Sheep Guarding Llama

I woke up at about three thirty this morning!  Three thirty, can you believe that?  I tried going back to sleep for a little while but gave up and went down to the office so that at least I could spend my morning being productive rather than just laying in bed wishing that I could call back asleep.  This is the price that you pay for going to bed too early, I guess.

The Hudson Valley is covered in a thick frost this morning.  The cold weather is officially here.  I like the look of the world as we approach winter but once the snow starts to fly I’m going to be really, really anxious to get to Texas.

I had a lot of time to get stuff done this morning.  I got caught up on the last two days of SGL.  Definitely do not want to be falling behind here again.  It is so hard to catch up once we start down that path.  And I did some serious cleaning in the kitchen.  What a disaster the kitchen has become.  We have cardboard boxes stacked almost to the ceiling because they did not do cardboard pickup this month.  Ugh.  Not the month for that to have happened.  Stuff keeps getting shipped to the house and there is nowhere to put all of the boxes.  We literally can’t get to anything in the kitchen because of all of them.

We have our next “installment” of Torchwood Season One here on BluRay from Netflix today.  So we took the ninety minutes that it takes to make it through that entire disc.  Given BD technology it is unbelievable that they are only putting ninety minutes on a single disc.  What a waste of plastic and manufacturing resources.  Talk about living in a waste economy.

The show itself was really good, as always, although the episodes on this disc were very dark and much less happy than I like my television to be.  Hopefully this isn’t a trend.

This evening, while testing out video transfers to the house media server, I found out that Dominica has never seen Operation Petticoat which I could not believe.  So we watched that.  Definitely one of the all time cinema classics.  Such a great movie.  I don’t know how she has never seen that.  I could have sworn that we watched it together at some point.  I try to watch it every so often.  I can still remember watching it as a small child with my parents.

Very likely, when I first watched Operation Petticoat it was very likely around 1985.  Just as a big, round number as I don’t really have any clear recollection as to when I first watched it.  I could have been a bit younger but find it unlikely that I would have been much older.  At the time the movie felt quite old – something from another era.  But, in reality, it was only as much time from the time that that movie was made until the first time that I watched it as it has been time from then until now!  So the movie has doubled in age since I started watching it.  Weird.

Dominica was up and getting ready to go around six thirty this morning.  I woke up just a few minutes after her and did not really manage to get back to sleep for the rest of the morning.  I stayed in bed taking care of Liesl and Oreo – Liesl can’t be left alone or she will fall off of the bed and she needs a bottle periodically in the morning – until a quarter after eight when Dominica left to get onto the road out to Warren, New Jersey for her interview there.  She is not scheduled to be there until ten thirty but the car needed fueling and she wanted plenty of extra time in case anything went wrong considering she was driving out there in late rush hour traffic and she has to pass through Newark on her way.

Liesl and I got up as Dominica left and went down to the living room to hang out.  I did some cleaning in the dining room and got space cleared so that I could set up my laptop on the dining room table and work from there for the day.

Liesl spent the morning wanting to be held so I either had her sitting on my lap while I worked or I carried her around while I talked on the phone.  Boy were my arms tired quickly.  Liesl decided that she was going to be a no-nap baby today and stayed awake with me all day.

It was really nice getting a chance to just work from the dining room and spend the entire day with my daughter.  We had a lot of fun.  The Wiggles were on, of course, for most of the day.  I hate to do that but this really was a special occasion.  Luckily work was extremely slow today and since I had done such a good job of getting caught up on my emails yesterday I did not have any email thrashing to do today and I was able to stay on top of requests and not fall behind even while never having both hands free at any point in time.

I really did not have a chance to make any food today so my only meal was some banana nut Cheerios.  Good thing I like cereal a lot.

Dominica got back around two in the afternoon.  Liesl had just laid down for her first nap of the day just minutes before Dominica arrived.  So Dominica went straight up and took a nap at the same time as Liesl.  They woke up together around three thirty.  So, effectively, I watched Liesl and Oreo alone for seven and a half hours while working the whole time.  Not too shabby.  I call that rather impressive, really.

This afternoon I finally got my official start date in Texas.  I am officially switching from my current New York contract to my Texas contract on December 28th.  That doesn’t mean that we will not be in Texas before that date but it means that the paperwork is in motion and takes place that day.  I also found out that I am getting a raise!  not a raise enough to bring me back to my rate from 2006-2008 but a significant portion of the way back.  That raise, coupled with the tax advantages of Texas, puts us roughly at the same income that we used to have.  Sad to still be making somewhat less after four years (never a single raise, only hold steady and cuts even when getting pristine reviews) but at least it is steady work and we are close to the original rates.

As it is Friday work was slow most of the day and then picked up to “really crazy” by late afternoon.  So Dominica took care of Liesl while I worked.  Then, when worked was slowing down, we ordered in Italian from our “backup” Italian place.  We just felt like something slightly different as we have been stuck eating out or ordering in almost every meal.  The house is completely devoid of food at this point but there has been no opportunity to go grocery shopping and even if there was there hasn’t been any time to do any cooking.

We watched a few episodes of Rick Steve’s travel show on Hulu.  Good stuff.  Then, at nine thirty, I decided to call it a night.  The past several days have just been impossible and I really, really need to get some sleep or I am going to be getting sick very soon.  I can’t keep up with this kind of schedule.

It was more like ten when I finally got to bed.  Oreo came upstairs with me but Dominica and Liesl stayed up for a while longer.  Dominica ended up with insomnia and did not come to bed until early in the morning.

I was seriously exhausted this morning after working until four in the morning yesterday!  There is just so much work to be done that there isn’t enough time in the day.  Only at night when there are no requests coming in or anything is there any chance for me to even begin to get caught up with things.  I worked really hard last night and got my office email down to just seven items left in it.  Now that was an accomplishment!

To add to my exhaustion, Oreo had gone to bed with Dominica without going outside first.  So when he woke up at a quarter after five this morning it was rather an emergency to get him outside so that he could pee.  So then I was rather awake.  Of course the noise of taking him out woke up Liesl.  So she got up around a quarter till six.  So I had almost an entire hour in which I did not get any sleep.

I then fell back asleep at six and was at my desk working by eight.  So roughly four hours of sleep broken up into two two hour sessions.  Ugh.  This is going to be a long day indeed.

Liesl is very visibly feeling quite a lot better today.  She is still not completely better and there is still quite a bit of risk of her relapsing yet again but we are most definitely seeing progress and are worrying a whole lot less.

Work was slow today which was really important.  We got to spend some time with Liesl now that she is feeling a little bit better and Dominica was able to spend some time studying Linux administration so that she will be prepared for her interview tomorrow.

This afternoon Liesl came down to the office and hung out with me for a few hours so that Dominica could sit at her desk and actually work at her workstation rather than trying to do things in the living room while watching Liesl at the same time.  Impossible to get any real work done that way.

Overall it was a pretty productive day.  I was exhausted early and tried to get to bed around ten.  Dominica took Liesl upstairs and rocked her to sleep and then we both managed to get to bed around ten thirty.  But just before I actually climbed into bed, Liesl was awake again.  Dominica really needs her sleep for tomorrow as she has to be on the road around eight in the morning to get out to Warren, New Jersey for her interview.  So I got up with Liesl and we went down to the living room and hung out for a while.  Until maybe half past midnight.

Liesl and I listened to music for a while and then, when it was clear that she needed a bit more time to wind down, we watched the first episode of Rhoda which, is not a bad show, but definitely has the worst television show introduction sequence that I have ever seen.  I mean really, this is the worst one minute ever edited together for public viewing.

Watching the first episode of Rhoda I was amazed to discover that the doorman of the apartment building is the voice of Tummy Gummie and Rhoda’s little sister is none other than Marge Simpson!