Sheep Guarding Llama

Yet another beautiful day in north Texas.  I have managed to walk to work every day this week and have managed to walk home for lunch every day.  That is ten trips to and from the office in one week.  Impressive.  I have not pulled this off yet since starting down here in Las Colinas.

Today was not so busy as many Fridays.  Not a bad day.  I was able to come home for lunch and then walk back to the office.  I even managed to get out of the office at a decent time this evening.

We’ve managed to eat at home for the entire week.  Our first time doing that since moving to Texas as well, I believe.

Dominica spent the day playing Dragon Age Origins and when I got home I watched Liesl so that she could play all evening.  Liesl and I had a good time reading and playing.  DAO is very much like watching a movie so I watched that a bit.  Dominica is really getting quite far in this game.

Liesl is continuing to really show a lot of development this week.  Every night it seems that she has another couple of words to tell me and her “pretend conversations” that she has with us are getting more and more understandable.  They still don’t involve specific words, or at least not words that we recognize, but you can really get the flow of what she is saying as if she was speaking in Simlish.

We have decided that we are going to take Liesl to the Houston Zoo on Thursday which will be really cool.  She has not been to the zoo before and I think that she is really going to like it.

Dominica, having watching me play Final Fantasy XIII the last two evenings, has apparently become addicted to playing Dragon Age: Origins again.  She played some yesterday during the day but let me play my game when I came home at night.  This morning she got up early so that she could play DAO even before Liesl, Oreo and I got up!

Thus it begins. This is how video game addictions start.  Dominica will be playing DAO for days now.

I got ready and was off to work.  I walked in again.  The weather is remaining awesome here.

Nothing much to report today.  This week has been a bit of a blur.  Still trying to get caught up from being in Vegas.  The one big thing today is that I finally got a chance to work on getting SGL migrated from our custom hosting (on an HP Proliant DL385 G5) in a datacenter in Toronto, Ontario to our new CloudSite provided by Rackspace in Texas.  So, hopefully, starting tonight SGL will be faster and will have even better uptime with less effort on my side.  Tomorrow I will be updating WordPress and adding some new features to the site as well.  This work has held me back a little bit on updates because I can’t work on the site while it is in the process of being transfered from one location to another.

This evening Dominica played DAO.  I did not get a chance to use the PS3 at all.  So much for getting to play my birthday present.  I spent the evening playing with Liesl and working on website transfers.  It was a productive day.

Dominica made a ton of progress in Dragon Age: Origins.  I don’t really have any idea what is going on in the storyline at this point.  She is really loving this game.  I have never seen her this addicted to any game before.  She says that she does not think that it is as good as Fable II but that it might be the second best game that she has ever seen compared to that.

Speaking of which, Fable III is due out later this year and the rumour is that it will use our Fable II saved games!  I am really, really looking forward to that.

I was tempted to just call in to work today but decided that I really did need to work and that Final Fantasy XIII would have to wait until I got home this evening.  I know a lot of guys at work who took a day or two off when Grand Theft Auto IV released.  Surely FFXIII warrants a day at home with Mt. Dew and chips!

The weather is great again today.  It has been great all week.  Every since we returned from Las Vegas.  We are loving it.  We’ve actually had to have the air conditioning on for the past few days which is crazy in mid-March!

I walked home again today for lunch.  Definitely getting my exercise this week.  No time to play my game at lunch though.  Actually I took a short lunch and headed back to the office.

After work I walked home and got about three hours to play Final Fantasy XIII this evening.  This is the most that I have gotten to play a video game in a very long time.  I talked to Jen and she is many hours ahead of me at this point, though.

Liesl is making some massive strides in her development this week.  She has learned several new words like apple, ball and keys.  She is able to say all of them so that we understand her and her general communication skills are really improving.  She really knows what we are saying most of the time.

Liesl really seems much older this week.  On Sunday night, I think it was, we sat around watching some videos that my parents took of me around Liesl’s age and it is amazing how much more advanced she is than I was.  At her age I really seemed like a baby but she really does not.  She seems like a small child.  She is so active and engaged and self entertaining.

Today is the big day – the North American release of Final Fantasy XIII for the Playstation 3.  According to Amazon, I should expect the game to arrive this afternoon.  Pretty cool.

The weather was nice again this morning and I walked to work.  It appears that now that we are in March the “wintry” weather here in Texas has subsided and we are solidly on to spring.  No remotely cold days now for some time.  This is much more of what we had been expecting to see here.

It was a very busy morning and I did not get to go to lunch until rather late.  I walked home again.  This is working out that my normal lunch crew is taking a class at the office and cannot make it to lunch with me because I need the exercise of walking home for lunch as well as the cost savings of eating at home.  Although we did some calculations and the savings at lunch time are nominal compared to going out to eat in Texas but at dinner it does save a bit.

When I got home at lunch Final Fantasy XIII had just arrived!  I was excited and had hoped to have had a chance to play it during lunch but Liesl woke up just after I arrived and there was no way that she was going to let me play a video game and eat lunch rather than play with her.

So I walked back to the office and worked all afternoon.  While I was working this afternoon Jen from Houston ran to Game Stop and grabbed herself a copy of FFXIII and ran home to start playing it before I could get home and play it.  The race is on.  I didn’t get to leave work until a little late this evening so Jen was way ahead of me in the game.

I got home around seven o’clock.  Dominica made dinner while I fired up the PS3 and got started with the latest title in the Final Fantasy series.  The first impression is really something.  This is the first 1080p PS3 title that I have seen and Square clearly knows how to tweak the platform.  Stunning doesn’t even cover it.  This game is insanely gorgeous.  I played for about two hours tonight and the whole time I was just completely amazed by how great it looked.

There is no question that FFXIII is much like its FF7 predecessor in that it is built mostly out of movie-like cut scenes and the gameplay is completely linear so you end up basically walking through a really, really long movie.  I am really looking forward to being able to get into this game and see how it goes.  I haven’t played a Final Fantasy when it was new since FF7 back when I had a first generation Playstation and lived in Greenleaf Meadows with Josh.

Very little to report on today.  We are back in Irving as of last night and today is Monday so I am back to the office today.

Today the weather was nice and without any warning we went from bright sun to torrential rain and pretty serious hail.  I was at my desk and didn’t notice a thing as I do not have a window looking outside unless I stand up.  Dominica called me to ask if I had seen the weather.  It had caught her by surprise.  This is her first time seeing a midwest thunderstorm sneak up on her.

I had noticed the storm coming from the southwest when I walked to work this morning so I was too surprised although the ferocity of the storm was more than I would have guessed.  I normally walk over to the office and spend a few minutes just standing out front cooling down as it is a vigorous uphill walk the last half of the distance and I tend to get pretty warm.  So I just stand in the breeze cooling off and sipping my coffee which gives me a chance to get a feel for the weather of the day.

I walked home for lunch today.  The storm had passed and it was bright and sunny again although I had to take the extra long way around the driveway rather than through the lawn since it was completely underwater.

After work I just came home and we just relaxed.  Dominica cooked dinner and we watched Torchwood: Children of Earth the miniseries that had arrived on BluRay from Netflix.  We’ve been looking forward to this for a while.  We had four episodes to watch (out of five, we had seen episode one previously) so that ate up the entire evening.  We are now completely caught up with Torchwood with the Brits.  We are all awaiting a new season now.

Tomorrow is the big day… release day for Final Fantasy XIII.  It has been a long time since I got a video game on release day.  Dominica bought me FFXIII for my birthday and Amazon is set to have it delivered tomorrow afternoon.  So I get to start playing on release day.  I am pretty excited.  This is the biggest PS3 release yet and we are years into the platform.