Sheep Guarding Llama

It is Labor Day, here in the US.  So most of our customers are out today, which makes for a nice, relaxing, and quiet day to work.  This is nice, I like my days when I can really focus on being productive, rather than spending my day running from one customer ask to another, which isn’t efficient.  I don’t mind doing the tasks, but the time spent being interrupted and always having to watch and see what people need is frustrating.

I slept in until ten this morning, having gotten to bed so late last night.  It was enough sleep, I suppose.  I did not feel too tired all day.

Customers ended up being all but silent.  So I was able to spend basically the entire day working on highly productive, back end work that really needed to be done, but is never important enough to get my focus.

Paul has a medical procedure tomorrow, so is on basically no food for him today.  He is allowed to have candy, though, but we don’t have any in the house.  So he cooked up maple sugar candy this afternoon.

While doing loads and loads of server tasks, I was able to get several more weeks of SGL updates written today, too.

The girls did school today.  Their cousins may or may not have been in school, we don’t know, but they were definitely busy and not trying to play video games today, so it worked out that we were able to get a school day in even with it being a “holiday”.

For dinner this evening, Dominica made the delicious Mexican stew, again.  I watched a few episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I am finally on to season six and stuff is really getting good by this point in the show.

Luciana really wanted more Harry Potter tonight, so I got the girls to bed a little early and read two more chapters, three and four, of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to them in bed.  The Harry Potter books will likely be the first books (in fact, the first eight books) that I will ever have read through completely three times.  And that’s three times in print, not including the one or two times via books on CD which is how I read the later books the first time around!

I slept in until ten this morning.  Then got up and found that no one wanted to use the living room, so I set up Andromeda on Steam to see how much I could get into it today.

Liesl was very much in a being by herself mood today, so that kept her from wanting to play video games.  She likes to camp out in my bed and watch her YouTube shows from there.

I actually got a lot of video game time in today, enough that my seven in the evening I didn’t even feel like playing it any longer.  I was worn out, which is rare.  I never get that much time to play a game like that.

Luciana took another shower today and made me read another chapter (now on chapter two) of the first Harry Potter book while she was in there.  The girls have long loved me reading to them while they are in the shower.    This (starting yesterday) is the first trying it with the new shower that was just installed.

For dinner tonight, Dominica and Paul made fried tofu nuggets and broiled cheesy broccoli and squash.  It was all very good.  We got in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager while we ate.  We are very slowly working out way through that series, again.  I’m gong through Deep Space 9 much faster on my own, but I have not had a chance to see that in several days now.

I was tired and tried going to bed around eleven, but then ended up being unable to fall asleep.  So I got up around midnight and went into the office and just got down to some work (and some posting.)  I got some social media work done, which is always useful.  I got several SGL posts done, which is good as I’m feeling better and better as I work to get those caught up.  I did some database work that turned out to be, I think, very fruitful.  And then I set to doing some application work.  A very busy night, for sure.

I ended up working until nearly five thirty in the morning!  But I got a lot of critical work done that I have not been able to focus on and I am feeling much better about my backlog of tasks.  This, hopefully, is going to propel things forward quickly.

Saturday.  It’s the three day Labor Day weekend.  I slept in quite a bit this morning, didn’t get up until ten!

Once I was up, I tried getting Final Fantasy X working for Luciana, but it is so sloppy and buggy that there is no way that she would be able to play it.  So I downloaded Final Fantasy V to see if that would work for her, but it requires too fast of reading for her to handle.  She has been wanting a FF game of her own to play for a while, but finding one that she is ready for and works is not all that easy.

I grabbed a bag of carrots, some left over hummus, and settled in to play Andromeda for a while.  I got to play for a little bit, two or three hours, and Liesl came and played with me for a little of that time, until Dominica made lunch and Liesl went off somewhere to eat it.

Luciana took over the living room and played some Portal Knights this afternoon.  Which was fine, I did some writing and helped to support two of my techs doing work in Georgia.  And then I ended up doing some direct support for a customer in Utah.  So I had plenty to do, anyway.  I actually did quite a bit of work today.

I got the television back later on and played more Andromeda.  Several more hours worth, in fact.  I’m making a lot of progress.  It is definitely not a good as the original Mass Effect trilogy, but it is good so far.  I am interested to see where the story goes.

I made the girls Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for dinner.  Luciana had already eaten a quarter of a pizza for breakfast.

Tonight, before bed, Luciana asked me to start reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone again.  It has been a few months since we last read it.  So I borrowed it from the Farmer’s Branch Library and we read the first chapter together.  Liesl was not so interested and just watched one of her videos.  So this was just daddy Ciana time.

I played Andromeda until one thirty in the morning.  I completed a lot of quests today.  I would have gone to bed earlier but had about an hour in which I could not save the game where I was so had to keep playing for a bit.

It’s Friday, and boy do I need it this week.  I am worn out, things have just been way too crazy all week.  Thankfully I managed to sleep in until about nine this morning, having stayed up working until really late last night.

The girls had school today.  Their attitudes were great.  Yesterday was kind of bad and so they are on a no devices before or during school rule, now.  But they are so excited to get to five this evening and be allowed to play their new Portal Knights game.  So they were just happy as could be, wanting to be good for that.

Today was not nearly as crazy at work as the rest of the week has been.  Maybe because we are going into a long weekend and people are leaving work.  Maybe because people are burned out on the problems and just aren’t so concerned anymore.  Maybe because we’ve worked so hard to fix things that they are basically working.  I have no idea.

Once the five o’clock whistle blew, the girls came screaming through the house to turn on Portal Knight and they got right into it.  They continue to love the game.  They put in over four hours on it last night on their first evening playing, we will see how much they play today.

Everyone (except for me, of course) felt like pizza for dinner, so I ordered in Dominos for everybody.  Four pizzas for four people.  Liesl gets a thin crust onions and green peppers.  Luciana gets a hand tossed plain cheese.  Dominica gets stuffed cheesy bread.  Paul gets a thin crust pepperoni.  And I get to place the order and make myself a salad.

While waiting on other things today, I have managed to get a lot of the 2017 SGL back log taken care of.  By early evening all of the gaps throughout the entire year have been closed except for a small window from late August to early September that I am working on now.  Once that is done, only the missed days in 2018 will be left!

This past week I topped six thousand posts on SGL!  Not a shabby number.  I’ve been doing this for a long time now.  That’s enough for one post each day for 16.4 years.  But I’ve actually been doing the blogging for 18.6 years now so some days have definitely been missed.  But I’ve actually gotten a bit over 6K now, so it’s awfully close to daily and I’m still doing a little catch up yet for the last few months.

Speaking of catching up, all days in 2017 are now accounted for!  Only 2018 days still need some catching up.  But loads and loads of progress at this point.  Although boy is there a lot to catch up on in 2018.  It has been such a tough year, been a hard one to talk about, really.

Everyone went to bed early on me tonight.  I played a little Andromeda, maybe forty five minutes, just to get past one spot where Liesl and I were stuck from the other day.  She wants to play Andromeda with me tomorrow, so I did not want to go too far.  She is really good at the next part so I will just save that for her.  I was not really feeling it so much tonight, by the time that I managed to sit down and play.

It was after eleven when I finally managed to have my dinner.  I just had some microwaved veggie chicken style patties and some almonds while I played my game.

Luciana has been asking to play a Final Fantasy game.  So since the system was idle I downloaded Final Fantasy X | X-2 HD for her to try out.  It is a huge game, 36GB for the initial download.

I didn’t stay up too late tonight, but after one.  So several hours after everyone else had gone to bed.

I slept for a solid nine hours last night!  Guess I needed that.  This morning was not as bad as most have been this week.  But it was still a jump out of bed and work like crazy all day long kind of morning.  We had thirteen network outages for one client today, for example.  That’s rather a lot and keeps us way too busy dealing with stupid things rather than getting to actually be productive.  I am really happy that this is a semi-holiday weekend as I could really use the time to do some catching up this week.

Today, Steam had Portal Knights on sale.  It’s been on the wish list, but was not a game that I had thought very much about.  But since it was on sale at a pretty good reduction today, I took a peak at it and boy am I glad that I did.  Taking a closer look, this game seems like the perfect mix of things for the girls.  It has both local and network multiplayer options, which is exactly what they need, and it seems to take the best of Minecraft, which they love, and adds in adventure and Action RPG elements to make it a really involved game, plus the graphics are vastly superior to Minecraft.  It is also a fraction of the price and not made by an evil company like Minecraft, is, which really tries to hurt its customers at every turn.  Portal Knights looks amazing, so I splurged and spent the $8 to get it for them on sale.

I worked until about seven.  Then for dinner tonight it was tuna steaks with a fresh lime, ginger, garlic, and olive oil reduction that was excellent; boiled potatoes; and green beans.  It’s been about four days since I realized that Dominica must be sensitive to the carrot family as well as the onion family that we already knew, and since that time, with careful avoidance of carrots, her incredible digestive issues of the past few years have remained completely at bay.  This is a very good sign, a huge breakthrough.  We were talking to doctors about things like cat scans and sonograms and possibly having to go to Mexico for surgery.  And suddenly, with a little dietary control, there is at least a possibility that everything is okay!  It’s way too early to celebrate, but she is feeling the best that she has since we were in Africa, so this is pretty major.

The girls started playing their new Portal Knights game around dinner time and they were both so excited.  That they can play together, on the same screen, is a really big deal for them.  They like being together and have so few video games that allow for that.  They kept running in to tell me how great the game was.  Ciana told me that she was having the most fun evening ever (although she says things like this awesome.)  Still, it is a good sign.

The game is very involved and the girls were learning it at an incredible pace.  There is so much to do in it.  They are hoping that their cousins will get it, too, so that they can play online with each other, too.

Dominica and Paul went out to the Fox and Hound for some darts and pool, their usual.  It’s so nice that I don’t have to do that stuff, so not my thing.  Then they got Sonic on the way home, which is good so that I didn’t have to really see the ice cream.  I’ve avoided it for so long, now.

Since the kids were so tied up with their new video game, that meant that I neither got to hang out with them, nor that I got to play my own games, so I took the chance to do some lower priority work that needed to be done and did many hours of website maintenance work.  It was good, as it really needed to be done.  And I was able to do SGL updates while I did it, for a change.

When I put them to bed, Luciana said that this was her favourite game of all time, and she plans to spend all of her free time tomorrow after school playing it, too.

I ended up staying up till after three in the morning.  But I got a solid seven hours of web update work done, which was important.  One fewer thing to worry about.  I did loads of documentation and got a server that was heavily overburdened fixed and ready for several new workloads which are due to be moved to it very soon.  There is always so much work to do.  It is never ending.