December 3, 2012: The Girls First Trip to the Library

Today is a huge day for the Miller family.  Dominica was up before six o’clock this morning so that she could get ready and get in to her new job that started this morning at seven.  It is great that she managed to get a great new job right down the street.  It is only a few blocks away.  So she left right about seven.  I got up right after she left and showered so that I would be ready to handle working a full day, getting ready for a presentation this evening and watching Liesl and Luciana all day.  This will be quite the day for all of us.

I got set up in the office and started working before either of the girls got up.  Luciana was the first up and she came out and played either in my office or around the house quietly to herself for much of the morning before Liesl got up.  It is good to get to see her doing her personal time, I almost never get to see this.

We did pretty well today, the girls and I.  They were quiet and played together most of the day and were very good about allowing me to work when I needed to.  Because it is Monday it is decently quiet at work so getting time with them wasn’t too bad.  We had a really nice time being able to be together all day just us.  It is pretty rare that we get to do that.  They were both so good all day.

I spoke to Dominica throughout the morning.  Pretty exciting that she is at her “new job” now.  It was going pretty well this morning.  She wanted to do some testing so had me set up a VM for her to do a test deployment at home (thank goodness for Technet subscriptions and a large Drobo B800i SAN device!)  She came home at eleven for about half an hour.  Saw the girls, did the test deployment and ran back to work.  Very nice that she is able to come home so easily.  That really makes the job nice.  Everyone is really nice there too, they are putting her at ease and she has a lot of work to do lined up that is just basic “setup” work so she is very comfortable as she has a really good roadmap of work for the month of December.

I was very busy all day trying to balance the tons and tons of work that needs to be done with helping Dominica while she is at work.  Thank goodness that we got things moved and that she has Lync on her phone now, that really makes things easy.  She is able to reach me quickly all day.

Danielle’s computer died and we just cannot get it to work so she ran over to Jeremy’s and got a computer that he had there to try that one.  But that one, too, is not working.  What a pain.

As soon as Dominica got home from work I jumped in the shower and we took the kids to the Carrollton Public Library at Josey Ranch Lake where Chris and I are giving a business seminar this evening.

We got there early and took the girls around to see the library.  Liesl has been scared all day.  We are not sure why.  Maybe anxiety over going someplace new?  Maybe something having to do with going to a library and she thinks that she will be expected to read or something like that?  We aren’t really sure.  We have been talking to her all day about it and she just keeps saying that she is scared.  It might have something to do with needing to be quiet with which she has some major issues.

Once we were in the library, though, Liesl had a very good time, as did Luciana.  Dominica spent the time with them in the children’s area which was really nice.  They got to look at books, play with the toys and just relax and have a nice time.  We really like the library and it is so close to us.

Chris and I, mostly Chris, got things set up and waited.  We ended up having…. no one… show up for the seminar.  Not too surprising really.  Weird time, venue and even topic.  I was skeptical but it was worth the effort to see if it worked at all.  It didn’t, but a good learning experience and relatively inexpensive.

So we got out early and Dominica and I went to the Subway at Josey Ranch to pick up some dinner and went back home and watched more of How I Met Your Mother Season 7.  We watched until Dominica needed to go to bed, which was only five minutes after Liesl went to bed, and I went to work to get more done as there just is not enough time in the day.  I had been working from my laptop all evening but went into my office to be more productive.

I am starting to get the hang of Windows 8 and, as a power user, it really isn’t bad.  But for end users, it must be awful.  Honestly, without knowing how to use the command line, I have no idea how a normal user is supposed to even turn the computer off.  All normal options, the ones that you desperately need, are missing.  For me it is easy, because I’ve always used the command line to turn Windows machines off, so it is not all that unnatural.  But a normal user must be completely lost.

I ended up working until four in the morning.  What a long night.  I am trying to get access to my new email and it is really hard because of the way that it works.  So I tried one thing after another all evening and finally resorted to building a new SSL-Explorer server.  I haven’t used one of those in years.

So it was an exhausting night and I finally managed to get to bed at four in the morning.  That was less than ideal.  Tomorrow is going to be rough.

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