Sheep Guarding Llama

I was up at a quarter till seven this morning so that I could get to work and do deployments.  I worked all morning for the office.  There is a lot going on today and it is going to be like this for a while.  I am rapidly getting more and more work handed to be at the office these days so my leisure time is going to quickly evaporate.

For breakfast this morning we ate quite a lot of delicious fruit from our Edible Arrangement that we had received.  Liesl is loving all of the fruit and she really likes her teddy bear that came with the arrangement as well.

Our new inflatable chairs arrived today as well. We are very excited to potentially have something on which to sit other than the one office chair that we practically fight over when we are both home. It isn’t even a nice office chair but just the cheapest thing that we could get.

This evening we went out to Target to do some utility shopping and to pick up more of their wine cubes which have proved to be quite the hit in our house.  We picked up a lot of things that we needed like more blankets, waste baskets, etc.

I ran into Barnes & Nobles just to get a quick glance at their IT book section but it was really weak and the prices are horrible – maybe thirty percent hire than Amazon and Amazon has no sales tax so why would I even think about doing that?

It is the final Friday of the year end financial freeze.  At midnight, eastern time, tonight the freeze ends and the busiest financial IT season begins.

The financial freeze might be ended but the deep freeze of Texas is in full swing.  It is even colder today than yesterday and boy is it cold!  It his seventeen degrees today with a windchill of just two!  I was so cold today that we decided that Dominica should drive me into the office rather than have me walk.  It is supposed to be cold like this again tomorrow but then should not be so bad by Monday when I walk back into the office so well worth having Dominica get up and drive me today.

Work is still very, very slow.  Nothing is moving until tomorrow morning when I will be quite busy.  I am still doing training stuff in the office so there is a bit to do but there is not that much pressure.  We keep telling the new people how crazy it is going to be next week but I am not sure that they really believe us.  They all started during the time just before the freeze and were not really set up and working until the freeze was on and so they have never seen even the average workload.

For lunch, two of us drove out to Firehouse Subs on MacArthur Boulevard which was awesome.  They have a really amazing hot veggie sub there that is really impressive.  I am looking forward to going back there again.

An Edible Arrangement arrived today from a friend of mine that I know through SpiceWorks.  We met at the first SpiceCorps Houston group and he was very kind to welcome us to Texas with this massive fruit basket with a teddy bear for Liesl!

Very slow evening and then Dominica came and picked me up and we went out for shopping and dinner since everyone was already in the car.  We did some grocery shopping as we needed some basic supplies.

For dinner we stopped at 7 Salsas out on MacArthur.  It was quick and tasty and very cheap.  Under twenty dollars for Dominica and I to both have fish tacos!  We are loving Texas.

Tonight I finished reading the book “The Book of Xen” about Xen virtualization.  It is a very good book and covers a lot of good material on Xen administration.

Off to bed as early as possible tonight as I have to be up very, very early in the morning to deal with deployments for the Middle East.  They are chomping at the bit to get going with new projects once the freeze ends.  I have three completely unrelated projects lined up to have me work tomorrow.  Thus it begins…

Today’s big news is that, for the first time, someone went and looked at our house in Peekskill!  This is a really big deal since no one has been looking at houses at all thus far.  Just having someone go through our house is a major accomplishment.

Of course, there wasn’t any interest in our house, but that seems like it would have been too much to ask.  The official response from the real estate agent was that the people who viewed the house were only interested in an end unit.  That, of course, begs the question as to why they were looking at middle units.  Hmmm…

I worked from home for a while this morning until my paperwork was all set for my security badge.  It is extra cold today so I don’t want to do more walking than necessary out there.

Once everything was ready for my badge I walked in to the office and spent quite a long time walking around the campus attempting to find the building where my badge was being handled.  Of course it easily tripled the amount of time that I had to be outside exposed to the elements than if I had just needed to walk from home to my own office.

I have my badge now and am able to come and go in the Irving campus which will make work a lot more easy.

Very little to report.  We are awaiting furniture for our new apartment.  Dominica ordered some inflatable chairs that we are going to test out and see how well they work.  I think that they might work out but Dominica is pretty sure that they will not.

The apartment is completely empty.  Liesl’s room has literally nothing in it except for her pack and play.  Our room has a suitcase on the floor and an air mattress, that is it.  The living room just has the one office chair that we bought so that we were not kneeling on the floor to use a laptop and Liesl’s pop up play room.  Seriously bare.

Walked to work again today.  It is getting pretty cold down here in Texas.  We were not expecting it to be quite so freezing cold and we do not have warm jackets or anything so I am walking to work with just my fleece.  Not very much for blowing winds and temperatures dipping below twenty.  I was a mite chilly when I got to the office today but not too bad.  It is supposed to be very cold tomorrow though.

For lunch, two of us from the office decided to walk up to Blu Ginger, where Dominica, Liesl and I ate last night, and have lunch there.  We offered for several people from the office to join us but no one else was keen on walking around outside I guess.

We walked all the way to the restaurant when Dominica called to say that Oreo really needed me to run back and take him out.  So we made a pitstop back at the apartment to deal with Oreo.  Then on to lunch.

I discovered that not only does Blu Ginger have an awesome lunch but it is only $8 per person including a spring roll, soup and an entree!  Now that is cheap. Try doing that in New York.  I can’t believe how much less it costs to do things here.  We were expecting housing to be cheaper but the cost of food is really amazing.

We got food to go for Dominica too.  We delivered that back to the apartment and then walked back to the office.

Once we got to the office we discovered that there was no manager on site at that time to sign me back in and even though I had a pass for the day security was not going to let me back in to the building.  Um, good planning there.  They didn’t require this yesterday and don’t do this on Wall Street or in Tribeca, not sure why they do it here.

So, with nothing else to do, I walked back home again and spent the afternoon working from home.  Didn’t really end up being all that bad.

Tomorrow my priority is definitely getting my badge activated.  I am not going to go in until that is ready to be dealt with.  I can’t be walking around in the cold getting locked out as it starts getting colder here over the next few days.

This morning was my very first time going in to the new Irving office.  It is awesome being able to walk into the office.  I have never really been able to do that before.  At least not since Pittsburgh.

The walk in only took a few minutes.  A very easy walk.  It is crazy how close we are living to work.

I had a good morning in the office.  For lunch I walked back to the apartment and had sandwiches there with Dominica, Liesl and Oreo.  I was able to spend my lunch break with Liesl and walk Oreo for Dominica so that she would not have to deal with walking Oreo with Liesl being left in the apartment.

I finally managed to deal with my immunizations for college today!  What a pain that has been.  After getting threats from health services, threats from the dean’s office, calling people and explaining the situation over and over again and then everyone acting like I am not responding to the notices even though I keep calling and calling.  It isn’t like I closed over Christmas break, they did!

After working and working to track down my records for the past few weeks and especially yesterday it finally turns out, today, that RIT decided to admit that since I was a completely distance student (like I have always been for the last three years) that obviously I don’t need to have immunization records on file.  Of course, I had asked if students who lived in countries that didn’t have those immunizations and were online students had to meet this insane requirement and had previously been told that it was a NY State requirement and of course they did.  So, obviously, that was a total lie to try to force me to provide records I cannot reasonably possess.

So after much paperwork and hustle I am not being kicked out of college for something that was not my fault and not a requirement of me at all.  RIT had been threatening to keep all of my tuition as well – a nice little scam that they have running.  Only students with enough wherewithal to really fight this process don’t lose tens of thousands of dollars to their little game.  I am really disgusted by how that entire process was handled.  I had called the health center with this information a month ago – the minute that they opened on the day that they notified me of the fake requirement – and had explained this all then and they have been giving me a runaround for a month!

I also managed to get my scholarship straightened out.  There was some serious miscommunication there and while I did lose about $1,000 I did not lose my complete scholarship.  One more thing ironed out and out of the way.  We are slowly chipping away at these things.

Weird note: The word “miscommunication” does not appear in my browser’s dictionary.  How can this be?  Isn’t this a very, very standard word?  I looked it up at Mirriam-Webster (okay, I hate all Websters dictionaries on principle but it was quick) and believe it or not, they claim that miscommunication has only been a part of the English lexicon since 1964?  Is that possible?  Anyone have an OED to verify that?

Tonight we decided to get Thai for dinner.  We walked over to the restaurant with Liesl.  It is so close it is barely a walk!  This is going to be great.  And it is warm enough that we only need to wear fleeces!  In January!  At night!

Dinner was awesome.  We went all out and had two entrees, two appetizers, Thai ice teams and even some Thai wine – which was very good.  Liesl had a great time throwing food all over the floor.  Argh.  If this had been Peekskill the bill would easily have been $120.  We got the bill and it was only $50!  I can’t believe how cheap Texas is.  This food was really excellent too.