Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica and I were both completely exhausted this morning.  It was after four in the morning when we finally called it a night and I had to be up around eight today.  Dominica and Liesl slept until around nine thirty but that only helped a little.

I worked for a few hours while Dominica got ready so that we could go.  Then at eleven or so we drove down to Arlington to meet up with her aunt and then we followed her down to Mansfield, which is south of Arlington, where several of Dominica’s cousins, aunt and other extended family live.

We had a really nice time visiting with the family today.  It was great seeing people that we haven’t seen in over a year and almost no one had every met Liesl before – the last major family gathering was at Papa’s funeral one month before Liesl was born – so it was a big chance for her to get introduced to everyone.  We got to meet a lot of the “kids” of Liesl’s generation ourselves as there are many that we have never met before including Samantha, Liesl’s second cousin, who is just seven months younger than Liesl.  It is rare for Liesl to not be the littlest of the children.  She definitely liked having a baby around.

We hung out for several hours.  It was  a very nice day.  Then we headed home and stopped by at Waffle House for dinner in Grand Prairie.

This evening we spent a bit of time working on cleanup work from the migration that we did last night and getting more websites moved over to the Rackspace Cloud.  I am loving using them so far.  Very easy and very powerful.

I had to be up pretty early this morning.  They wanted me to start work at six thirty today.  Ugh.  My weekends are not very relaxing.

My Saturday morning deployments ended up going until almost two in the afternoon.  I’m not exactly busy that entire time but I am tied to my desk.

This evening Dominica and I got to work on a major desktop Active Directory migration project.  We started around ten in the evening after Liesl had fallen asleep and ended up working like mad until four in the morning!  What an exhausting night.  Overall the work went well though and it was stuff that needed to be done and we were able to knock it out.  While being extremely tired I am very happy to have this work completed.  I feel better about the situation.

Simultaneously tonight I also started working, for the first time, with Rackspace Cloud Sites.  This is my first time working with a commercial hosting entity like this which, I think, most people will be pretty surprised to find.  I’ve done tons of hosting over the years but either a business large enough to do our own hosting or as a hosting provider.  So the experience that most people have, using a hosting provider, is one that I have never experienced directly.

Tonight I only worked on moving over static websites so nothing too exciting.  The first batch of sites moved over without any incident.  It was quite easy.

The speed of the sites being hosted on Rackspace is noticeably faster than it was before.  The console for Rackspace Cloud Sites took a little getting used to but was pretty easy once we figured it out.

Again this morning I was awake super early.  Not as early as yesterday, that was just crazy, but very early.  It was probably five when I woke up so I got up and showered, made my morning coffee and drove over to the office getting there around six thirty or so.  It is nice getting in early, I get so much extra work done when I do that.  Plus it is a very stress-free way to start the day because you know that you are getting in and resolving any issues that arise early in the morning instead of letting them pile up and hit you all at once when you finally get to the office.

The weather was predicted to be really bad today so a lot of people were thinking that they would not be coming in to the office today.  There was rather a serious storm last night but nothing too horrible and this morning it was simple cold and rainy but hardly “stay home from work” weather.  I drove because of the rain.  A little too much water falling to make walking worth it.

I accidentally took Dominica’s keys today so she was unable to leave the house as she had no house key.  So at lunch I drove over and picked her up and then we drove down route 161 to Northgate and hit the Waffle House there for lunch.  We are starting to learn our way around the area just a little bit and are starting to be able to actually drive places without using the GPS (which is mostly useless anyway) which is very exciting.

I left the car with Dominica after lunch and walked back to work.  It is Friday so work was busy and I worked quite late.

After work I walked over and Dominica, Liesl and I drove down MacArthur Boulevard down to Boston’s Gourmet Pizza where we met up with Brian, a friend of mine that I have only previously known online via the SpiceWorks community.  Brian has been the acting SpicePioneer for SpiceCorps Dallas and I am not his co-Pioneer helping to get that community really going.  Our second meeting, and the first one with me here, is in six days in Las Colinas.  To make it even more exciting, Rackspace is sponsoring us, which is awesome.  I am hoping that they will bring some Rackspace Blue Cloud Cotton Candy like they have given out in the past at other events.

We had a really good time at dinner.  Brian brought along some friends of his, Mike and Sara <sp>, who all live very near to us.  The pizza was actually quite excellent at Boston’s too, which I was not expecting, as no place in Texas has decent pizza.  We are having great luck finding people to hang out with in the Dallas area.

After dinner we stopped by Yogurtzone and got some fro-yo for dessert because Dominica wanted it.  It was pretty cold for fro-yo but there were a lot of people there eating too.

I woke up just after three this morning.  Liesl was still asleep, a miracle.  I was pretty much completely awake so I got up, showered, dressed, made my coffee, walked Oreo and decided that I might as well go to work since everyone was still asleep and if I did anything around the apartment I was pretty likely to wake them up.  So I took my coffee and headed out the door.

I arrived at the office, which was stifling hot, around a quarter after four this morning.  It was warm but quiet.  Perfect place to sit and relax and drink my delicious cup of coffee from home.  It is not often that I get a chance to work in complete silence so I took advantage of the time to get a ton of work done.  All kinds of catching up I did this morning.

It was nice to have the morning to myself.  I needed the alone time.  I got almost three hours all to myself.  I got to read, write, hang out on SpiceWorks, keep up with email, do paperwork, and who knows what all.  I forgot to mention that my second monitor was finally delivered at work yesterday so I am working a lot more efficiently now.

It was definitely nice having time to do some catch up.  For breakfast, which was hours after I got to work obviously, John and I ran to Panera and picked up coffee and bagels for the office (John paid for the bagel, I just grabbed the coffee.)  I also got myself a four cheese souffle which was delicious.

At lunch I went home and had a $2.50 Tony’s pizza and visited with Dominica and Liesl and had a conference call on the phone.  I walked Oreo then returned to work.  I took the X3 back to the office as it is expected to be quite the storm tonight and I did not want to get caught being at the office with no way back home in a torrent of freezing rain and possibly tornadoes.

This evening Dominica and I watched the last few episodes of the fourth season of Doctor Who.  What an incredible season.  We are just waiting for the Doctor Who post-fourth season special episodes BluRay to release and then we will be effectively all caught up.  We have a lot of catching up to do with Torchwood now, though, and we have not yet even started the Sarah Jane Chronicles.

Liesl actually went to sleep at a quarter till ten tonight!  This is the earliest that she has fallen asleep in weeks.  It is a miracle.  Finally we might be able to get just a little sleep.  Hopefully this is telling that she sleep issues really have been ear ache related.

Liesl did not sleep through the night last night but she has been worse so we might be seeing improvement.  No real improvement is due for at least forty-eight hours so we really should not be seeing anything yet.

This morning I started the day by walking to Jamba Juice to pick up the Wednesday special $1 oatmeal and bringing breakfast home for Dominica.  I got oatmeal for myself and a ColdBuster juice and headed to the office.

I walked to work.  Nothing too exciting to report.  The big news today is that Apple is announcing the iPad.  Big whoop.  I’m not sure who cares but certainly not me.  Just a big iPhone and the iPhone wasn’t very interesting so this sure isn’t.

For lunch today, John and I drove out to Waffle House which is about five miles away from the office.  Originally several people were going to go with us but everyone decided that they didn’t want to go.  We are troopers, though, and wanted to get our weekly supply of butter.

I got home on the late side from work and Dominica and I decided that we wanted more oatmeal so I walked over to Jamba Juice again and picked up more oatmeal and a pineapple smoothie for me.  Then I brought it back home and we ate dinner while watching Doctor Who.

We got to bed around eleven tonight.  Liesl went to sleep pretty early tonight.  Fingers crossed that tonight will be a good night.  She needs good sleep to be able to heal.  We all need some sleep around here.