

To add insult to almost injury, as no one except the perp was actually hurt in the chain of events, RIT said, in every communication that they sent out, to check the RIT web page for the latest details and instructions.  But even hours after the events were all over RIT had never acknowledged that anything had happened on their website.  The main site, that they directed people to, had nothing.  The emergency site was woefully blank as well.  This was a “Toyota fail” event, I think.

In the end it took forty minutes before I received the all clear from RIT after having already received it from other people via Twitter and FaceBook.  That the students can communicate in real time but RIT cannot is just plain sad.  RIT likes to think that they are a technology school but they seem to constantly be falling down, unable to handle the simplest technology tasks.  Last semester it was my professor who was not knowledgeable of the Micosoft Word file format that she required that we use – yes, she required it and yet could not read it and didn’t not even know what it was when she received it!  She was also unable to manage installing or having the IT department install the free Word reader or the free compatibility pack, both from Microsoft, or OpenOffice, also free.  What exactly are the requirements of working at RIT?  Seriously?

So it was around one thirty in the morning (CDT) when I turned in for bed.  Dominica was up just a little while longer playing Dragon Age: Origins but she came to bed shortly after I did.

Tomorrow I am in the office and then, after work, Dominica will pick me up and we will drive on down to Houston where we will spend the next two days.  Then Brian and I are off for our road trip to Pennsylvania and, ultimately, New York.

I woke up rather late this morning, but I don’t think that anyone was expecting me to be into the office bright and early today anyway.  I got up and took my time getting ready.  I hopped on to the BlackBerry just to be sure that there were no fires but I didn’t actually straggle into the office until around ten.

This week is going to be crazy busy.  Monday through Wednesday I am working in the office as usual.  Then on Wednesday evening Dominica, Liesl, Oreo and I are driving down to Houston and spending the night.  We will get there pretty late.  I am then taking Thursday off from work and we are taking Liesl to the Houston Zoo which should be a lot of fun.

On Friday I am working from Houston at the Grices’ and then, as soon as work is done, I am picking up Brian and we are driving from Houston to Hatiesburg, Mississippi where we will crash for the night.  Then I have to get up and work on Saturday morning doing Linux patching.  Once that is done we will be back on the road and off to Philadelphia.  What a week it will be.

Work wasn’t too bad today, thankfully.  For lunch John and I went to Rockfish.  I was in the mood for fish tacos.  I have discovered that I can get the fish taco dinner portion there and split it with Dominica making for two entire meals.  After tax and generous tip the total is still just over thirteen dollars for the two of us to have a really good meal.  Texas is so cheap!

I dropped off lunch for Dominica, played with Liesl, walked Oreo and then walked back to the office.  Still nice weather.  It just keeps going and going.  We have been going back and forth between fresh air and air conditioning at home.

I got home around six thirty and we piled in the car and drove out to On the Border for dinner.  This is our first meal out since getting back home after our trip to Las Vegas.  We had some shopping to do and figured that we should go out to eat.  Technically we went out for lunch but that was from work.

We ate dinner then ran over to Walmart for some really quick supplies.  Then it was off to Men’s Warehouse as I had two suits that have been ready for several days that I needed to pick up.

We got back home and felt that Liesl might be getting tired.  She had fallen asleep in the car.  So we just watched some Soap but she never actually fell asleep and Dominica just finally had to take her to bed at midnight.  DST really messes with the rhythms of everyone, doesn’t it?

I stayed up late getting some work done as the only time that I can do it is after everyone has gone to sleep.

This morning Dominica was right up and at Dragon Age: Origins.  She is almost done and wants to push through and complete the game as quickly as possible so that she can start it all over again.

The time changed last night so we lost an hour.  We slept in a little this morning but we will definitely be exhausted tomorrow.

I had to work all day but, for the most part, it was a slow day and there wasn’t that much to do.  So I got some time to play with Liesl while Dominica worked on her game.  She managed to complete the game, with less than sixty hours of total gameplay, by mid afternoon.  The end of the game was very challenging and it took her quite a few tries to get through it to the very end bit of the story.

As soon as she was done playing it through the first time she immediately created a new character and began the game again.  You know that she must really love this game if she is playing it a second time just minutes after having completed it the first time.  I have never done that with a game before.

The first time through the game she played as a Dwarven noble warrior.  This time she is playing as a human noble rogue.  My plan is to play it as a elven servant.  I sat down and watched as much of the starting portion of the game as possible as the very beginning of the game is where the different storylines diverge so completely.  We are pretty sure that the middle forty or so hours of the game are pretty much identical no matter which character you play.

At five this evening I got paged out.  I had hoped that that would have been the end of the work day but, as it turns out, my day was just beginning.  So instead of getting time to hang out with the family and relax on Sunday evening I ended up on a conference call that went all night.

I was on the phone for several hours and then, around nine, I had to run over to the office to work from there for a little while.  Just what I wanted to do on Sunday evening.  I worked there and got home around eleven.  I walked both ways so that was my eleventh time walking to and from the office this week.  When I got back Liesl was asleep so we put on Soap for a little bit before going to bed ourselves.

Liesl, today, has totally demonstrated that she knows where her nose and our noses are.  If you ask her, “Liesl, where is your nose?”  She instantly touches her finger to her nose and laughs.  You can ask her where your own nose is too and she touches your nose.  She doesn’t have mouth or ears yet but she definitely knows nose and possible belly button.  She is growing up so fast!

This morning we got a chance to sleep in.  Yay.  I forgot to mention the big item that happened last week – we finally got a bed here in Texas!  I can’t believe that it slipped my mind as it was a pretty significant part of the week.  The bed itself actually arrived at our local Walmart (we had it shipped there from an online order because the shipping is free when you do that) just before we left for Las Vegas but we were unable to do anything about it before we left so we just had them hold it for us.

On Monday Dominica had driven out to Walmart and brought the bed home.  On Monday night I had moved the mattress, which was insanely heavy, from the car park to the apartment.  It was so heavy and my heart was racing so much after doing so that we decided to leave the bed frame for Tuesday.  It is a king size, eight inch thick, memory foam mattress.  Much like our mattress in Peekskill but a little thicker and king rather than queen.  On Monday night we just threw the mattress on the floor of Liesl’s room and slept there.  It was awesome to not be on an air mattress.  We have been sleeping on an air mattress, with two adults, a toddler and a seriously bed-hogging Boston Terrier for two and a half months now.

On Tuesday I brought the bed frame to the apartment and Dominica assembled that while I was playing Final Fantasy XIII.  The assembly was really easy.  It is a metal frame, portable bed frame that we will easily be able to just throw into the back of the X3 and move whenever we move to a new home.  So Tuesday evening we got the bed completely assembled and set up in our own bedroom.

So this entire week we have been sleeping on a real bed.  The biggest factor for us is that when one person (or Oreo) moves it doesn’t cause the entire bed to move around.  We are able to get much more solid sleep now.

This morning I finally got the Nikon D90 charged and set up again so I took some Liesl pictures first thing.  I need to always have the camera just available in the middle of the living room in order to always be able to get pictures whenever she is doing something cute.  The camera has been discharged and packed ever since we moved to Texas which has made getting pictures really tough – especially as my Kodak digicam got packed somewhere for a while and we could not find that either.  So look for new Liesl pictures to be posted very soon – real pics from the good camera.

I had to do some office work this morning but not very much.  It was good as I needed some time to just relax at home.  Not that there wasn’t plenty of work for me to do but at least I didn’t have stuff hanging over my head.

Dominica got up and got right to playing Dragon Age: Origins.  She has been making crazy progress through the game and is definitely pretty far along.  She had felt like she was mostly just starting on the game but when she checked some online walkthroughs she figured out that this afternoon she was already on the eighth out of nine major sections of the game.  So she is planning to finish playing the game this weekend – most likely tomorrow.

We stayed in today.  Another day of not going out to eat.  We are doing quite well this week.  This evening, after Dominica got tired of playing DAO and just needed a break we checkout out the latest on demand Netflix content and discovered that the classic 1977 American television show Soap is now available!  Neither of us has ever actually watched the show but we both know just about everyone who stars in it and we know the show by reputation.  The show was on when I was two young to watch it and Dominica was not born yet when it started its run.  It was not a popular show in reruns when we were young so it was never something that we really had the option to watch.

Soap is actually a great show.  It has a phenomenal fast – pretty much all of whom went on to major careers in the 1980s on other series and, which came as a surprise to me, it has a very young Billy Crystal.  I had no idea that he got his start doing sitcoms!

Then it was off to bed.  We tried to go to bed as early as possible tonight as tonight is the Daylight Savings time change here in the US.