Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I got about a full hour and a half of sleep last night.  No rest for the weary.  Karla was out of the office today, she had to do something up near Honduras so we didn’t have our usual early morning support.  I talked to Paul and had him watch things to cover for her so that I could get as much sleep as I did, but it sure wasn’t very much.

I had to be up before eight to deal with just oh so many things at work.  This week has just been insane.  No chance to relax at all.

Rachel took off around one because she had to get to work.  This is her first full week of bar-tending up in Frisco.

I worked until six thirty, then jumped in the shower.  Kat was supposed to arrive around seven for our somewhat weekly cheese tray evening party.

Tonight was a smoked salmon night.  Four kinds of smoked salmon, all with some sort of honey mustard and dill sauces.  So good.  Both girls loved the salmon, too, and ate a lot of it.  Kat also brought over a big selection of hummus and pita chips, and both girls fell in love with that, too.  It is one of Ciana’s new favourite foods.  She especially liked the roasted red pepper hummus and the garlic hummus.

Dominica also made apple dumplings tonight.  So I made an exception from my diet, my first real cheat in over a month, and had one.

They were so good, especially as my first “treat” in well over a month.  And so filling.

Went to bed early tonight, was pretty tired between the lack of sleep and all of the great food.  The girls had a really great time trying lots of new foods and hanging out with the adults doing a fancy dinner party.  The girls devoured much of the food, but neither touched a dessert!  Was in bed by eleven, likely was asleep about one minute after that.

Tuesday, and a second power outage this morning.  We actually knew about it last night, so we were much better prepared for the start of day, today.  But it was still a very long day trying to deal with all of that.  It has been a crazy week, and we are only two days into it!

After work this evening, Paul dropped me at the Trinity Mills Train Station and I took the last train of the day, the 8:10PM A-Train north to Denton downtown.  This is my first time every taking the A-Train or going north by train at all.  The ticket price is outrageous, $12 for a one way ride, but the train is clean, comfy and ridiculously easy.  And it is pretty fast.  If it was a smart price, I would want to do this all of the time.  It goes from and to the perfect locations, it would be hard to be handier.  But it does not run late at all, not even quite late enough for comfortably going out, let alone returning from going out.  So the schedule definitely needs some work.  You can’t even use it for going out to dinner.  I’m not sure who this train is for, but not for people going to Denton, that’s for sure, and that seems like a pretty foolish financial decision for Denton to make.  Denton is like Dallas’ little piece of Austin and should be a huge draw, but there is no good way to get there.

I arrived at a quarter till nine and walked west on Hickory through a charming restaurant and bar district.  I had loads of time to kill so stopped at Rusted Taco and tried their fried rockfish and grilled mahi mahi tacos.  It is Taco Tuesday, after all.  The tacos were pretty good, I ate them while I walked to the square.

Since I was so early for industrial night at the Abby Underground, this is the last one ever, I took a long walk around the Denton Square to check out what was there.  There are a lot of venues and restaurants and stuff that look really nice.  I want to spend more time in Denton exploring what there is here.

I sat on the square for a bit cooling down, it was a really hot night, and finally went to the Abby at a quarter after nine, which was still ridiculously early.  Rachel isn’t even supposed to get out of work until ten thirty at the earliest.  The bar lights were all on and I was the first person there.  Just Jaiden setting up, his co-DJ and the bartender.  So I just had a beer and chilled for a while.

The party got going around ten thirty or so.  L was there tonight, so we hung out some.  Rachel arrived around twelve fifteen.  We danced till the bar closed. This was Jaiden’s last night DJing at Abby Underground.  My understanding is that the party picks up at Andy’s across the square sometime soon.

We decided not to stay for the after party.  It’s always so late and we were not sure where it was going to be.  I was pretty happy when Rachel decided that she wasn’t in the mood to stay out that late.  She was hoping for an 80s movie back home.  So I drove her back to the house, and we watched The Lost Boys which is one of her, Dominica, and Paul’s favourite movies, but  I have never seen it.  While a classic 80s film, it’s actually pretty horrible and if you didn’t know that the stars of the movie ended up being famous actors, you would definitely think that it was some unknown B movie.