Sheep Guarding Llama

We went to bed a little after eleven last night.  Liesl then woke me up around two thirty this morning.  I tried to fall back asleep after she did that but after being awake until almost four I decided to just give up on the whole idea and to just get up and get out of bed.  Better to be productive and feel good about myself rather than to just lay in bed thinking about all of the work that I should be doing but am not.

So at four in the morning I sat down at my little built in desk in the living room and got to work on my laptop.  I did a ton of work today.  I mean a ton.  The amount of work that I had managed to complete before anyone else was awake in the house was pretty crazy.

My biggest project was getting SMB IT Journal, the ezine of small business technology, migrated from a custom hosted server over to the Rackspace Cloud in San Antonio.  Not that it was a complicated project, just time consuming.  I have several CMS systems that need to go through this migration so I will be working on that as time permits.  I managed to get several systems migrated today which helped to take a load off of my plate.

I was intending to head into the office early today but ended up getting caught up with a few issues at the office that kept me from going in and then there was one phone conference after another and it just ended up being a work from home day.  A really, really busy day, in fact.

This morning I got up and walked into the office carrying three dozen doughnuts from Round Rock Donuts.  People have been waiting for a long time to get to try these.  We figured out that if you microwave them for ten seconds they are almost just like fresh.  Not quite the same as getting them down in Round Rock but still way better than normal doughnuts.

It ended up being a crazy doughnut day as someone else in the office brought in two dozen doughnuts from Dunkin Donuts this morning as well so we had five dozen altogether not including the almost one dozen that I left back at the house that Dominica and Brian tore through today while I was at work.

We ate a ton of doughnuts today.  Once we figured out how to microwave them we just ate them all day.  For lunch Brian drove over and picked up John and I and we went to Rockfish.

This evening, after work, I walked home the leftover doughnuts as Dominica was desperate to get more of them – she had finished off the box that I had left for her (it had not been entirely full, but still) and wanted more.  Liesl had started trying them as well and liked them.  My daughter is going to be very, very spoiled – her first taste of doughnut was a Round Rock Donut!

This evening we went out and did some really quick shopping at Walmart – just basic supplies.  Then we ran to a meeting that Brian had set up.  We had dinner in Dallas’ West End district at Spaghetti Warehouse.  I haven’t eaten at a Spaghetti Warehouse in probably twenty years or possibly more.  Dominica has never eaten at one and neither has Liesl, obviously.

We had a nice dinner.  We were meeting with a friend of Brian’s that he had met online on a video game that he plays on Facebook and had wanted to meet while Brian was in town.  It was nice to get to see some of downtown Dallas.   I have driven through but have never stopped there before.

After dinner we just drove back to the house and pretty much headed straight off to bed.  It was rather late.

Neither Brian nor I slept very well last night although the hotel is great.  I had to be up pretty early dealing with work for the office as I am working from the hotel today.

I really like the Comfort Suites in Round Rock.  It is a very handy location for Dominica and I as well since it is really close to where we hope to be buying a house sometime in the near future.

Jarrad ended up not being able to join us this morning so Brian and I walked ourselves over to Round Rock Donuts and picked up four dozen of them!  Brian was pretty impressed by the line of cars waiting for the drive through winding out of the parking lot, down the side street and on to the main road as well as the line of people that filled the bakery itself and lined out into the patio area outside.

It took thirty minutes or more to get to the front of the line at Round Rock Donuts.  We bought our four dozen and then walked outside and sat down at one of the picnic tables to eat a few while they were incredibly fresh and hot.

From gathering donuts it was back to the hotel so that I could work for another hour.  I ended up having several servers down and we ended up being late for our brunch meeting.

It was just after eleven thirty when we managed to get to La Margarita where we were supposed to have been at eleven.  We had a nice lunch there with some people that I had met down at SpiceWorld last October.  I had fish tacos again.  The fish tacos at La Margarita were excellent.

I ended up being paged several times during brunch which was very annoying.  We ended up having to run around immediately after brunch to find good Internet access so that I could work again for a while.  We tried McDonald’s right next to the hotel where the WiFi is normally pretty good and, at least down here in Texas, free.  But after drinking some McCafe coffee and not being able to get online while getting paged and paged by people who couldn’t handle “don’t page me again until I get online – you are interrupting me from finding a way to get online to help you.”

We gave up on Internet access from McDonald’s and ran back to the hotel and were able to sit in the car outside of the hotel and get onto the Internet access from our hotel room.  That worked surprisingly well.  Wireless has come a long way in the last few years.  Once 802.11n is ubiquitous it will be really amazing.

We were stuck there for a while.  As soon as the servers were fixed we hit the road north to Temple, Texas to meet up with a friend of Brian’s that he has known for a decade or so but has never met.  Temple is very close to Round Rock, maybe twenty minutes away at most.  We are making good use of our trip this weekend.  Three meetings between Round Rock and Temple.

We met up with Sandy and Will in Temple without any issues.  Temple is a very small town so finding each other was easy.  We had been hoping to have had time to have headed out to their private shooting range and to have fired off some of their weapons collection including an AK-47 but we were getting late and did not have the free time that we had hoped.  So instead we just went out for a quick Mexican dinner at a little Mexican diner type place.

We were not in Temple for very long.  Maybe an hour and a half at most.  Then it was back onto the road to get up to Irving again.  The drive from Temple to Irving was well under three hours.  Maybe two and a half at most.

We got back to Irving, the drive went fine.  The whole weekend was really gorgeous with temperatures as high as seventy degrees!  That was a nice change from what we have been having.  It has been a very cold winter.  Can’t complain, though, with all of the snow that they have been seeing in the northeast.  I have managed to avoid what appears to be a record setting snow year up there.

So my alarm went off at five forty five local time this morning.  Oops.  It was late when I went to bed and I forgot that my mobile is set to Eastern time rather than Central time and I set it an hour early.  Argh.  So I only got about four hours of sleep.

A major earthquake, 8.8, rocked Chile’s second largest city this morning killing seventy eight people and generating a tsunami that is traveling across the Pacific.  At this time Hawaii and many other Pacific islands as well as Australia are under warning.  No major population center has been hit yet although populated islands have reported the tsunami already.

I worked all morning getting everything done that I could before needing to travel today.  I ended up not being able to get on the road until after one in the afternoon so I was cutting it pretty close for getting to the airport on the southeast side of Austin.  At least I got a bit of time to visit with the family before leaving for a day.

I got onto the road without having eaten all day.  I took I35E south and stopped in Italy, Texas to get fuel and to eat at McDonald’s.  The weather was amazing today.  Mid sixties as I drove down with bright sun.  Gorgeous Texas day.  It is snowing back home, of course.

I made decent time until I reached Austin proper.  There were tons of cops around Italy up until Waco or so.  Once I hit Austin traffic slowed to ten to twenty miles per hours and I had to creep most of the way through the city.

I was able to drive the entire way to the Austin airport, to which I have only been once before, without using a map or GPS at all.  That was pretty cool.  I am learning my way around Texas.  I got to the airport just five minutes or less after Brian made it out to the curb so the timing was perfect.  No wasted time at all.

We drove around Austin for a little bit so that Brian could see the city.  He has never been to Austin before so this was his quick introduction.  We drove out east and the west into the city from the outer loop.  We drove right through some cool neighbourhoods and then through the UT campus.

We did a tour around downtown Austin and got a good look at the city north of the lake and then drove north of the city and stopped off to grab a couple of beers and fish tacos at a local bar and grill chain.

We got checked into the hotel, the Comfort Inn and Suites in Round Rock right on i35 where Dominica and I stayed the last time that we were in Round Rock the weekend after SpiceWorld in Austin back in October.  It is a great hotel although it was far more expensive this time than it was that last time.

We only had a little while in the hotel to relax before going out to get drinks with Jarrad at a bar called Twin Peaks not too far away.  We knew that we would be there for a while so Brian and I grabbed a taxi to take us down there.  We got there maybe an hour before Jarrad so had some drinks.  I was very happy to learn that Twin Peaks carried 512 from Austin – my local beer of choice.

We had a good time and ended up drinking till we closed the place down.  Then back to the hotel.  We are scheduled to meet again tomorrow morning at nine thirty.  We are going to walk over to Round Rock Donuts (and Lonestar Bakery.)  I am very excited to be getting Round Rock Donuts again.  I am delivering a load of them to the office on Monday as well.

It was an uneventful morning.  Got up and went into the office.  I was able to walk today, the weather is a little chilly but not too bad.  Still just wearing a fleece.  Back “home” in the northeast everyone is getting pounded with snow and wind.

So in legal news today, SCO – the company that has been bankrupt for forever and just runs around suing anyone and everyone claiming that they own the entire universe and constantly losing horribly in court and being unable to settle their legal debts – has now decided to not pay their attorneys.  Now honestly, can we feel bad?  These lawyers were aggressively attacking innocent people and companies on behalf of SCO and working to keep a parasitic  and evil company functioning longer in the attempt to lash out and hurt the American public.  So no pity from me.  And really, who couldn’t see this coming?  Did these lawyers really think that SCO was going to pay no one else but would pay them?  Ha ha.  That’s not how this game works.

Work was pretty busy today.  We still had “visiting dignitaries” at the office today so instead of casual Friday it was “dress up” Friday.

For lunch three of us went to Schlotzsky’s Deli to which I have never been before.  They have a veggie sandwich that was pretty good.  Nothing really special for a vegetarian but it was decent.  Now I know that that is a place that I can eat at from time to time.  That is always an issue being a vegetarian.  You never know when you will find something to eat at a new place.  It makes you think twice before trying out a new place.

This afternoon was very, very busy.  Hardly a free moment at all.  It was crazy up until a quarter after five and then everything just died down all of a sudden.  By six I decided that things were so slow that I could head for home.

I got home and discovered that the apartment was empty.  Dominica had neglected to tell me that she was going out shopping.  That would explain why there was no answer when I called home to find out if she wanted to go out to dinner this evening.  I was home for probably forty five minutes or so before she called to find out if I was still at work or not – her plan had been to pick me up and go out to dinner.

I was already in my pajamas for the evening but I changed back into normal clothes and then the family picked me up and we went out to get On the Border.  We decided that we just wanted to get take away (I probably should have just stayed at home now that I think about it) and while we waited for that to be ready we ran over to PetsMart and go Oreo’s toenails trimmed which he desperately needed to have done.

We came back home and ate dinner and watched some Netflix on demand movies.  It was a pretty slow evening.  Nothing eventful.  Liesl stayed up way too late tonight.  It was around midnight or later when she finally was able to fall asleep on my lap.  I have to be up early tomorrow so I had been hoping to get to bed quite early tonight.  That never works out for me.

Tomorrow I have to be up bright and early to do deployments again.  My Saturdays are really just an extension of Friday night.  So no extra rest for me.  My alarm is set for six forty five.

Tomorrow afternoon, after work is done, I am driving down to Austin where I will be picking up Brian from the airport and getting a chance to go out drinking a little on the town.  We are staying there on Sunday night and then driving up to Irving on Sunday afternoon after stopping at Round Rock Donuts to stock up on the world’s best fried pastry treats.