Sheep Guarding Llama

I was up at six thirty again this morning.  Unlike yesterday, no one woke up while I was getting ready and I left the house at a quarter till eight and no one else was even awake yet.  This is the earliest that I will have physically made it into the Irving office yet.

It was overcast but moderately warm on my walk over to the office.  Manny picked up bagels just minutes before I arrived which was great.  Nice to have bagels right as you arrive at the office.  And Monday is a holiday too so bagels and a three day weekend!  Who could ask for more.

I managed to finally get SGL back up to date today.  That was no small task.  I have more availability to work on it during the day now and things have settled down a lot more so, fingers crossed, it should stay roughly up to date from this point forward.

Today, on my way walking home from lunch going back to the office, I got to meet two of our neighbours whose homes were completely destroyed by the burst pipes in our building this weekend.  I got to get a tour of the damage and the story as to what happened.

Apparently, we were not the only people who had called to report that the pipes had frozen (we had called on Saturday to let them know that the pipes were likely frozen and that we knew that because the washing machines had frozen – they didn’t respond to us telling them that the pipes were frozen until Monday – after the apartments were destroyed.)  One of the guys in a destroyed apartment had called to tell them that water was beginning to leak but no maintenance was deployed – likely because the call came through during the Cowboys game and no one was going to go fix a leak during a Cowboys game in Irving.  So there was clear negligence with having had a full day’s warning and not even investigating in the least and then having actual water leaking and ignoring the emergency!

The apartments in that part of the building had to be condemned by the city of Irving because the apartment building was attempting to force the residents to remain and live in the destroyed apartments (ceilings gone, walls destroyed, no carpeting, no electric, floors under water, no furniture, etc., etc.  The residents were told that the apartment takes no responsibility for what is in the apartments and told them to call their own insurance companies!  We have to call our own now to let them know that there is fraud underway at our complex.

The apartment is refusing to provide any housing whatsoever.  They continue to advertise for new people to move in but claim that there are no apartments for the people whose apartments have been destroyed and even told them that just because they were condemned did not mean that they could get out of their leases and that the apartment was under no obligation to provide housing to its lessees!

The apartment company did offer to let people out of their leases if, and only if, they were out immediately (where are they going to go?) and if they signed a non-disclosure agreement!  And the apartment management is not accepting calls from the displaced residents and are acting like they are not at fault, that this was not complete negligence and that they are not actively and willingly engaged in illegal activity now!  So we are turning everyone away from Tuscan Villas now and have informed my office, which is the closed business to the apartments, to warn everyone off from staying there.

So we are incredibly thankful that we only signed a six month lease and that there is nothing in our apartment.  We will certainly be leaving at the end of six months.  We miss New York a bit now where the state attorney general would have already responded to a situation like this.

Back to work for another busy day.  There is so much to be done. I am going to burn out soon.

Dominica was really stressed today when I got home.  Liesl and Oreo have really been wearing her out.  Not having furniture, a television or anything at all is not helping the situation.

Liesl kept us up really late tonight.  We are getting exhausted trying to keep up with her schedule and me going to work at New York hours.  It is a really tough combination.

Dominica had to spend a lot of the evening in our bedroom with Liesl while I worked in the living room on my homework for RIT.  I have a lot of work that is due and I need to get it done.

Once Liesl finally fell asleep and my work for today was done Dominica ran out to go to the grocery store as there is no other time to really do it.

It was around one in the morning by the time that we finally managed to get off to sleep.

Another awesome day in North Texas.  Sun was up and bright and it was a nice, warm walk to the office.   I was actually up quite early this morning.  I started working from home at six thirty and put in almost three hours before going in to the office around nine after getting my coffee and walking Oreo.  Dominica and Liesl were just up as I was leaving.

I was doing some searching for other things today and noticed that I had an article picked up by Enterprise Storage Forum: RAID Levels Explained.  The same article was picked up by Enterprise IT Planet too.  Another article, Virtualization: An In-Depth Overview was picked up by Small Business Computing.  It is neat seeing that a lot of publications think that I am worth reprinting.  Of course, I don’t get paid for each one, my publisher owns the rights during the republishing period, but it is still encouraging and a nice compliment.  I wish that the told me when they did it so that I could link to them though!

Kind of a busier day at the office today.  Since coming to Texas things have been far busier than they were in New York because I am filling my day with training now that I was not doing previously.  Before coming to the Irving office I was not even aware of who the new people on my team were so I was completely out of the loop.  Now I am right in the thick of things and am tuned in to all of the goings on at the office.

For lunch today I went over to the Chaat Cafe.  The meal was cheap and the food wasn’t bad but it definitely was quite far from what we normally consider to be Indian food.  There was no one visibly Indian working at the restaurant and the food was kind of what you would expect from Indian food prepared in Texas.  Sort of Indian food like but bland and toned way down for the Texan palette.  Not very impressive.  We will probably eat there from time to time but we are not nearly as excited as we were before when we thought that we had real Indian food right in our parking lot.

Back to the office after lunch.  It is overcast today but still pretty warm.  Quite comfortable for being outside without a jacket.

I ended up working relatively late tonight.  Nothing exciting to report.  I walked back to the apartment and we spent the evening in.  We both kind of felt like going out to eat but neither really wanted to go through the effort.  So we just stayed in and had veggie cold cut sandwiches.

Liesl and Oreo are both struggling with the adjustment to living in Texas.  Likely the constant upheaval has contributed quite a bit to them being restless and sleep schedules being all screwed up and everything.  So staying in and getting sleep whenever possible is good.

Liesl actually fell asleep decently early tonight for the first time in probably a week.  Pheww.  We got some quiet time.  I worked from my laptop while Dominica watched HGTV.  Then it was off to bed at a reasonable hour.  Oreo had snuck away and went to bed at like seven in the evening.

Pretty normal day today.  Not too much really to report.  Got up and worked from home a little bit this morning and then walked to the office.  I can’t get over being able to walk to the office.  This is great.  Fifty degrees in January and walking distance to the office.  Make my readers jealous today: check.

The other advantage of walking to the office is being able to carry in my own coffee too.  Good coffee from home instead of the burnt ick that the office has in the little snack area.  Eww.  I’ve been carrying a “to go” coffee container to and from the office every day to be as green as possible.  I need my SpiceWorks thermal mug but it is in storage back in New York still.  This would be the perfect place to use it.  It is very handy that Dominica has the house stocked with “to go” coffee supplies though.  Very easy to make and take coffee every morning.

I worked until after one before taking lunch.  Dominica wanted Thai for lunch so she called in an order to Blu Ginger and I walked over there to pick it up and took it back to the apartment for us to eat there.  On the walk from the restaurant to the apartment some maniac New York transplant driver almost ran me over on my street (inside joke.)  But luckily I was able to run away quickly enough.

I ended up being in the office pretty late today.  With the move to Texas we don’t tend to get stuck as late as we used to but there was some stuff going on today and I just ended up staying late.

I got home and we decided to go out to IHOP tonight to use our free dinner coupons that we had received after the issue that we had last week down in Le Marque, Texas.  It took us a little bit of work to figure out how to get to the IHOP even after we had seen it from the road because it is on a side road but the drive around looking for it turned out to be really fruitful as there were a large number of restaurants and shops hiding on this side road that we got to drive by and check out.

Dinner was good.  We didn’t have any meal to modify to really test out the IHOP as the specials that we had wanted are no longer available but we did enjoy our dinner.  While we were at dinner, Liesl did her very first colouring with crayons!  She thought that that was great fun.  She held a red crayon in her right hand and a green one in her left and attempted to scribble on her placemat.

We also wrote Liesl’s name down for her in crayon and told her that it was her name.  She pointed to it and then pointed to herself several times.  She clearly grasped the idea that the word was her name!  She clapped and clapped after that.  This is a major milestone.

After dinner we stopped by Super Walmart that is right next door there by the highway and Dominica did some really quick grocery shopping while I waited in the car with Liesl and Oreo who had both fallen asleep.  I did some work from my BlackBerry while waiting for Dominica to finish her shopping.

We got home and I had to sign in to the office and do some quick work and then I got some time with Liesl already asleep to actually do some real work.  I did some work moving a Windows 2008 R2 Server around behind the new Vyatta router that I built over the weekend and deployed certificate services in the hopes of getting a PKI infrastructure set up that I can use to back the Vyatta router to do VPNs.  Should be pretty cool once I get it working.

It is Monday and it is back to work for me.  We woke up a little on the late side today and the sun was already up.  Not too big of a deal as I worked all day yesterday.  It isn’t like a Monday for normal people where they are recovering from a weekend of partying or slacking off or whatever and sleeping in late means skipping some amount of work.  I work all weekend so getting a little bit of a break on Monday morning can be pretty important in keeping me functional after a long Sunday.

Apparently, though, Dominica’s mobile phone’s clock skewed rather dramatically while its battery was dead and she was under the impression that it was actually the middle of the afternoon when we got out of bed rather than just fifteen minutes later than usual in the morning.  So while I was casually logging in to the office and getting ready to walk over to the office itself she was freaking out thinking that it was incredibly late and that I had already missed half of the work day!

It was not until I started trying to make lunch plans that she began to figure out that maybe the time was not what she thought that it was.  LOL.  I am going to guess that the change of timezones has affected her a bit more than she realized.  I definitely feel the change of timezones on a daily basis.  Just being off by one hour is noticeable – especially when I continue to work and function on Eastern time but everything around me is on Central time.

I walked to work once I was ready.  Now, finally, the weather is really awesome.  Over fifty degrees today!  This is great.  it is the second week of January and already I don’t need a jacket to walk over to the office.  This is what living in Texas is all about.

At lunch I walked back home and Dominica and I had sandwiches.  Being able to walk back and forth is amazingly cost effective!  It is healthy too.  Getting two round trip walks in every day is not a huge amount of exercise but it is more than i would normally get.

I returned to the office after lunch and was only there for maybe five minutes when Dominica called to tell me that the fire alarms were going off at the apartment building again and that Oreo was freaking out and that she was unable to take care of both Liesl and Oreo with the alarms going off.  While we were on the phone they went off again.  So I told my boss that some flooding was happening again and that I needed to get home and back home I went having not even settled in to work yet.

I talked to the fire department, who I had seen arrive as I was leaving the office, and they said that today it was not our pipes bursting from the freeze but instead it was a carpetter (anyone know the proper word there?) who accidentally knocked a sprinkler head off and caused the fire suppression system to unload onto the second floor flooding the building yet again.  Great.

Luckily (for us that is) no water made it to our apartment and things are fine for us.  Honestly, though, considering how little we have in our apartment it does seem as though it might not have been better if this would have happened to us.  You can just imagine how the call to our insurance company might have gone:

Us: “We’ve had a flood and everything that we own is destroyed.”
Insurance Company: “Okay, so what was ruined.”
Us: “Well, our living room chair.”
Insurance Company: “We have you listed as having an inflatable arm chair in leopard print?”
Us: “That’s correct, we would like it replaced.”
Insurance Company: “Just to be sure that we are on the same page here.  This is a plastic chair?  Have you tried wiping it off yet?”
Us: “Oh wait, oh yeah.  You can just dry it off!  Nevermind.”

So I was home during the afternoon in case there was any further issue with the alarms. Oreo really can’t handle being in the apartment with alarms going off. He gets so scared. Fortunately there were no further alarms for the rest of the day.

This evening we drove out to Dominica’s aunt and uncle’s house in Arlington.  They have some spare furniture for us that we are going to get to use in our incredibly empty apartment.  We picked up two bar stools and a dining room chair in addition to some kitchen flatware items like plates.  Thus far we have just been living off of disposable dishes and utensils that we have been washing and reusing (a la Scott & Andy in Pittsburgh circa 2000.)

We visited for about an hour but it was rather late so we could not stay for long.  On the way back to Irving, which seems to take possible half an hour, we stopped at the same Waffle House that we stopped at the last time that we were there and had a very late dinner.

I discovered the joys of pecan pie heated on the grill and smothered in melted butter tonight.  Holy cow is that good!

After getting home, Liesl did not feel like going to bed at all and, as she has become accustomed to doing, she kept us up until around midnight when she finally fell asleep.  We are really getting exhausted because of her new schedule.  The shift of timezones has not worked out in our favour at all.  Liesl used to go to bed early and get up early which is pretty good for my work schedule.  But now we have shifted by an hour one way and she has shifted an hour the other way and we are getting no sleep 🙁

Back to work tomorrow and hopefully no additional flooding issues at the apartment.  We are excited to get to sit down now while we eat.  That will make for a nice change of pace.

This morning we made an attempt, after I did my early morning work, to go out to IHOP for a nice, late breakfast but made it only out on to MacArthur before I was called and turned back and had to work.  We should have known better than to attempt to go out to eat on the first Sunday after the freeze was over.  What were we thinking.

I am working all day today, of course, I am still doing the regular Sunday coverage so I put in a full Sunday of work.

The weather turned warmer last night and today the pipes that had frozen during the crazy freeze that we had last week began to thaw and burst.  All over Irving, and presumably Texas, today buildings began to flood.  Our apartment building was no exception.

Luckily for us none of the pipes directly above our apartment had frozen, but down at the far end of our hallway – the part that I walk through on my way to the office – was not so lucky.

We did not realize what had happened.  It was late morning and I was just taking a shower when the fire alarms went off.  At first Dominica yelled at me for taking too long of a shower and setting off the alarms but there was no steam anywhere – not even the mirror was fogged up – so that make no sense.  We have a tiny water heater so you can’t take a long shower anyway.  Ten minutes tops unless you want a cold one.  I can keep my good books in the bathroom as it never gets humid enough in there to even wrinkle the pages.  So me setting off the alarm seemed rather unlikely.

Dominica thought that she heard the alarm going off outside of our apartment as well but before we could really check it had shut off.  Oreo, of course, was going into a panic because of the alarms so I pretty much had to take him straight outside for an extended walk.  He was terrified of returning to the apartment at all.

While we were out we found the fire truck along side our building and the waterfall pouring from the end of the building closest to the office.  I talked to the firemen and they said that the pipes above the third floor had ruptured sending a veritable waterfall crashing through the apartments.  I can only imagine how much damage there was on the inside considering the cascade flowing off of the balconies.  The lawn around the building was flooded and water was streaming down towards MacArthur Boulevard.  There were people in the hallways all wet and someone standing, soaked, out on the sidewalk in his pajamas.  Anyone who’s apartment was in line with that water lost everything.  Many apartments were completely destroyed.

We are very thankful that our apartment was spared.  The alarms went off several more times throughout the afternoon as the fire department had to return a few times.  I am not sure if similar situations happened in further portions of the building or not but it seems likely.

For dinner we decided to get some French Provincial again so Dominica ordered online and I walked over to pick it up.  Yummy.