Sheep Guarding Llama

Our big news is that I have gotten paid today!  What a relief that is.  This is my first paycheck, other than getting paid for a single day, since we left New York in late December. Obviously we have bills piling up and we have been becoming a bit concerned that there was never going to be any money and that things were going to get really bad quite soon.

Today is Wednesday and that means that it is dollar oatmeal day at Jamba Juice.  So before work I walked over there and picked up a large Coldbuster smoothie for myself and eight oatmeals to take into the office.  I swung back to the apartment and dropped off one oatmeal for Dominica and then walked to work.  It was a little late by the time that I finally got into the office but I did not want to get myself up too early today as I am still not feeling well from my sinus infection and I need sleep in order to get better.

I came home at lunch today.  I really was not feeling all that well.  I had another call at lunch today that ate up pretty much all of my time but it looks like we have managed to line up some sponsors for SpiceCorps events which is awesome.  Getting good sponsorship seems to be key in getting good attendance and interest going.

This afternoon while I was at work Dominica went out furniture shopping.  We are just getting used furniture rather then buying new or renting.  That makes it far cheaper as we really only need it for six months.  It was too late in the day by the time that Dominica got over to the used furniture warehouse so they were not able to deliver it today but they will be delivering tomorrow.  Only one more evening without furniture.  We can not wait until we have something on which to sit!

I was really feeling bad this afternoon and decided that I needed to leave work early today.  So at four I came home.  Not a real early end for the day but it was definitely better than staying rather late which is what usually happens.

For dinner tonight we ordered Thai from Blu Ginger and I walked over to get it.  We did our best to get to bed early tonight.  I am going to stay home from work tomorrow.  Maybe being home will help me to feel better.

Still feeling a bit under the weather today.  My sinus infection is not getting any better.  I did get some sleep last night, though.

Off to work today but nothing exciting to report.  I came home for lunch today but ended up being on the phone for my entire lunch time at the house and had to run right back to the office.

This evening I worked on getting SugarCRM installed on Rackspace’s Cloud Sites.  The installation was pretty smooth.  This was my first time hooking up a database driven application on Cloud Sites and it required me to modify some system settings to get it working properly but it went well and runs great now that it is installed.

I hope to get a chance to install several different applications on the Cloud now.  It is very unfortunate that only PHP, Perl, Python and ASP.NET apps are able to run on Cloud Sites at this point.  I would really like to see Ruby on Jails and Java available on it.  If a Java container was available then I could try out LifeRay or Glassfish Web Spaces on it.

Got up early this morning, which is surprising considering what a long weekend it was.  But given all of the stuff that was done over the weekend I felt that I should probably get up early and get on the phone and check in with people to make sure that everything was working okay.  Dominica slept in for a little bit but was up pretty early as well.

Dominica ended up having a rather busy day.  She was on the phone almost all day dealing with migration wrap up stuff.  It was a good day for her overall though.  It could have been bad but was really just busy.

At lunch I came home and helped her out with a few issues that she was having and hung out with Oreo and Liesl.  I am feeling a bit under the weather today – probably from the late nights this weekend.  I have a sinus infection or a cold or something similar.  It is very hard to tell.

After work this evening I came home and Dominica was going to make dinner but I reminded her just how long of a weekend it was and what a busy day she had today and she agreed that we should probably go out to dinner.  I was in the mood for pizza so we went to Boston’s.

We went to Boston’s and I got the 32oz Shiner Bock.  I am very glad that they have a 32oz size which is a more appropriate beer size than you normally get in the US.  In Germany beer comes in a liter which is 33.8oz so this is just a tiny bit smaller.  Close enough though.

Liesl had a great time at dinner.  The manager came over to check on us and Liesl decided that the manager needed to hold her!  We were about the only people at the restaurant so the manager took Liesl and walked around with her.  All of the staff was really doting on her.  They gave her a balloon too.  The manager’s mother and daughter were the only other people eating at the restaurant so Liesl went over and hung out with them.  Liesl thought that it was a really great time.

We ate way too much food and then headed home for the evening.  Our goal for tonight is to just get to bed and to catch up on some sleep.

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.