Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

This morning Liesl woke up extremely congested and really not sounding good at all.  Dominica decided right away that she needed to go see the doctor today as soon as we could get her in.  Liesl does not have a local pediatrician here in Texas yet so we decided to try out an urgent care facility instead.

I went to work to get as much done as I could before the doctor’s appointment.  Dominica went online and did some research and found a facility and talked to them and found out that we could just walk in.  So she got Liesl and herself ready to go and then drove over to the office to pick me up around ten in the morning.

The urgent care facility closest to us was over in Grapevine which was only about fifteen minutes away.  It was very easy to get there and we were able to walk right in waiting only five minutes or so.

The doctor saw right away that Liesl has an acute ear infection in her left ear.  She has minor signs of inflammation in her right ear but nothing of concern.  But the left ear is really, really bad and he is confident that that explains all of the problems that she has been having for quite some time with the irritability, sleep issues, cough, congestion and more.  While it is awful having her have a really bad ear infection it is great that it is something that we now know and something that can be addressed.

Liesl got a prescription for amoxicillin, to which we hope she is not allergic, and we were on our way in no time.  We decided that it was almost lunch time and that it would make more sense for us to just go out for lunch and to get the prescription filled rather than taking me straight back to work.  So we returned to Las Colinas and went to CVS on MacArthur Boulevard and then stopped at Taco Diner to get some lunch.

Taco Diner was pretty decent.  It is not like it sounds, it is actually a decently fancy restaurant.  It is a Mexico City style Taqueria.  Huge selection of tacos, that is for sure.  Two different fish tacos but neither in a style that I am really into but Dominica really liked them so I am sure that we will be back.  Taco Diner is part of the Mi Cocina family.

After lunch we picked up Liesl’s medicine and Dominica dropped me back at the office.  It was just noon when I got back so it worked out pretty well that really I had just taken an early lunch.  So I covered the office during the normal lunch hours.

After work I went over to Mike’s Jersey Subs on the way home and picked up dinner for myself.  I talked to Andy for a while while I was walking over to the shop and before getting dinner.  I hardly get any chance to talk to anyone now that I am down in Texas.  Being never at home makes it tough.

Liesl seemed to be in a slightly better mood tonight although it is impossible to tell.  I sat on the floor for hours and played with her and Oreo.  Oreo wanted to play fetch for the longest time.  He is really acting like a puppy tonight.

Liesl continued her new behaviour from last night and kept bringing books over to me.  Then she would hand me the book, turn around and plop down into my lap and giggle.  Then we would read the book and go through her flash cards.  Then she would get up, find the next book or flash cards, then we would do it again.

We watched some more of Doctor Who tonight.  Boy is the fourth season good.  We watched several episodes before going to bed.  Liesl actually went to bed at a halfway decent time tonight so our fingers are crossed that she is feeling a little better.