Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.