Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is another gorgeous, sunny, seventy degree plus day in Las Colinas, Texas.  It is very hard to believe that it is January.  In addition to having slight jet lag caused by the constant switching between eastern and central time we are also experiencing season lag as it feels like late spring but is actually the middle of winter.

Last night we had our first tornado warnings since moving here although we did not even see any rain let alone a tornado.  Not too far away from us, though, they were getting golf ball sized hail.

It was a very nice walk into the office this morning.  Busy morning and then the guys went to Firehouse Subs for lunch.  While there John and I discovered that they have their own, in-house Datil pepper sauce!  I am very excited about that.  Datil sauces are very hard to get outside of Florida.  Of course, Firehouse Subs is from Jacksonville, Florida so the Datil is their local pepper coming from St. Augustine.

On the way back to the office I got dropped off at home to deliver Dominica her sub that I picked up for her.  That tends to work out pretty well since we live so close.  Then I walked Oreo and hung out with Liesl for a little bit and then walked back to the office.  So today is only a three leg walking day rather than a full four.  I appear to have dropped two inch notches on my belt since moving to Texas which is awesome.  I walk everyday and have almost no desire to eat dessert which is really weird for me.

The afternoon at work was quite busy, as every day has been.  I ended up working pretty late tonight and after everyone had gone Dominica drove over and picked me up and we went out for dinner at Mi Cocina on MacArthur which is quite close to us here.  I had eaten at Mi Cocina the other day with the guys from the office and the food was really good so I was looking to try it again and Dominica has not had much opportunity to get good TexMex yet since coming to Las Colinas.

Dinner was quite good.  We really like the Americanized Mexican food there (it is nearly impossible to get true Mexican anywhere in the US, even in Texas.)  We will definitely be coming back and making this a regular stop.  We continue to be amazed by the low cost of food, even pretty fancy food, here in Texas.

After dinner we went back home and attempted to get to bed early as we are pretty tired but Liesl continues to be miserable.  She is teething horribly as four molars are trying to come in and she is having a terrible time dealing with it.

My latest article about choosing an email architecture for your business was published by Internet.com’s Datamation Magazine today: “Cloud vs. In-House: Choosing an Email Solution” so please go check it out and help support SGL and my writing career.  The article was the top headliner of the day.

Overall it was a busy day at work, as every day has been since the financial freeze has ended, but nothing too much to report.  For lunch the guys went out to Mi Cocina (which probably means “My Kitchen” but can mean “My Caboose”, which is much funnier.)  The food there was excellent.  I try the fish tacos wherever I go and these were definitely really good.  Very different from the style that we normally find.

I did, finally, manage to get most of my new employment paperwork sent in today.  Hopefully that means that I will be getting paid sometime in the not too distant future.  Hopefully, anyway.

After work, Ananth, who is in town just for the week hunting for an apartment, came over to our apartment to check the place out.  He is lucky to know tons of people in the area so that he can stop by and see real apartments with people already living in them and get first had accounts of how it has been in one place or another.

I spent most of this evening talking on the phone and hanging out with Liesl.  I talked to Andy for several hours and then talked to dad for a while as well.  Liesl spent quite a bit of time talking on the phone to her grandfather as well.  She likes to hold the phone and walk around the house talking into it.  She is getting pretty good at using it like a real phone.

Dominica has been on a book binge and spent the evening reading a novel on her Amazon Kindle.

Liesl had another of her super late nights.  She ended up staying up until around eleven thirty, I believe, and then, after we finally got her to go to bed in her pack and play in her own room, she got up around one in the morning and needed to be taken in to our room.

I had tons of stuff to do so ended up staying up until around four in the morning sitting at the little desk area in the living room.  I did get a lot of important work done, though, so it was, at least productive.

Back to work today but it is a four day work week (whatever that means, a six day work week I guess is more likely.)  It was a gorgeous, sunny day when I woke up.  This is the warmest that it has been since summer in New York.

Dominica made me my coffee and off to work I walked.  With a day like today it is really hard to believe how cold it was here just a week ago.  That does not seem feasible.  It is no wonder that everyone was so shocked by how cold it was.

Slow morning, just the usual stuff at work.  I walked back home for lunch.  Dominica cooked lunch at the apartment and I walked Oreo.  Liesl had fallen asleep just before I got home so I just ate my lunch and came back to work since she was not there to hang out with and Dominica and I couldn’t even really talk to each other for fear of waking her up.  So I figured that it would make more sense for me to get work done rather than just sitting around at home (or standing, as we have no furniture.)

It was a busy afternoon at work and it was evening before I even realized.  I am finding that my days just fly by recently.

I am on the “late Fed shift” this week which means that I need to stay at the office until around seven every evening to babysit the systems until everything closes down for the day.

Once I got home, which was quite late, we decided that we wanted to get Thai from Blu Ginger so we called over and order and I walked over to pick it up.  We are loving having them next door.  They are our new neighbourhood restaurant.  Fortunately Thai food is pretty healthy so that will work out well for us in the long run.

Liesl, lacking a house of things to do, is very clingy, especially when we are eating or working, so my usual mode of operation in the evenings is to eat while holding her which can be quite challenging when attempting to eat off of a low counter while using chopsticks on pad Thai.  I am sure honing my chopstick skills.

Our evenings have been really exhausting lately.  Liesl is refusing to go to bed, or at least to stay asleep, at night even though she is completely exhausted.  So we end up staying up hours and hours after we want to have gone to bed both because we have no way to go to bed while Liesl is still awake and also because there is so much work to do that can’t be done until she falls asleep so we don’t tend to get to sleep until an hour or two after Liesl falls asleep which is often midnight or later.

This evening Dominica helped me proof read my latest article for Datamation, the online technology magazine, so that I am ready to turn it in tomorrow.  I had been working on it a bit yesterday and the day before while we were out of town but had not had the time to sit down and really get it tweaked and ready for publication until tonight and even tonight has been pretty tough because I am so tired.  It is very hard to write coherently when you are so tired.

I also managed to get caught up on my class at RIT completely today.  I have my midterm due this weekend on Saturday evening but that is not looking to be too bad and I am hopeful that I will actually have it done during the week rather than waiting until the last second.  I already have this week’s regular work completed and have nothing backlogged so I am about five to six days ahead of the game – perfect for getting my midterm paper in ahead of time and having some time to relax this weekend.  We just passed the halfway point of the class over the weekend so I am on the long, home stretch now.  (I guess technically it is not the home stretch until the final quarter of the class, in actuality.)

We slept in a bit this morning.  It was great.  A holiday with the Canadian staff covering – how relaxing!  I’ve been doing some catching up on sleep this weekend, that is for sure.

Francesca went out somewhere and picked up breakfast tacos (this is Texas after all) and donuts (which are way more popular in Texas than any other place that I have ever seen) for breakfast for everyone.  We ate and watched the Disney channel for much of the day.

Beth came over with her daughter and hung out for several hours.  Dominica and I had been planning on hitting the road by around noon but noon came and went without any signs of us getting up off of the couches – we are really loving having a place to sit for a change!  Oreo is having a great time alternating between just hanging out in the big, open, fenced-in back yard and snuggling with me on the sofa.  He has missed having furniture like this too.  Back home in New York he would spend most evenings snuggling with someone while we watch television.

It ended up being around four in the evening before we finally got moving enough to get on to the road.  We were hungry by that point so we ended up stopping at Waffle House right around the corner from Francesca’s house to get a late lunch before really getting on to the road and facing rush hour traffic.

After lunch/dinner we drove down to Bayou Vista, a good twenty minutes or more in the wrong direction, to go to Joe and Britt’s house to pick up all of the stuff that we had to store there after Christmas that would not fit into the X3 on the drive up to Irving.  We were able to fit the rest of everything this time so Liesl will have all of her toys (that are in Texas) now and we have our camera back and a few other items including quite a bit of our laundry that we had to leave behind.

So it was around five thirty when we finally got on to the road from Bayou Vista to drive up to Irving which Google estimates as a four hours and forty five minutes – a good haul.  We hit traffic on the south side of Houston that slowed us down quite a bit, but we were doing pretty well once we were passed downtime.

Liesl ended up not sleeping so well on this trip and was awake and unhappy for two or maybe even three hours!  Ugh.  That made for a very long trip.  We did not have good food supplies for her with us and we ended up being trapped in the vast wilderness between Dallas and Houston without a bottle for her or anything that she could easily eat in the car.  Not a mistake that we are likely to make again anytime soon.

We tried stopping at Buc-ee’s, which is apparently a Texan tradition, it is a massive gas station / mini mart / country store (imagine a Sheetz, WaWa, South of the Border and Cracker Barrel all rolled up together) to see if we could find something for Liesl to eat.  Dominica ended up getting powdered creamer for coffee because the ingredients are roughly the same as Liesl’s formula!  It worked, to some degree.  Liesl drank some of it but wasn’t so thrilled with it overall.  She only drank about half of the bottle but it was better than nothing.

We got to the apartment in Las Colinas around ten thirty.  We got the car unloaded and called it a night.  Liesl was awake for at least an hour after we got back if not longer.  Dominica tried reading “Inkheart” to her but Liesl keeps grabbing the book and tearing it away from Dominica so that did not work.

Back to normal work life tomorrow.  The weather is supposed to be really amazing – as high as the mid-seventies!

I am was very, very happy to be able to really sleep in this morning.  Oreo and I snuggled as long as we could.  I had my two BlackBerrys so I just worked from them for as long as possible.  I have really been needing some extra sleep.

I am working today, as I always do on Sunday, but I am anticipating a very slow day since tomorrow is a bank holiday for the US markets.  That means that only foreign markets and FX trading is really going on this evening.

Work was slow today and I was able to work mostly from the BlackBerry and the laptop in the living room.  For breakfast/lunch, Dominica, Liesl, Francesca, Madeline, Emily, Garrett and I went out to Denny’s.

This afternoon Dominica took Madeline and Emily out to the movies to see Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeaquel and Disney’s The Princess and the Frog.  I really dislike going to the movies and did not want to leave since I had to work and Liesl was staying behind and we do not get as much time together as we used to before I was going in to the office every day so I stayed behind with Francesca and Bennie watching Liesl and Garrett.

It is great to finally be back into the habit of writing SGL updates as they happen rather than playing catch up all of the time.  I even got time today to get caught up a bit on the SpiceWorks Community too.

For dinner we went out to Mamacita’s for real Mexican food.  The food was great.  We had the fish tacos and they were definitely some of the best fish tacos that Dominica and I have ever had.  We hope that we can find some really good Mexican food in Irving.

After dinner it was back to the Grices’ house.  We were only there for a little bit when I decided that I wanted wine and there wasn’t any so Emily and I ran to Target to pick up a cube of pinot gris (the call it grigio, but only Italians are supposed to call it that.)  I found a $1 pack of Animal Planet land animal picture flash cards for Liesl as well.  She loves flash cards.  So I grabbed that for her.  Emily got a $1 flower pot of forget-me-nots.  She has never grown anything before so this is a first for her.  I can’t imagine being eight and not having grown anything.  I guess growing up on a farm changes your perspective on the world.  Gardens, planting, etc. was just a part of life.

As soon as we got back to the house, Emily and I planted her forget-me-nots.  The dehydrated soil was to be put in water and magically inflated itself.  That was really cool.  Emily and I both agrees that watching that alone was worth the $1.  Now she has a bit of waiting to do on her flowers, though.  She was expecting to have flowers tomorrow.  She is going to be pretty disappointed, I think.

I spent the evening doing some writing and drinking some Pinot Gris while everyone watched some television.  Dominica and I are really enjoying being someplace with furniture!