Sheep Guarding Llama

Today I am definitely showing a lot of improvement.  The antibiotics are making a difference.  I actually felt the turn happen yesterday afternoon.  Within an hour I went from massively sick to not feeling half bad.  I still have a horrible cough and can barely breath today because of it but the improvement is dramatic.

For the most part we took it easy today.    Watched a lot of Prehistoric and tried to get better.  I don’t have to work at all today so I got to hang out with Liesl a lot.

I did have some writing that has been needing my attention.  I have an article due for Datamation that I was supposed to get done this weekend but being sick I never even got a chance to look at it.  So I am attempting to get that done today.

This evening, in order to actually work, I ended up having to barricade myself into the bedroom and working with the laptop perched upon a barstool.  Oreo lay on the bed while I sat in an office chair typing on my laptop on a barstool.  It was an entertaining sight to behold, I am sure.

Dominica’s back is really bothering her this evening and we are concerned that it may mean that I cannot go to work tomorrow.  She had a really hard time watching Liesl this evening as she could get up to chase her or to pick her up.

I got most of my writing done tonight and I was able to watch Liesl again.  Luckily no homework due from me this week.  But my final is due this week so I have a lot of writing to do later in the week.

Being a good generlist is a strategy that involves being a tactical specialist.

Went to bed really early yesterday.  Really early as you might have noticed from my very short post.  It was around six thirty when Oreo and I hit the sack.  I was out quickly.  Sick and exhausted.  Sleep was what I needed even more than the antibiotics.

I slept for a very, very long time and did not get up until almost ten this morning!  That was one long night of sleep.

I am still very, very sick today but I can tell that the long night has caused some improvement.  I worked today and we pretty much did nothing.  Just watched some Prehistoric and relaxed.  Dominica is not feeling so great today either.

It is a really good thing that I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.  I am definitely not going to be feeling up for that for at least another day.

Liesl was extremely restless and by around three thirty in the morning I was so awake that it was not worth attempting to go back to sleep again.  I tried for a while but by four I gave up and just got up.  I am very, very glad that I went to bed so early last night or I would be in horrible shape today.  I really need my sleep to fight this strep infection so getting less than five hours would have been really bad.

I was decently productive this morning. Having the house to myself for several hours helps although getting up so early is not good for long term productivity as I am very likely to be very tired by the middle of the day.

Today I spent the morning going downhill quite rapidly.  My strep quickly moved from being in my sinuses to being in my upper respiratory system.  I am really not doing well at all.  I started my series of antibiotics yesterday afternoon but there has not been enough time for it to really help by this morning.

I worked all morning for the office and then called it a day.  I spent the afternoon just being sick and sitting around the house.  Dominica and I watched a bit of television and discovered a “new” British show from iTV called Prehistoric which is very cheesy and poorly written and yet we are enjoying it.

My symptoms have changed today and I have a could have Scarlet Fever (aka scarletina.)  It is really hard to say and the treatment is the same so we aren’t about to go back to the doctor just to find out if the strep has matured to that stage or not.  Scarlet Fever is just a late stage of strep so it isn’t something that you catch but just something that happens if you don’t go to the doctor and get antibiotics in time.  I might have gone as much as five months with strep at this point.  I have been sick, possibly continuously, since going to Germany in September.  So there has been way more than enough time for strep to turn into Scarlet Fever.

Liesl seems to have shown a slight amount of improvement today.  Maybe she will be happy again soon.

Still tons of snow on the ground here in Irving, Texas today.  The snow stopped falling sometime during the night but it is not melting like we had hoped that it would and the world here is still covered in slush although the roads really are not too bad.

Liesl was feeling pretty bad this morning.  Her cough is even worse than yesterday and she is clearly very sick.  We had wanted to have gotten her in to see the doctor yesterday but due to a mix up with our new plan we had to wait until today but Dominica was able to get her scheduled for first thing this morning – which ended up being an hour or two later because of the roads and the medical staff mostly did not go into the office today.

I was supposed to go to the doctor’s office with Dominica and Liesl but we were all running late and we had decided that if they were ready to go that they would just go to the doctor’s without me and I would catch up.  The office is literally right across the street – the same distance that it takes to walk to our car that is inside of the building.  But Dominica and Liesl left without telling me and while I knew the office complex to which to go I did not know what doctor or practice they were going to.  I also wasn’t sure if they had just stepped outside for a minute or not.  Dominica’s phone was dead so we were not able to call each other.  So they ended up going alone and I just worked for the office.

It ended up taking two hours at the doctor’s office, so in reality it was best that I didn’t go as today ended up being a highly disrupted day for my work as it was.  The verdict was that Liesl has a strep infection in her sinuses.  Poor little girl.  So she needs to go on antibiotics again, just a couple weeks after going on them for her ear infection.  It also means that it is almost certain that I have a strep infection as well.

The roads were good enough that Dominica and Liesl were going to take off straight away to drive down to League City for Madeline’s tenth birthday part weekend and sleepover.  But I mentioned that taking Liesl there as a strep carrier that is still contagious might be like sending a Genoese rat down to all those tween girls and that strep would be spreading like the plague.  Not to even mention that Francesca is pregnant and getting strep would not be ideal for her either.

So Dominica and Francesca debated whether or not they should go for about an hour and finally gave up on the idea.  So I have the girls home with me this weekend which is nice because it is a long, holiday weekend.  The only issue is that I blocked off this entire weekend to get rest and to get loads of work done so that is going to be much, much harder now with them here.  So my productivity is not going to be nearly what we had hoped that it would have been, unfortunately.

Once we knew that the girls were not traveling today and that the car would be available we scheduled with CareNow to get me an appointment to see a doctor as well.  There is pretty much no way that I do not have strep given that Liesl does and that I have been so sick for so long.

They got us right in and we drove out to Grapevine so that I could see the doctor.  The good news that we learned is that I am officially a bit lighter than I was the last time that I saw a doctor and my blood pressure is quite good – not amazing or anything like that but of no concern at all which is amazing as I am always fearful that I will have high blood pressure especially these days with all of the moving and work hours.  The stress has been much higher than usual.

The diagnosis was, as expected, strep.  I’ve probably had it for a long time.  So I got a prescription to an antibiotic and we drove back home and went to CVS and dropped off the scripts and went to Sonic to get some lunch.  It was a quick lunch, picked up the scripts and got back to the house.  It is definitely good that we saw the doctor today as I got much, much sicker as the day progressed and by the late afternoon I had a horrible, horrible cough that is as bad as it was in September.

My afternoon was spent working via BlackBerry mostly and on the phone almost the entire day.  It was a very busy day considering how sick I was. Luckily several people at the office were helping me out as I felt awful and my Internet connection was mostly useless – I suspect because we have tens of thousands of people working from home today causing some severe congestion.

We ordered in pizza for dinner but I only had two slices, just not hungry.  I went to bed super early at a quarter until ten!  That is the earliest that I can remember going to bed in a very, very long time.  It was hard to get to sleep, though, as Liesl would sneak into our bedroom and jump on me trying to get me to play with her or to read her her “Hippos Go Berserk” book that is currently her favourite.  We read it so often that I have it memorized now.  Oreo came to bed with me and snuggled.  It was an hour or two at least before Dominica and Liesl went to bed.

So tomorrow we will just all be home, attempting to recover.  I might go down and make use of the coffee bar at Tuscan Villas to get some work done in the quiet there.  They have wireless Internet access and free, high quality coffee, tea and cocoa so it is a good place to get away and concentrate on all of the writing that I need to be doing this weekend.  At least I am starting the weekend with SGL up to date and with some of my Saturday work done for me by Harsh so that I would not have so much to do tomorrow.

I woke up nice and early this morning and discovered to my horror that the DFW Metroplex was completely covered in snow!  Snow?  Yesterday it was so nice that I was able to walk to work without even wearing a jacket and today we are under snow?  How can this possibly have happened?

I walked Oreo, made my coffee and then drove over to the office.  It was surprisingly warm, thirty seven degrees, for there to be so much snow on the ground, at least an inch, and for so much to be falling.  The roads were covered in slush but driving was fine.

It was around seven or a little before when I arrived in the office.  I emailed everyone and told the Texans who live any distance from the office to just stay home rather than risking the drive in.  The roads aren’t bad with without any snow plows or salt, with crazy drivers and with massive skyways it is generally not worth driving in such bad weather.

It occurred to me this morning, before leaving the house, that I should get my iPod charged up and usable again.  It has been months since I had it set up and working and I have missed tons of stuff on IT Conversations.  Time to get that working again so that, at least, I can listen to some podcasts while walking between the office and home every day.  Four trips per day adds up.

This morning was very busy again but by lunch time things started to settle down a bit.  The office is very empty today and that is contributing to things slowing down.  Some people came into the office but we mostly sent them home early because the weather was getting worse throughout the day.

The weather is definitely going to be a problem from Dominica who was planning on driving down to League City this weekend for Madeline’s birthday slumber party.  Dominica was planning to leave tomorrow morning so that she could be on the south side of Houston before traffic got bad but now it is looking like driving in Dallas tomorrow morning is going to be pretty dangerous.  So we are playing it by ear and seeing what is going to happen there. She might have to wait until Saturday morning before she leaves to avoid the snow.

At lunch I drove home and picked up Liesl and Dominica and we drove to Panera Bread for lunch.  It was a short lunch but it was nice getting to hang out.  I dropped them at the apartment on the way to work.

The afternoon slowed down a lot from this morning and wasn’t actually all that bad.  I actually had some time to breath and was able to leave the office a little bit before six to come home and see the girls.

We just had leftovers for dinner and spent the night playing with Liesl and watching Torchwood.  We were up until around midnight and then it was off to bed.  When we did go to bed it was still snowing.  Who would have guessed it.  I am guessing that there will be no one in the office tomorrow.

I have forgotten to mention on here that my next door neighbour back in Peekskill lowered the price of his house earlier this week.  That puts us into really tough shape.  We know that he is going to take a huge loss on the house but apparently he is backed into a corner and has to do so.  The house started at $400K in December which wasn’t bad since we were at $380K.  We are directly next door sharing a wall.  We have the nicer structure but he has the end unit.  Then he came down to match us in price about two weeks ago.  Now he is down to $365K!  Not good.  We are figuring that we have no way now to sell our house as long as his is on the market.  He is just willing to lose too much money that we can’t lose that much just because he is being reckless.  So our plan is to rent the house instead and hold off for a year or two before trying to sell it again.  Now, of course, we have to go through the challenge of finding renters.

So that whole situation is not incredibly encouraging.  My opinion is that we just have to wait until our neighbour is off of the market.  He is going to lower the price until it sells and we have no desire to compete with that.  We are not in the panic to sell like he is and we aren’t going to take a massive loss just because he has to.  So we just need to hold out.  Someone is going to get an amazing deal on his house and that is great for them.  We got a great deal on our house from someone in a similar position.  We are fine not making a penny on the house we would even lose some.  But nothing like that.  We are in a position to hold out, at least for now, on selling it and that seems to be what we need to do.  We do lose some every month but the numbers he is likely to lose are staggering.  We are convinced that he must be short selling which is not an option for us.  I can’t imagine that he has the kind of cash necessary to cover the loses that he is about to see – and even so no one has bought that house yet.

Although because his price is lower and we are attached there is a greater chance of more people passing through our house since anyone going to look at his will stop by and look at ours too while they are there.  So maybe we will find someone who really likes ours and will be willing to put in an offer.  Although thus far there have only been one or two serious people who have even gone out to look at the house since it went onto the market a month and a half ago.