After yesterday’s cooling tropical depression we have a hot and humid day today.  Not so hot but so humid.  It was very uncomfortable just driving the Mazda over to the office.

On the way into the office I discovered the tallest fire ant mound that I have ever seen right at the entrance to the office.  These fire ants are quite tenacious and will show up in the weirdest places.  They must have a massive nest underneath our grass in front of the building.

After working for a little bit I drove John to the garage to drop off his car to have some work done today.  Then back to the office.  It was a bit of a drive.  Much farther than I had anticipated.  Nice excuse to escape from the office.

For lunch today it was over to Rockfish where, today, I became the mayor on FourSquare.  I am not the mayor of Rockfish and La Cima.  Taco Bell will be mine soon as well.  Panera cannot be too far behind.

Then it was back over to the garage with John to pick up his car.  Right next door to the shop was a Mexican snow cone restaurant (yes, a Mexican restaurant that makes breakfast tacos and snow cones – go figure) so we decided that it would be just wrong to not try it out.  So we went over and got snow cones.  They were pretty good.  I got a guava flavoured one.  They had easily sixty or more snow cone flavours including dill pickle, three types of apple, two types of bubblegum, etc.  Pretty crazy.  They even had one special snow cone that came covered in pickles and some other odd things.

After lunch and the drop off I went to the apartment to deliver Dominica her lunch from Rockfish.  I then hung out at the house for little while as I had a call and few things to attend to before returning to the office.

It was a short afternoon at work that really seemed to just fly past me.  I worked really late too and did not even really notice.  It was almost seven thirty by the time that I made it home.

Liesl is addicted to watching the Dora the Explorer spinoff show Diego.  She was watching that with Dominica when I got home.

Tonight we started playing catch with Liesl.  Really it is more of playing “throw” because she doesn’t even make an attempt at catching anything but she does love to throw stuff.  She was doing really, really well too!

Once she got into throwing things she started looking for other items to throw.  We figured out that if we said, “You cant through that, it is hard and you will hurt mommy.”, that Liesl would start to cry.  I’m pretty sure that she was thinking that she had hurt mommy and she was upset because she did not know what she had done.  So we had to refrain from saying that.

So we started focusing on the idea that it was okay to throw soft things and not okay to throw hard things.  Liesl started grabbing all of her toys and rubbing them against her face to see if they were hard or soft!  It was amazing her learn this new concept right there on the spot.  She totally understood and was exploring the concept of the items’ surfaces.

We pretty much skipped dinner tonight.  I just ate a leftover burrito from Taco Bell the other day and I did not have that until very late at night.

Liesl went to bed at a much more reasonable time tonight – just a little after ten thirty.  That is a good bedtime for her and I hope that we can keep her to going to bed sometime around there.  We need to be able to get some sleep too.

Tonight Dominica and I did some looking into homes in the area to see what was available and what the price ranges were.  We were amazed to find that there are a large number of homes on the market that would cost us less to own than we are currently paying in rent – even after taking into account the taxes.  We knew that homes in Texas were inexpensive but this is much less expensive than we had been thinking.  Dominica is pretty sure that our lease is up on February 1st so we need to figure out what we are doing pretty quickly to have a hope of being able to get into a house by then.

We had been feeling like we had lots and lots of time to worry about where we were going to be living when our lease was up but, in reality, we have almost no time at all.  One advantage to a house would be that we would no longer need to maintain a storage unit in addition to the apartment cost.  That’s almost a hundred dollars a month that we lose that could be going into a mortgage.  We are also feeling the crunch in terms of space.  I need a real office (I’m working out of the bedroom right now) and we always have guests who need their own space as well plus we have a house-worth of furniture in storage that would be nice to have out and usable.

So we are seriously considering the idea of buying a small, inexpensive house in Las Colinas.  Of course, we have to convince the bank to give us a second mortgage when we already have one mortgage up in Peekskill.  But my guess is that that will not be all that hard.  I also need to talk to the bank about refinancing options as we could potentially save a lot of money simply by refinancing the house in Peekskill.  There is even a chance that I could take it from a thirty year to a twenty year mortgage which would be fantastic.

Tomorrow morning dad is heading off to Ohio for the weekend.

I got up this morning unaware that a tropical depression slash hurricane was expected to be pounding the metroplex.  I had gone to bed with the weather being completely normal.  I had spoken to a friend in Austin yesterday before leaving work and he had been saying that they had gotten four inches of rain yesterday but I really did not think very much of it.

When I looked out the windows this morning, it was pouring.  And I mean pouring.  It was torrential.  Quite literally, this is what a torrent is.

I drove to work and was completely drenched by the time that I reached the front of the parking lot.  The lot is quite large and you always have to walk quite a long way to your car.  I was seriously wet.  Then, just in front of the office, there was a massive stream flowing through the parking lot with no way to get across it.  So I jumped the best that I could but still managed to completely soak both feet.  It is going to be a long day, I can tell.

All morning it was freezing cold in the office because I could never dry out.  My feet were wet all day.  A lot of people did not make it to work and those that did were very late as they fought traffic that was moving so slowly all over the metroplex.  Accidents everywhere.

My lunchtime there was already significant flooding in the Dallas area with police using helicopters to rescue people stranded by the floods.  The rain had let up some so I ran to Taco Bell and picked up lunch for the family and brought it back to the apartment to eat.

It continued to rain all afternoon.  I worked late today not leaving the office until six thirty which is when our dinner reservations at La Cima were for.  Oops.  We did what we could to get over there but we ended up eating at more like seven thirty.  It worked out that I was working late, though, as Liesl was still asleep until just as I was leaving the office.

When we got to La Cima we learned that tornadoes had touched down very near by at the corner of Irving and Mockingbird and had destroyed a warehouse there.  There was a ton of flooding all over and the Trinity River was close to breaking its banks which would be disastrous.

The drive to La Cima down Riverside Drive was pretty amazing.  This was the second heaviest flooding I have ever seen – the worst being when the riving in Binghamton broke its banks and the whole region was wiped out several years ago.  This was very similar though but without the obvious devastation.  There were whole trees underwater.  The park along Riverside was just gone.  The buildings in the park were just rooftops.

From the dining room at La Cima, the Skyline Room, there was  a really good view of the flooding and I could see all over Irving and Las Colinas that there was a lot of ponds and rivers where there had not been any previously.  It was amazing to be able to look out and see a flood happening in real time.

We had our regular, Wednesday evening pasta night tonight.  Brian Watson joined us, or we joined him – he was at the bar hours ahead of us since we were running extremely late.  Tonight was shrimp cream, but a different shrimp cream than we usually get.  It was almost a vodka sauce tonight.  It was quite good and I was glad for a change of pace, even if just a minor one.  Every little big helps.

The wine flight tonight was really something special.  It was Tuscan wines with a pinot grigio that I like but was not crazy about but then a Santa Cristina Sangiovese and a Principe Corsini Don Tommaso Chianti that were simple unbelievable.  It was the best flight that I have had yet at La Cima.

On our drive home from La Cima, we swung over to the post office to send out some mail and then, on our way back past the club, Dominica and I saw our first, real, live, in the wild armadillo!  That was very exciting.  We have seen them in the zoo, of course, as everyone has.  But it was really neat seeing one actually just running around on the side of the road.  At first I thought that it was a possum but realized that it was shaped differently and armored when we got closer.  It was much, much larger than we had thought that an armadillo would have been.

After we came home, Liesl went into her room and watched Diego while Dominica and I watched a combination of Rick Steve’s Europe and House Hunters International.  I ended up working from my laptop and there was a lot to do so Dominica was up until around two in the morning and it was pushing three in the morning when I was finally able to take Oreo out for his last walk and get to bed myself.

We had a really restless night, though, as Liesl was up by three thirty and a few times after that and finally around four thirty we decided that she needed to come into bed with us as she was just unable to sleep.  She did not do much better sleeping in our bed, though, and so no one got much of any sleep tonight at all, including poor, old Oreo.

Back to work.  The weekend had to end sometime.  I sure did not want to pull myself out of bed this morning when I got up.  I was a bit late as well.

At lunch today I rushed home and managed to sneak in about one more hour on Awakening.  I am very close to the end and my goal is to complete the game this evening.  I want it done and out of the way   It has been really nice having a few days to forget most everything else and get stuck into the DAO world.  I am pretty sure that once I complete it that Dominica is going to get back into playing through her second game again.  She is already pretty far through DAO for her second time.  She is much more of a “play it again” person than me.  I really like to play a game through, very thoroughly, and get really in to it one time but I nearly never consider going through a game twice.  King’s Quest being a notable exception there – I’ve probably played through the original three times at least.

After work I came home and Liesl was still asleep, which has gotten to be pretty common these days.  She used to go to sleep for her afternoon nap around eleven thirty.  Now she doesn’t fall asleep until after two – or even after three.  So she is very tired and still napping when I get home from work.  This is good for me because I get to spend lots of time with her at lunch but it is bad because she stays up much later than we want to and her sleep is all weird which does not seem to be good for her.

It did give me a chance to get right into Dragon Age: Origins Awakening when I got in the door and I played it straight for about two hours and managed to complete it!  Eighteen and a half hours in three days and the game is done.  It was very good and I was quite happy with how the ending played out.  They did a good job and I like how things ended for my character.  I really feel that they did an excellent job of making my character really be true to himself even if the ending was somewhat melancholy.

As soon as the game was done it was time for the biweekly conference call that I do on Tuesday nights.  It was just a short one this week, though, and only lasted about forty-five minutes.

We managed to get off to bed at a semi-reasonable time tonight.

Today is Labor Day and I have the day off.  Whoo hoo for a three day weekend.  The family slept in late and basically took the day off to do absolutely nothing all day.  No shopping, no traveling, no nothing.  Time to just zone out.

My big project, continuing from yesterday, was playing Dragon Age: Origins Awakening which is continuing to be really good.  The expansion is definitely very buggy in comparison to the main game but my game is playing better than Dominica’s did as there have been several bug fixes released since she played through the expansion pack.  Dominica is planning to play the expansion pack again, though, because she was not happy with the outcome of the first time that she played it and she wants to have better success playing it a second time.

It was great having an entire day with just nothing at all to do.  Of course, it wasn’t completely nothing but it was a good approximation.  There were some issue that came up that demanded my attention but they were few and far between.

We were very lazy today and neither of us felt like going anywhere so we decided that since it was a holiday that it would be good to just order in from Domino’s and go all out.  Liesl loves when pizza gets delivered and does her “happy pizza dance.”

I managed to make it through the bulk of Awakenings today.  I was probably about fifteen hours in by the end of the day.  I am far enough along that I was wondering around the game pretty extensively trying to figure out what I might have missed and trying to tie up any loose ends that might exist.  I don’t want to miss very much and am trying to be as thorough as is reasonable.  Dominica was not that thorough and was quite disappointed.  Awakenings is much less forgiving than the main DAO title was and if you don’t make good decisions, bad things can happen!

It was a very nice, very relaxing day.  We had a nice time just hanging out together as a family and doing as little as possible.

We got up at five this morning to see Aunt Gayle and Gwen on to the road.  They were up very early and managed to get out of the door by seven after five.  That will put them up in Kentucky, their driving goal for today, in very good time.  Liesl even got up and came out to see them off.  She loves having company.  She wishes that they could stay.

We all went right back to bed and slept in nice and late today.  Huzzah for holiday weekends.

Once we got up I drove to Panera and got breakfast lunch.  I was trying to get breakfast but, for some odd reason, they decided to not serve breakfast as late as they normally do on a holiday weekend.  But we managed to get leftover suffles.  Yum.

Today’s project is to finally complete my game of Dragon Age: Origins.  I got DaO for Christmas but did not get to play it for quite some time.  Long before I got a chance to start playing it, Dominica played it all the way through, then played the expansion, then started going through it a second time!  Then I got to play it but never managed to quite complete it.  I got stuck at the final, massive battle and went so long without getting a chance to pick it up again that I was so out of practice that I felt that I could not make it through the final battle.  So Dominica said that she would do that for me.

I ended up spending a bit of time working with Brian on an OSX server today.  That was pretty cool as I have not had a chance to work on OSX’ server edition previously nor have I had a chance to play with Snow Leopard, the latest release of OSX, so it was a good learning experience for me.

Dominica was able to complete the final battle pretty easily – I did have a very powerful party, I was just out of practice with the controls.  Once she completed the battle I went on and finished the remaining game elements.  Overall the game was awesome.  The amount of story delivered in the eighty-two hours that it took to play through the game was truly amazing.  The Dragon Age franchise is definitely pushing the envelope in terms of video game story telling.

The ending of the game was not a let down and it hinted at exciting new chapters in the game to come in the future.  We already know that DaO2 is slated for release in March and, of course, Dominica will not allow us to wait at all for that.  I am sure that we will have it pre-ordered and will pick it up on release day.

It only took about forty-five minutes to wrap up my DaO game.  Then I popped in Dragon Age: Origins Awakenings and kicked off playing through that.  I managed to get several hours into Awakenings this afternoon which was nice.  I have not started a new game in quite some time.  Awakenings is really a continuation of the first game and is not a stand-alone title but an extremely large expansion to DaO.

I managed to get deep into the storyline already today – which is easier to do as there is really just one storyline and it feeds off of your decisions, choices and accomplishments in the first “game”.  There aren’t six different characters to choose from, each with their own life story to get into.  This dives straight in doing a great job of taking over where the original game left off.  Anyone who plays the first game really needs to play this expansion as there is tons of great stuff in here.

It was a very relaxing day.  I am extremely glad that I got time to relax and game for a while.  So seldom that I manage to pull that off.  Liesl spent a lot of the day either sitting on Dominica or my laps or just playing with her toys in the living room.  Oreo spent the day on the sofa right beside me snuggled up.  It was very sweet.

After I couldn’t take playing Awakening any more we watched G.I. Joe, the new big-budget movie remake of the 1980s cartoon.  It was awful, as you would imagine that it would be.  Dominica actually liked it.  I was less than impressed.  Now, to its credit, I did not watch the cartoon as a child, ever, and had no idea about the characters and which parts were cool nods to the old television cartoon so I am sure that there was a lot of cool stuff that I did not catch.  Still it was an extremely weak movie with very little going for it.

I have tomorrow off from work.  We have no plans whatsoever tomorrow so most likely I will dive into Awakening and see how far I can get.  It is not a full-blown game and I want to get it wrapped up as quickly as possible.  Then I will be able to get back to Oblivion.  I try my best to just focus on one game at a time, or two at most.  I learned some years ago that if I start a lot of different games at the same time that I will just lose interest because I don’t get deep enough into any one of them.  So I try really hard to focus on just one and complete it before moving on to the next now.  Or maybe two, so that I have one in Liesl’s room (Oblivion) and one in the living room (likely going back to Fable I: Lost Chapters) so that I can play depending on which television is available for my use.

I had to get up at a quarter till seven this morning so that I could get logged in and do some morning work.  Pretty normal for a Saturday for me.  I put in a few hours before anyone else got up which worked out pretty well.

The weather was really nice again today.  My family is really fortunate that they came down this weekend.  They managed to avoid the incredible heat and get to see the DFW at its best.

I ended up having just tons of work that needed my attention today and got very little free time during the day.  Late in the morning, everyone went down to the pool to swim while I watched the dogs and worked.  I was planning to wrap some stuff up and head on down to the pool myself but just before I was able to do so Liesl was brought up because she was exhausted.  So Liesl slept and I worked and watched her and the dogs for several more hours.

At least the day turned out to be very productive.  I got just tons of work done.  And Liesl got a nice nap and the dogs did not have to be lonely.

Dominica, Gayle and Gwen came up from swimming around three thirty.  We visited for a while and then everyone showered and got ready to go to La Cima for our six o’clock dinner reservations.  Even when we have plenty of time it always seems like it is a rush to get ready and to get out of the door.

Dinner was excellent.  There was a wedding at the club tonight so we dined in the Lakeside Room which is neat because it has views of our apartment and my office.  This was Dominica’s first time ever having dinner in Lakeside.  Nicki and I ate there once previously.  It makes a nice change from the Skyline Dining Room where we normally eat.

After dinner we headed back to the apartment and turned in early.  Aunt Gayle and Gwen are hoping to be on the road very early tomorrow and want to be up around four in the morning which is pretty crazy.  I was the first to go to bed, however, as Liesl was upset and not feeling well and needed me to stay with her or else she would cry a lot.  The upside is that I was able to go to bed nice and early and get some real sleep for a change.

As seems to always happen, my Friday morning conference call was canceled without any announcement.  It would be really handy to know these things before I plan my mornings around them.

This morning I worked from home.  Dominica had a doctor’s appointment to see about getting health care coverage so I stayed home to take care of Liesl.  We had a lot of good time to just hang out together.  It was nice being the stay at home parent for a change.

Dominica was starving when she got home from her physical so we went over to the club for lunch.  It is not very often that we are able to go to La Cima as a family so that was a really nice treat.  We made it just in time to be able to get the lunch buffet.  This was only Dominica’s second time being able to go for the buffet herself.  Liesl had a really good time.  She likes being able to get in, see everyone and eat quickly.  She also seems to like being there during daylight so that she can really see everything.

Liesl is really into spotting airplanes.  Living right by two airports gives her pretty much constant access to a sky full or jets taking off and landing.  Every time that we go for a walk she sees several and always points them out.  She gets very excited and can often see them before we do.  Up at the club she gets a really good view of them from very high up and loves to watch them from the windows.

Today was a very quiet day at the office with the long weekend coming up.  I didn’t get to leave early today, though, as I had a few items that lasted late into the evening.

Aunt Gayle and Gwen arrived around six or so.  I left the office when I could and met them out taking a walk.  I had been dropped off at the office after lunch so had no car and was on foot.  After I met up with them I took them down to the ponds on Las Colinas Boulevard and we took Boo Boo on a long walk down through there.  It was great weather for a long walk.

After our walk I took them back to the apartment which they had not been to yet.  We ordered in Chinese food for dinner and we put on the new Star Trek film tha twas recently released to Netflix On Demand.

Liesl slept in with us tonight.  She likes it when we have company because she gets to sleep in mommy and daddy’s room.  Oreo does not like that, though, because it means that he has to sleep at our feet or on the floor or else Liesl is liable to kick him during the night.

This morning when I left for work Liesl called out “I Love You” as I headed out the door.  She is so sweet.

Very little going on today.  I’ve been feeling pretty exhausted all week.  Some more interviews today.

After work we went out to do some shopping.  We hit the storage unit to drop things off from cleaning around the house.  From there we went to McDonald’s for dinner.  We discovered that Liesl loves McDonald’s Filet-o-fish sandwiches and playing in the McDonald’s playground.  She had great fun playing on the jungle gym.

We also went to Kroger and did our grocery shopping.  It was a busy evening.

At home we just spent the evening cleaning and preparing for our guests tomorrow.

This morning Datamation published my article on The Differences Between Managing Engineers and Support Professionals, one of my article series on IT management that I write for them.

For some reason I was really exhausted today.  I ended up sleeping in late and then working from home for just a little big this morning before heading into the office.  I got in around nine thirty.

No interviews for me today so I am using the day to catch up on the “normal work” – ho hum.  Around ten thirty I ran out and picked up coffee for the team from Panera Bread.  Traditionally everyone on the team seems to drink Starbucks but since being down in Texas I have made several runs to Panera for their light roast, which is very different from what you get at Starbucks, and several hard core Starbucks fans have made a point of telling me how much they love Panera’s coffee, that they now drink it regularly and how it had never occurred to them to even try it previously.

I am always surprised because I think of Panera as a premier coffee destination (along with McDonald’s McCafe and Tim Horton’s) where most of my friends would choose to go for coffee naturally should they be out looking for some and not brewing their own at home.  With their free and easy to use WiFi Internet access, wide range of food options and casual atmosphere that makes reading and working easy to do I am surprised that more people do not use them all of the time.

This evening Dominica and I had originally planned to go to La Cima for pasta night but we were pretty worn out after I got home and decided against it.  We figured that it would be best to just stay in instead.

I can’t believe that August is over already.  This year has been flying past us.  We have now been in Texas for almost nine months which is very hard to believe.  We have been in Texas longer than we lived in North Brunswick, I think.  In several weeks we will have been in Texas as long as we were in Peekskill before finding out that we were moving to Texas!  Now that puts it into some perspective.

I was really tired this morning and overslept a bit.  It was a rush to get in to work today.  Today there were several more interviews in my week long interview marathon.

Not much news today.   Busy day but nothing too interesting.

I came home  a little early so that we could get up to La Cima for our dinner reservations.  Tonight is the last evening of August and we have to use our “Plus Membership Benefits” tonight or lose them.  We had a lot of benefits to use during the month of August and we were struggling to get up to the club enough to get all of our benefits!

Our reservations were for six which is perfect because it means that Liesl has only just woken up from her afternoon nap in time to go to dinner.  Liesl has been napping later and later recently and has shifted from napping during my lunch break to not going to sleep until after I normally would go back to work which is better for me getting to see her during the day and better for going out to dinner.

We had a good dinner tonight.  I opted for all kinds of food that I do not normally eat including salmon and cucumber tartar for my appetizer and the shrimp and crab cioppino for my main meal.  Very healthy.  The cioppino was a lobster broth and very tasty.  My father would love it, I think.

I was very wise tonight and got my dessert to go.  That made for a more appropriately sized meal for me.

Liesl did really well at dinner tonight too.  She is getting more and more mature and getting used to how to behave when she is at the club.  We have also learned more of what to feed her and how to pace the evening.  It is very encouraging to see how well she does eating in a fancy restaurant all of the time though.  It is very good training for her.

The cutest thing is to watch how well Liesl does with her napkin.  She keeps it in her lap just like she is supposed to do and after almost every bite of food she brings it up and wipes her mouth – just like an adult. She is so proper and elegant.  It is truly adorable.

I needed to be in to the office early this morning as I have some errands that need to be run during lunch today so I wanted to get in and get as much squared away as possible so that I would have extra free time.

I got to the office and discovered that I am involved in some serious interviewing this week.  That caught me by surprise.  It has been a while since I have done solid interviewing.  This week is looking like it might be a bit of a marathon.

I had a busy morning and then had to run into downtown Dallas to run an errand.  That took much longer than necessary due to the atrocious parking situation that downtown has.  I hate having to park (or really drive) anywhere down there.  Dallas is not big enough to warrant the parking headache that it has.

My errand was much faster than I had planned on so I was able to go home and see Dominica and Liesl for lunch and eat at the apartment before going back to the office for the afternoon interviews.  It is nice doing interviews as it really breaks up my work life giving me something out of the ordinary to do.

After work, Dominica managed to get the latest episode of Doctor Who, “The Waters of Mars”, to play now on Netflix so we watched that.  We are nearly caught up at this point.  Just waiting for the last two episodes to get released to Netflix.

We all slept in this morning.  Way too much because tomorrow I need to be up early and it is going to be very hard if I let me weekend schedule skew too much.

Today was a mix of productivity with family time.  I got to play with Liesl a lot and we all spent a bit of time just relaxing.

I spent a bit of time working on a BASH / cURL script on my laptop while we watched some Netflix.  Yesterday, Dominica and I watched two episodes of Doctor Who from the latest episodes being released to Netflix.  There is one episode that has been released but does not appear to be working so we are hoping that they get that fixed soon.

This evening we watched the movie Camp which is a movie from, I believe, 2003 and was going to be, I thought, a parody of camp movies but it was actually serious and pretty decent.

Very little to report today.  Have to be up early tomorrow.

Top Ten Failed McDonald’s Products.  Some of these are quite funny.  I especially like the Jason Alexander commercial, boy does that take me back.  I used to watch that commercial and would sometimes get the McDLT.  I always wondered what happened to it.  It was especially interesting that it still exists today, just called the Big and Tasty (a.k.a. the Big and Nasty.)  What is most funny is… what is the difference between the different McDonald’s burgers?  Except for the Big Mac, I really can’t tell them apart.

It is a nice, quiet Saturday at home.  I needed some down time and while I am still quite busy today at least I got some time without people needing my immediate attention for pretty much the entire day.  We all slept in a bit this morning not getting up until around nine.

My first task this morning was wrapping up an article that I had been working on and getting it submitted.  I’m not too sure that it will be accepted but at least I turned something in.  My schedule has been so crazy that I have not been able to write anything for a very long time.  I am trying hard to get back into the swing of writing on a regular basis.  Although for quite some time there was a billing issue around my writing and so I was not anxious to submit anything new until that was resolved anyway.  So the timing was not all that bad, in reality.

Overall I was pretty productive today.  I got a lot of stuff done and got quite a bit of time to hang out with the family.  Liesl and I played a lot today.

We spent a bit of time this afternoon just relaxing in the living room.  I worked hard all morning and decided that I needed to just relax with the family.  Liesl spent a lot of time sitting on my lap on the sofa with Oreo snuggled up next to me.

Liesl has a new game that has just started over the last few days.  Dominica likes to sit in the section of the sofa that is right by the window.  The moment that Dominica gets up and leaves the room Liesl takes off at an all out sprint to get to the chair and leaps up onto it and lies down like she has been there forever before Dominica can make it back.  This has been going on for a few days and it is completely hilarious.

We watched the Hindi film Singh is Kinng tonight.  It was cute, a bit hard to follow at first.  I never quite understood how the beginning of the movie tied in to the later bits.  For the most part I followed it but there were some references at the beginning that I just could not piece together.  But I asked friends and they were confused as well, so it wasn’t just Dominica and I who were unclear as to what was going on.  But the movie was cute and enjoyable.

Another nice day in the mid-nineties.  I can handle this.  I was pretty tired this morning and slept in a little late, which is fine as my Fridays start off with a conference call that I just do from home since it is early in the morning and there is no point to my being in the office prior to the call.

I ended up having so many little things going on this morning that I just worked from home until lunch.  That worked out quite well, actually, and I got to see Liesl a lot today.  Dominica made an early lunch which I ate and then went into the office.  I walked today, it seemed warm out but was not as warm as yesterday and the walk was quite nice.

Work was exceptionally slow today which was great.  On a Friday, no less.  How cool is that?

I got to leave work at a nice time and came home for a little bit before it was time to get ready to go out to dinner at La Cima.  Dominica and Liesl ran out to the store before we went to dinner as well.

It is a busy Friday night, being the last Friday of the month, and it was hard to get in to La Cima at all let alone at the time that we had wanted.  So our reservations were for eight which is very late for little Liesl.  She has been napping quite late and staying up pretty late at night recently, though, so we might be okay.

I checked in with FourSquare tonight at La Cima and earned my first Mayorship.  We knew that that had to happen pretty quickly.  For those who don’t use Foursquare, that won’t mean anything.

Dinner was super cheap tonight.  We ate sensibly getting just salads and dinner.  Dominica’s dinner was free as it is her birthday month and we had a fifty dollar gift certificate to use tonight so we paid almost nothing for our dinner tonight which was very cool.  We decided to splurge and got the BBQ shrimp with grits too to split which is very tasty.  Liesl got mac and cheese and started yelling “mac and cheese” with a big grin on her face over and over again which was adorable.

Liesl is, without a doubt, the center of attention at La Cima.  Everyone comes over to see her many times.  She has her own fan club.  She adores all of the attention although she does get shy from time to time.  Mostly she is just having a great time.

We came home and Liesl stayed up for about an hour watching Dora.  Dominica did some cleaning and I worked on writing an article and doing some last minute work for the office.  We ended up staying up pretty late.

The weather warmed back up a bit today and we are back into the mid-nineties now.  But it is so much cooler than it has been for the last few months that it feels cool to us.  I walked to the office this morning.  I’m so glad to be walking again.  Driving that short distance just feels wrong.

Very slow day at work today.  Yay!  Came home for lunch and got a chance to hang out with the family a bit.  I’m trying hard, whenever feasible, to be home when Liesl is awake during the lunch times so that we can hang out.

I got a chance to speak to Ramona today.  She left China several days ago and has been traveling across Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which I bet is awesome.  She is now in Moscow and well connected to the rest of the world.  I bet that she is in financial shock going from a year in Yulin, where life is insanely cheap even by rural American standards, to Moscow, the most expensive city on earth having just recently surpassed Tokyo.

This evening was spent working and hanging out with Liesl.  Lot’s of stuff needing my attention and no time to relax whatsoever.  A very busy night.

Liesl was up late tonight.  We finally decided that we needed to put something on to get her to calm down and fall asleep.  So pretty late we put on a few episodes of The Suite Life On Deck and she snuggled with me on the couch to watch it.  I had my laptop and was working on a Visual Studio project so that worked pretty well.

By the time that Liesl fell asleep I was barely able to hold my eyes open.  At around eleven Dominica and I worked to get Oreo’s dog food all packed up and into the freezer.  Dominica had cooked for him today.

When I took Oreo on his final walk for the day we noticed that the sidewalk directly in front of our entrance to our building has been completely overrun by fire ants.  They not only worked their way under the main sidewalk after having set up their nest under the tree there but have now worked their way up the sidewalk and own quite a bit of space there.  We really cannot use that entrance anymore, it is too dangerous as we are likely to track them in!  They have “bubbled up” all around the sidewalk for quite some space and tonight were pouring all over the sidewalk as their went about their little ant chores.

Today was much cooler than I have had in Texas for quite a while and it feels great.  Last night was the coolest that it has been and today is not quite that cool but the whole day today was cool and not just the afternoon.  There was a lot of rain around the DFW this morning causing all kinds of traffic issues but no rain, at least none that I saw, directly hit the Las Colinas area.

I drove to work this morning but was sorry that I did.  It was cool enough that I should have just walked.  I was not confident in the weather when I left home this morning.

For lunch, Dan’s wife packed his lunch with just a letter telling him to “have lunch with the guys”, so we all took that as a sign that we were destined to eat at La Cima for lunch today.  Which we did.

The awesome thing on the lunch buffet today was the Caesar salad on the action station.  Since it was on the action station I was able to get it without the chicken.  It is rare that I can get a vegetarian option from the action station so this was a special treat today.  A larger menu than usual.  The salad was fresh sauteed vegetables with a homemade jalapeno lime Caesar dressing.  It was amazing.

I picked up a buffet lunch to go for Dominica and dropped it off for her on the way back to the office.  From the house I walked back to work.  First time walking to work in weeks.  It felt good to get back into the groove.  Starting tomorrow I plan to begin leaving the car at home again.  I really need the exercise.

When I got home from work this evening both Dominica and I were not feeling too well so decided to cancel on going to La Cima tonight even though it is our pasta night.  We are going to be at La Cima a bit coming up in the next week so little need to be highly concerned about making it tonight.  We are scheduled to be there for dinner this Friday night to celebrate Dominica’s birthday.  That will be our first Friday night at the club, I believe.  Then on Tuesday night, the last night of the month, we are sneaking in to have our monthly dinner.  So that is two large meals in the next six days plus we ate there for lunch today.

We did manage to go for a walk again this evening.  It was not as cool as last evening but still pretty nice.  We took a much longer walk tonight, maybe double what we did yesterday.  We put Liesl in her stroller and Dominica pushes her while I walk Oreo on his leash.  All of us need the fresh air and the exercise.  Oreo is very happy to be getting out and getting some walking in.  It is so hard for an old, blind Boston Terrier to get exercise.

I have tons of work to catch up on so spent much of the evening working.  Liesl and I did get a chance to spend a lot of time together this evening – mostly hanging out in Dominica and my bedroom reading books.  She would run and find a book and then run to me and sit on my lap while I read her the book.  Then she would run off to find another book.

Liesl knows tons of animals now.  We go through some books that she has not seen in a very long time and she knows cow, puppy, toucan, cat (meow meow), monkey, turtle, snake, spider, butterfly and more!  Very impressive.

I was stuck working quite late tonight.  So while I was working and after Liesl had gone to bed, Dominica drove out to Walmart to go grocery shopping.  She was gone for several hours!  She left before midnight and did not get back until after two in the morning.

As the day progressed the weather got cooler and cooler.  This is awesome.  It would appear, and I have been told, that the Texas summer is over and we are heading into steadily cooler temperatures from here on out.  Supposedly it is unlikely that we will head over the three digit mark again until next summer.  After weeks of unrelenting one hundred plus temperatures I think that hovering in the mid-nineties will be very pleasant.

Today Dominica and I started our diets.  We are attempting to just do simply calorie counting like dad did.  Dominica was trying to talk me into a more complicated “lose weight quickly” diet but I just want a slow, healthy, sustained loss.  I am very healthy now and just need to lose weight so that maybe I can qualify for health care.  That makes it tempting to harm myself by trying to lose weight very quickly (thanks American medical system!) but I am avoiding doing that.

I came home for lunch and Dominica made sandwiches, salmon and tuna salad.

After work the weather had cooled way down.  When I got home and it was below eighty degrees Dominica decided that we would go out for a walk.  So we put Liesl in her stroller and harnessed up Oreo and went out for a walk.

It was a beautiful evening.  So nice being able to just walk around outside.  The sun was low and the air was mildly warm and there was a little breeze.  We walked around the new townhouses being built near us and then down to the boulevard and along the ponds there.  It is a really nice place for an evening walk and very few people go out there so it is a lot like our own, private place to walk.

It was just a short walk tonight, maybe thirty-five minutes.  Hopefully as the weather gets cooler we can get out and do this a lot more often.

After we were back to the house I was busy working all evening.  There is a ton to be done and I have been struggling to keep up.  Tonight is the every-other week conference call that I am normally on.  It was a long one tonight running for a full two hours.

After the call I ended up staying up late until well after two in the morning working.  Dominica attempted to stay up with me but crashed before I got a chance to go to sleep.  She is going to be exhausted tomorrow for sure.  Lots of work done tonight, though.

Proof that Jay Leno is out of touch, his audience doesn’t even want to know what he is saying apparently.

I got up at seven this morning in Annapolis which is six back home in Irving.  Pretty early to be sure.  I got up, showered, got dressed, did a little work and packed up so that I would not have to worry about packing anything later today.  I don’t want to scramble at the last minute to get things packed.

I went out into the Florida room and hung out with Michelle for half an hour or so.  Then Curtis arrived, or at least popped in as he had been in the house for a while and I just didn’t realize it, and we headed into the office to work for a while.

It was a really productive day.  Lots of coffee involved and whiteboarding.  We ended up taking an extremely late lunch and heading over to Deep Creek.  Deep Creek just has awesome food.

There was not a lot of time after returning from lunch.  We worked in the office and got more done but mostly I was just on my laptop all day.  My work Blackberry is still not set up from when they forced me onto a new device so I am Blackberryless at the moment.  A bit of a pain when traveling like this because normally I would work from it in the airport.

At seven John drove me up to BWI and dropped me off for my flight.  We were there at a quarter till eight and by eight I was sitting at the bar across from the gate.  I ended up at the bar sitting next to a girl who was headed for my flight and a guy who was from Rochester, New York.  Weird.

I had plenty of time to hang out at the bar, I was over an hour early.   Better early than running to make the flight.

The girl from the bar ended up sitting across the aisle from me on our flight and the flight was pretty much empty so we were able to talk the whole flight back which helps to pass the time.  She is newly married and she and her new husband have just recently moved down to Grapevine from Western Michigan arriving just a week or two after Dominica and I moved to the area.  They have been looking for a place like La Cima and so might end up trying it out to see if they might like it.

We arrived at DFW about forty minutes early.  Dominica and Liesl picked me up and we were home before the plane was even scheduled to land.

John at the office turned me on to the latest Internet video sensation, the double rainbow video.  Now, what makes this awesome is not that the video is good, at all, but that the guy is so insanely stoned and yet still manages to make the video and then, when conscious sometime later I imagine, posts it to YouTube.  Now why would he do this?  I have no idea.  But if he hadn’t decided to expose his rainbow fetish to the world we would not have had the chance to then be blessed with the instant classic Double Rainbow Autotune Remix.  All I can say is, “whoa, so intense.”

The plan was to have the alarm go off at three o’clock this morning.  Yup, that indeed was the plan.  What actually happened was that I woke up to Liesl crying.  I said to myself, “That’s funny, Liesl doesn’t normally wake up before thee in the….. OH NO!!!!”  Yes, it was four thirty when Liesl normally wakes up and I had slept through the alarm by an hour and a half.  Craptastic.

Dominica and I were up and out of bed in a heartbeat.  It was four thirty, on the nose. She ran and grabbed Liesl and got her ready to go out the door while I started brushing my teeth and getting my last minute items packed.  It took only five minutes from waking up to being out the door and on our way to DFW.  Impressive.

We figured out a little bit more today about how to get in and out of DFW.  We were able to drop me off at the actual terminal for a change.  That really worked out well as I was able to run right in, print my boarding pass and get out to the gate.  I actually had time to watch CNN for a good fifteen minutes before boarding the early morning flight.

The flight itself went well and uneventful.  I read the latest issue of Visual Studio magazine on the flight and even fired up my laptop and ran through the entire life of the battery doing some software installation of stuff that I had downloaded and prepped while still at the house before I went to bed last night.  I am very glad that I had done that as having that stuff ready to go now worked out perfectly.  I really was able to make great use of the time that I had on the plane.

We landed in Baltimore at nine thirty in the morning.  I emailed John as I landed and he headed out to find me.  I had no checked baggage so was able to get out of the airport pretty quickly.  It was awesome to step out into the cool, sub eighty degree temperatures in Maryland.  I have not felt air this cool in a very long time.  The last few times that I have been in either Maryland or New York it has been very warm – Texas-like temperatures.

John picked me up in the yellow Corvette.  Even though he has owned it for four to six years I have never actually ridden in it.  I don’t fit very well with the firm, sport seats designed for people much smaller than myself.  It was a tight fit.

We headed right over to Old Country Buffet for breakfast.  I had not eaten a bite all morning.  John and I ate breakfast and then Michelle, her mother and the girls arrived – right as they switched over to lunch rather than breakfast.  We got a bigger table and had lunch all together.  That worked out pretty well getting two meals all in one fell swoop.

After lunch we went to the house and spent the afternoon working.  It was quite productive.  I did manage to take a shower and freshen up as well.  I had had to skip my morning shower in our panic to go from being asleep to being in the car in five minutes today.

For dinner, John and I hit the grocery store and got salmon pinwheels that looked quite tasty.  We picked up veggies and fruit and headed back to the house.

I watched Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen with the girls while John slow cooked dinner.  It ended up being more like smoked pinwheels than grilled which was awesome – it just took about two hours.  We ended up having them on hamburger buns with dijon mustard.  They were very delicious.

After Transformers 2 John and I watched the last half hour of Jennifer’s Body starring Megan Fox from the previous movie.  We were very glad that we only caught the end of the it because that movie was really awful.

We weren’t tired yet so we found that Pineapple Express was just coming on and neither of us had seen it nor knew what it was so we watched that.  Had we realized that it was a Seth Rogan movie before we selected it we probably would have just gone to bed.  But since we were already invested we watched it.  Not that it, or most of Seth’s movies, are actually “bad”, they just fail to be “good.”  The movie was boring and pointless.  It had a few funny moments but mostly was just insanely boring.

Off to bed after that.  It was getting close to midnight.  Not really that late but definitely time for some sleep.  It has been a very long day.  But fortunately I did get that extra hour of sleep this morning

Today is Dominica’s thirty second birthday!

I woke up at six this morning but went back to bed and got up at seven just in time to work.  I signed in and got everything done for the day then showered and got dressed before anyone but Liesl was awake.

Our task for the morning was to pack up the car and drive Madeline and Emily down to Buffalo, Texas to meet up with their parents and siblings so that they could head back home to Houston so that they can start school on Monday.  It has been fun having them up here in Irving for the week.  This is, by far, the longest that we have ever gotten to keep them and the longest that they have been away from their mother.

The drive down went pretty well.  We stopped at Jack in the Box for breakfast on the road.  Liesl was awake for almost the entire trip.

It was around three or four when we got back to the house.  Liesl went right to bed right away and slept for several hours.

Dominica worked on learning some administration tasks for OpenVPN and Vyatta routers this afternoon.

Once Liesl woke up we went out to Boston’s, again, for dinner.  Then we hit the YogurtZone, again, for some dessert.  Then a quick trip to Kroger’s to do some grocery shopping and back home.

The evening was spent packing and getting me ready for my flight tomorrow.  I leave very early in the morning and arrive in Maryland before ten eastern.  It is going to be a very, very early morning for me.  I am not looking forward to that at all.  I have been tired all week as it is.

I will be getting back home to Irving on Monday evening at almost midnight.

I overslept this morning.  Has anyone ever noticed that every post starts off with info on how I slept?  Why do I continue to do that?  Does anyone care?  I’m imagining not.  It is just such a convenient kick off to the blog post.

This week has been pretty light on the posts.  I’ve been tired and busy and my evenings are pretty packed with activity so I don’t have much time to write.  Nothing much has been happening though so you are not missing anything.

For lunch today the girls met up with John, Nicki and I from the office at Boston’s.  That was a nice change of pace.  It took forever, though, because we had so many people.  It probably took half an hour just to get seated!

I got stuck late at the office tonight not getting to head home until after seven.  What a long day.

After work, we had dinner at the house and then, at my suggestion, Dominica and I took the girls out to YogurtZone for frozen yogurt.  They thought that that was a great idea.  YZ has make your own frozen yogurt desserts much like a froyo buffet.  It is very good.  We had a good time doing that.  We will definitely try to take the girls there again sometime.  It makes a great family outing and is pretty decently healthy.  Way better than going out for ice cream and it is more of an “event” as well.

I did get to play maybe thirty minutes of Oblivion tonight.  Not much but I did complete one quest and made good progress on another.  Madeline tried watching me play but thought that it was pretty incredibly boring.  Emily, on the other hand, thinks that Oblivion is about the most exciting game ever to watch and prefers hanging out with me watching me play the game than watching television in the other room.

The evening was pretty busy with packing and cleaning.  Then it was off to bed as early as we could muster, which was not all that early.  I was very tired by the time that we actually turned in.  It is going to be a short night as I need to be up to work at seven tomorrow morning.  I can’t complain, though, as Jeff is scheduled to work for seventeen hours tomorrow (Saturday) which is pretty rough on top of the fact that he has been sick all week!

My flight to Maryland is all set.  I am leaving Sunday morning at five forty from DFW and flying direct to BWI.  A direct flight, I can’t remember the last time that I had one of those.  That is going to be awesome.  This is one of the least hectic trips that I will be having in a very long time.  Two days, no driving, direct flights – who could ask for more?

I got very little sleep last night and woke up at five this morning.  I tried to go back to sleep but did not manage to so I just got up around five thirty and went into the office.

I didn’t bother to bring in coffee today and instead just drank the cold leftover Panera coffee from yesterday.  It  was in a sealed bag so other than being cold, it was just fine.  No creamer, though.

The girls drove down to Mansfield this morning to spend the day with family.  That left me on my own for lunch.  John and I took advantage of the day and we went to Rockfish for lunch.

I got home a little on the early side and we had dinner at home.  Then, after dinner, Madeline, Emily and I walked over to La Madeiline to pick up patisseries for dessert.

I’m heading off to Maryland on Sunday morning to see John for two days.  I am flying out first thing on Sunday morning and returning Monday night.  We thought about having Dominica and Liesl come along but it is a short trip so they are staying behind.

Spent the evening otherwise just hanging out with the family.  Went to bed around eleven.

I have been getting in to work quite early all week.  That works out very well.  Leaving the house once Liesl is awake is so stressful for everyone.

It is much, much cooler today than it has been.  Our hot streak is finally “broken”, not that it is not hot but today we did not manage to hit triple digits by the thermometer at DFW Airport.

This morning, John and I made a run over to Panera Bread to pick up coffee for the team.  It was a nice eighty eight degrees while we were out which was awesome.  Haven’t had that in a long time.

Just as we were heading back into the office it started to rain pretty heavily.  We were completely soaked by the time that we got in.

I came home for lunch today and everyone was just getting back to the apartment after having swam all morning when I got there.  I could hear them on the stairs heading to the apartment.  They pretty much all fell asleep immediately and napped all afternoon.

This evening is both pasta night and the Young Execs club at La Cima.  So I got out of work on the early side, before six, and drove right over there on my own.  We were only able to get dinner reservations for the family at eight this evening so I am guessing that they are very busy tonight.

The Young Execs group was good.  I only hung out with them during the Happy Hour portion of the evening in the lounge.  They moved into the dining room for dinner at almost exactly the same time that Dominica, Madeline, Emily and Liesl arrived for dinner.

Brian Watson joined us for pasta night.  We had a good time and remembered to talk to La Cima about changing the pace of our dinner as Liesl doesn’t hold up well for the relaxed pace that they usual have.  The pace is appropriate for the atmosphere and they manage it carefully and well but for a twenty one month old little girl the food just doesn’t come out fast enough.

Changing the pace worked very well tonight and Liesl was quite happy all through dinner.  If we can just remember to always do this, we should be good.

The girls headed home and Brian and I stayed behind with a few people from the Young Execs group for another hour or so.

I got home and it was pretty much straight off to bed for me.

I was up and out the door at seven this morning.  Today the girls are all going into Dallas to go to the museums.  They all got up about an hour after I left for the day.

They were not able to head to the museums as early as they had hoped because Dominica got stuck working for an hour before they could leave.

Work was very busy today.  I felt the need for breakfast so around ten thirty John and I drove to Panera Bread, got breakfast and brought back coffee for the team.  The coffee was a major hit.  Most everyone in the office had no idea that Panera had good coffee and were very happy to have it.  Everyone thought that it was much better than what they were used to getting, which is usually Starbucks around here.  What is amazing is that people will drive to Panera for bagels and then to Starbucks for coffee and no one ever thought of getting everything from the same place!

Around one I came home to be with Oreo for a little while.  He can’t go all day without someone at home.  He would get quite upset if we did that to him.  I tried to work on a computer that we have sitting in the living room to get Windows XP installed but I could not find a USB stick anywhere in the house with which I could move network drivers over to the PC, so I gave up on that.

I then took an old Pentium III 1GHz DeskPro that has been sitting around the apartment for a while to see if I could get Fedora loaded on to that so that Emily could use it as a programming machine.  This little Deskpro has been with us for a long time and has moved around from one storage unit to another and moved from Geneseo to Peekskill and now to Texas – just so that I could plug it in today to find out that it was dead and would not power up at all.  Argh.  So I threw it out after messing with it long enough to determine that it was completely useless.

The girls had a good time at the museums in Dallas and were very exhausted when they finally got home mid-afternoon.  I got stuck at work pretty late this evening.

When I finally got home I tried to play some Oblivion but only managed to play for a maximum of five minutes – there were just too many interruptions to be able to do anything productive at all.

I spent what time I did have this evening working with Emily on her Python programming.  Failing to have gotten one of the computers in the living room set up for her I got her hooked up with the Acer Aspire One netbook that we have running Fedora 11.  That worked pretty well for her for Python programming.

It was a very short evening.  Everyone was pretty tired and went to bed pretty early.  Tomorrow night we are all going to La Cima.

Up and out the door nice and early.  I was to work by seven thirty.  Not so hot this morning although we are still going to top one hundred again today without a doubt.

This morning Dominica took the girls, all three of them, down to the pool to spend the morning swimming.  Everyone had a great time and Liesl was completely exhausted by the time that they got done.  She was fast, fast asleep by the time that I came home for a very late lunch.

My lunch break was late and I ended up being quite busy and spending quite a bit of time on the phone.  I was rushing to race back to the office the moment that I was able.

After work my evening was mostly spend working with Emily.  She was interested in learning to program so I showed her how to write some simple Python on CentOS Linux – in a completely command line environment.  It took a little bit before she caught on to what the excitement in programming was about but once we got rolling she got interested very quickly.

We did some very basic stuff like printing, taking input and for loops.  It didn’t take too long before we were doing stuff that she found pretty fun.  Our big project was to make a simple “Mad Libs” style application where the user put in some random details and then the computer told a story substituting details from what the user had put in.

Emily is the same age that I was when I learned to program.  She just turned nine earlier this month.  I had the advantage, though, of knowing DOS already before learning to program and not having the annoying abstractions of the graphical environments to confuse me.  I also had a lot of typing experience and could touch type at that age.  It is amazing how big of a factor having the basic command line environment and the ability to type quickly are.

Tomorrow the girls are all going into Dallas to go to the Science, Children’s and Natural History museums.  I’m sure that they will have a good time.  I will just be at work and at home taking care of Oreo while they are gone tomorrow.

First thing this morning I got up, showered and hit the road to drive down to Buffalo, Texas to meet up with Francesca and Bennie so that we could pick up Madeline and Emily from them as they are going to be staying with us for the whole week.

I made great time on the drive and I was glad to have a little down time in which to do nothing whatsoever except to listen to the radio.  I need some real drive time from time to time and often I end up going a lot time with none and then having to drive way, way too much all at once.

There was a small wildfire in Rice, Texas right on the side of the highway.  There was a ranch on fire.  Trees, fence, fields all burning.  There was so much smoke that we had a momentary “grey out” as you drove past it.

I was making a bit better time, speeds averaging eighty to ninety easily with people passing me easily doing over one hundred miles per hour, than Francesca who was having issues getting up to sixty five miles per hour.  So we ended up deciding that it would make more sense to meet farther south down at Buc-ee’s rather than in Buffalo.

I ended up driving past Buffalo, Texas right as Francesca and family arrived at Buc-ee’s.  So next time we will try to meet in between the two.  Buffalo is halfway from Dallas to Houston but we live pretty much right in Dallas but the Grices actually live way down in Galveston so the halfway point between the big cities is not actually a useful halfway point for us.

So the Grices waited about half an hour before I arrived.  We fueled up and grabbed lunch at Buc-ee’s.  I won’t do that again, though.  The line is crazy and while the food is good it is so hectic to eat there that it is quite unpleasant and there is no where to go to eat unless you go and sit in your car which is not what I wanted to do with my sub.  In the middle of the night it is fine there but during the day I will not make the mistake of going there again.  We had a really hard time getting fuel too because we sat for a good ten minutes before we realized that no one was getting fuel and that the entire fueling station area had turned into a parking lot.  None of the cars had people in them and no one was coming and going from those vehicles.  Grrrrr…

On the drive back north the girls and I stopped in at Exit 164 to hit the Dairy Queen there for Blizzards.  It is a very hot day – continuing north Texas’ almost record setting heat streak.

Dominica spent the day cleaning around the apartment.  We are in our best shape that we have been in a very long time.

It was pretty late in the day by the time that we got back to the apartment in Irving.  Liesl was very, very excited to see us.  She loves her cousins.

We spent the evening just relaxing around the apartment.  I played Oblivion for a while and Emily hung out with me watching me play.  She thought that the game was a lot of fun and enjoyed following the story aspects of it.  I am pretty far along in the game at this point but there are still short story arcs to be followed that are interesting on their own.

Francesca has been playing Fable II this past week after I told her about it when she was at our place a week or so ago.  She borrowed it from Joe and just loves it.  We knew that she would.  It is an amazing game.

I actually got to sleep in this morning, it was awesome.  I did a little work but mostly spent the morning relaxing.

We were hungry for breakfast so once I was finally up and moving I drove up the street to Panera Bread and picked up a very late breakfast for us around eleven.  Panera has some of the most excellent breakfast sandwiches around.  They also have good pastries and coffee, so you really can’t go wrong there.

We ate breakfast and I played a little Oblivion while Liesl took her afternoon nap.  Once she woke up we got ready as quickly as we could and headed on over to the Pierces’ for their anniversary part that started at four.  It was around five when we finally arrived.  I’d call it fashionably late but when you have a toddler fashionable kind of goes out the window.

Liesl had a great time at the party.  She just loves any type of party.  She was the only child there but she did very well considering.  She only got really upset once and that was when the two kitties who were there decided that playing with Liesl was a bad idea and ran away to hide from her.  She was quite upset that the cats were not interested in playing with her.

The party was awesome, a really good group of people.  We had a lot of fun hanging out.  We stayed for about four hours which was all that Liesl could handle.  She was heading towards a meltdown when we went to leave.  We made it out before she actually got upset but just barely.  We are learning the signs and learning to just pack up and go immediately when she gets tired and starts showing the signs of being unhappy.

Tomorrow I am driving down to pick up Madeline and Emily.  They are going to be staying with us for the week.  Other than that, no real plans for tomorrow.  Dominica will be home all day.

Up early again, I’ve been very good about that this week, and in to the office.  I was in by seven thirty – exceptionally good for a Friday which always means that I will be working late.

It is still hot here.  I heard from John at work that today we tied the second longest streak of temperatures being above one hundred degrees and there is no end in sight.  I’ve tried to reference this and can’t find exactly where this applies.  We are definitely on a very long streak but it appears that for the DFW as a whole (or maybe for measuring from the airport) we are high on the streak list but not to the top yet.  We have no end in sight, though, so heading towards a record of some sort is definitely a possibility.

I’m impressed that I am handling the hot weather with such casualness considering that it is a level of heat knocking most Texans off of their feet.

For lunch today John and I went out to Rockfish.  We haven’t been there is a while.  It was very good.  I got takeout for Dominica and dropped it off at the apartment for her.

After work I came home and just played a little Oblivion before heading off to an early bed time.  I’ve been going to bed very early all week.  Tomorrow I will be relaxing a bit and then heading to the Pierce’s for their anniversary party tomorrow afternoon.

In case you missed in, the US State Department took some heat for turning down a passport application as the Chinese-American applying for the passport was too yellow (or at least in the photograph.)  The State Department claimed that they meant that the photograph was skewed too yellow but there is no colour whatsoever in the picture apart from the man’s skin so on what basis the State Department had to determine what the proper amount of yellow in his skin would be is anyone’s guess.  Apparently they don’t believe that the grass is really greener in California either but Katy Perry insists that it is true.

I was in to the office very early today getting in around seven.  I’m trying to get back to this being my normal schedule.  If I can get out of the house before Liesl wakes up I get out in half of the time and she does not get all upset by my leaving.  Once she is awake going to work becomes rather traumatic.

The morning went fine.  I stayed late at work before going home for lunch today because I had a late telephone call that I needed to be on.

I had a very productive call this afternoon.  I am helping a NAS vendor understand their market.  I do a bit of market analysis these days which is pretty interesting.  It is a nice break from what I normally do.

Back to work this afternoon.  Nothing much to report.  Played a little Oblivion this evening.  Watching a little House Hunters International which gets Dominica excited about potentially moving to Europe.  So we watch them whenever possible.

Last night was pretty rough.  Liesl woke up in her room very early and was on the floor (we don’t think she fell, just got out of bed and fell asleep there) and was very unhappy.  So she came into our room and was awake for a very long time.  She was having fun reading the letters on her new Dora the Explorer pillow cover.  She knows several letters now like E, A and Y.

I probably only got three or four hours of sleep last night, at best, before getting up at five forty five this morning so that I could get ready and get into the office nice and early.  I left the apartment just before seven.  It was actually decently cool outside.

I was in the office nice and early which gave me some time to get caught up with things.  It was very warm in the office this morning, though, which was annoying.  Between the crazy hot garage and the crazy hot office it takes forever to just cool down.  It was at least an hour sitting in the office before I was comfortable.  Normally it is just five minutes.

My new Blackberry Curve 8820 arrived at the office today.  This is my first model with the joystick or touchpad instead of the trackball.  It will take me a while to get used to it.  This one is black like my Tour so that will be a bit more confusing than my older Curve.  At the moment, I have six Blackberry devices!  I have my two current ones (Tour and 8820), then I have my order Curve and Min’s 8830 Worldphone plus Liesl’s Pearl and the old style Blackberry that I keep in a drawer for no good reason.  I have no idea why I got this new one but the one big plus of it is that it shares a power adapter with my Tour so now I do not have to keep two different adapters when traveling.  That had gotten to be a really big pain.

I went home for lunch and made some phone calls.  That did not take nearly as long as I had anticipated so I got to play Oblivion for just a little bit.  Dominica made scrambled eggs, hash browns, toast and Morningstar bacon for lunch.

After work this evening it was off to pasta night at La Cima.  Liesl was in a poor mood this evening so Dominica decided that they should not go.  I would have stayed in this evening but we had a meeting at the club tonight so I needed to be there.  Maggie was driving in from Fort Worth as well.

I was running late when I got over to La Cima but Brian and Maggie were already there.  We hung out having cocktails for a while waiting for the rest of our party to arrive.  There were some awesome happy hour snacks out tonight including a tomato basil pesto whip on bread and goat cheese whip on bread and spinach puff pastry.  Yummy.

We waited about forty minutes in the lounge and eventually gave up on the people with whom we were meeting showing up.  No emails, no calls, nothing.  So we headed on in to the dining room.

Tonight’s pasta was chipotle cream.  It was very good although all of the cream sauces are very similar.  Mixing things up even with just a vodka sauce once a month would be a welcomed change.

We left La Cima at around nine thirty.  We never heard anything from the people with whom we were supposed to be meeting.  It seemed awfully strange that no one ever reached out to us in any capacity just to let us know that they could not make it.  Hopefully there has not been a car accident, which several people suggested might have happened.

Liesl was still awake when I got home.  We got to hang out for half an hour or so before she went to bed.  She is really enjoying having her own room.  She has a place to do everything on her own and her very own big girl bed.  She can come and go as she pleases but everything is sized for her.  It really helps to contain the mess in the house as well.

Pretty much as soon as Liesl went to bed I was off to sleep myself.  I was so tired at dinner that I had felt like falling asleep right there on the table.  I have no idea why I am so tired today.  It just really hit me all of a sudden at dinner.  Completely worn out.

Dominica only stayed up a little while longer than me.  Liesl is getting up earlier in the morning now that she is sleeping in her own room so staying up late is not really an option for us anymore.  Dominica is often tempted to stay up late because she can play Lego Harry Potter on the PS3 after Liesl goes to bed.  My game, Oblivion, is on the PS3 in Liesl’s room, though, so I can only play it when she is awake so my available time to play is much more limited.  That is handy, though, as it guarantees that I am not tempted to stay up all night playing it.

It seems like I can never get out of the door in the morning no matter how hard I try.  One way or another something will happen and there will be no way to escape the apartment to get to the office.  I ended up on the phone and didn’t get to the office until around ten thirty.  I did log in and work from home, of course, but it is such a problem that I can never make it out the door.  It just seems impossible.

Work wasn’t too busy today.  But before lunch Dominica called me to tell me that somehow, whilst sitting on the floor, she horribly sprained her ankle and could not stand on it.  So Liesl, who had just gotten out of the bath, was running around the house naked and in complete control on her own.  Not a good situation.

It was almost time for lunch so we figured that Dominica could wait for me to get home before we panicked about what to do with Liesl.  So Liesl was in charge for about half an hour.  Dominica was able to cajole her into letting her put a diaper onto her so it wasn’t that big of an emergency at that point.

When I got home, Dominica was still in the same shape.  I worked on her foot as it seemed like an actual sprain was unlikely.  I could feel that her Achilles tendon did not feel the way that it should.  We tried pulling on her ankle and foot to see if the joint might be having a problem.  But then I tried working on her tendon and… ta da, her tendon went back into track and instantly her foot was all better.  She went from unable to bend it at all to perfectly fine in seconds.

We watched House Hunters International and had taco salads for lunch.  It has been quite a while since Dominica made those.  She did a ton of work cleaning out our closet today too moving a lot of stuff into the dresser that was recently brought down from New York.  What a difference that is going to make.  Our closet is usable again and we can find stuff.  It had gotten crazy.  We just haven’t had enough space.

Afternoon at work was fine.  A little busy but nothing much.

Once I managed to escape the office I ran home and changed and then drove over to La Cima to meet Watson for the Tech Execs night in the lounge.  It turned out to be a really valuable evening making a lot of good contacts.

We ended up eating dinner at the club and getting home around ten thirty.

It is another very hot day in Texas.  I am sad that we missed all of the rains that came while we were in New York.  Texas summers are great when the rain is falling.  But when the sun is out it becomes rather annoying to have to do anything that involves going outside.

Off to work this morning.  Just the usual routine.  Just before I left Liesl woke up.  Last night was her very first night in her new bed!  She was very happy.  I asked her about it this morning and she said that she really liked her new bed.

Work was decently busy today but not bad.  At lunch I came home to be with Dominica and Liesl.  Liesl was so tired, though, that she had gone to bed for her nap before I had made it home.  So no Liesl visit time and no way for me to play Oblivion since it is in her bedroom.  Maybe that wasn’t the best planning.  On the way home I stopped at La Madeline and picked up lunch for us.  There is nothing to eat at home and Liesl’s nap timing meant that there was no way to hit the club today.

Back to work this afternoon and home at a pretty decent time today.  Work got really slow by the end of the day.

I came home and watched Liesl while Dominica went grocery shopping.  The house is pretty much bare and if she didn’t get food we would have been scrounging pretty hard to find a meal in the house.

While Dominica was out shopping she bought Liesl a potty!  Liesl has been wanting a potty of her own ever since she saw her cousin Garrett’s potty while they were on vacation on Lake LBJ.  She wants to be a big girl and we have had to spell the word in order to talk about it because she would get so excited if she so much as heard us say it around the house.  So we are pretty sure that she is ready to start potty training now.

I came out to the dining room where Dominica and Liesl were and I asked Liesl “Did you see what mommy bought you?”  Liesl said, “No.”  Then I pointed to the potty on the floor and Liesl looked down at it and suddenly got the most excited look on her face.  It was so adorable.  Her jaw literally dropped and she just stared for a minute before dancing all over the room.  Very, very cute.  She is quite proud to have her own potty now.

We tried doing some potty training tonight but it did not go well.  You cannot expect Liesl to be able to do it on the first day though.  Too much pressure if nothing else.

I did get a chance to play a little Oblivion tonight.  That was nice.  We got some cleaning done around the house too.  It is still a complete disaster but it was a move in the right direction.  Dominica got a chance to play her Harry Potter Lego game on her PS3 as well.  It is handy, but lonely, having dualing PS3 consoles in two different rooms.  It is great because we can each do what we want but we don’t see each other now.  It is nice for Liesl because she can run from room to room playing with someone in each room.

We managed to sleep in until eight thirty this morning.  Boy did I need that!

Once I was up and showered this morning I drove out to Panera and picked up breakfast for everyone.  After breakfast Francesca and I loaded her wash stand, which has been at our house the last couple weeks since we brought it down from New York, into her Sequoia so that she could take it back down to Houston with her.

Shortly after Francesca and the kids left the apartment, around a quarter to noon, Liesl went to bed and I hit the road to drive out to Fort Worth to pick up Oreo from his weekend vacation at Maggie’s house with the two pugs.  Unfortunately, on the way both to and from Maggie’s, I hit some serious construction and was stuck on the road for a very long time.  It more than doubled the amount of time necessary to drive between Irving and Fort Worth.

I hung out a Maggie’s for a little while, maybe as much as an hour.  We talked shop and I got to visit with the pugs.  We figured out that Maggie has the same furniture that we have.  She has the regular couch and love seat units that match our theatre seating exactly.  Very strange.

Dominica put Liesl’s bedroom together today.  Liesl’s crib, which had arrived from New York a few weeks ago but could not be assembled because Brian had been using the room and then Francesca, was converted into a toddler bed so that she can use it again.  She has not slept in it since her first birthday, or maybe earlier, back when we were living in New York in 2009.

I showed Liesl her old crib and asked her if she remembered it at all, but she said that she did not.  She thought that it was very cool having her own bed in her own room and got right onto it and checked it out and said that she was very excited but no memory of it from when we lived in New York.  That was eight months of her twenty month life ago so I guess that that is to be expected.

My plans for the afternoon, after a very long time of missing it, were to settle down on Liesl’s couch and play Oblivion.  We have the “old” Playstation 3, the one that we had in New York, hooked up as of last night in Liesl’s room.  The new one, the one that we bought in Texas, is still in the living room.  My Oblivion game was stored on the old PS3 which was in New York and then went to the Lake House for the family vacation and only just made it to our house to really use yesterday.  I am very excited.  It has just been forever since I had my game to play.  Having it is Liesl’s room means that I will not get to play it very often but maybe that is best anyway.

I loaded my saved game file and noticed that my last time playing the game was November 17, 2009.  Wow has it been a long time.  Nine months since I last got to play my game!  A few people recently had asked me how, with my busy schedule, I am able to play so many video games.  Um, what?  For nine months I haven’t even had the game which I was in the middle of playing!  I’ve been playing Oblivion as my main game since before Liesl was born!  I took a break to play Fable II and then went nine months without the console and I played Dragon Age: Origins in the mean time but three games in two years doesn’t seem like all that much to me!  Especially when Fable II is really short, DAO is moderately short and I am nowhere near halfway through Oblivion!

It was not solid play time but I did manage to squeeze in several hours on Oblivion.  I needed that.  I’ve been missing my game and the downtime that it provides for me.  I was so tired, though, that I had to drink several cups of coffee in the middle of the afternoon just to be able to keep playing without passing out on the couch.

It was great to get back into the game.  It took me a while to figure out where I was in it and to get back in to the swing of things.  I bought my second house in the game, in Skingrad, and completed several quests and kicked off my journey through the Arena.  I really appreciated having an afternoon to just veg for a little while.

Liesl spent much of the day just playing in her room while I played Oblivion.  Oreo snuggled on the couch next to me.  That left Dominica mostly alone in the living room to watch PlayOn on her own.

Once Liesl went to bed, Dominica and I watched some House Hunters International on HGTV via PlayOn for a little while before going to bed ourselves a little after eleven.

Liesl was excited about getting to sleep in her new bed.  She likes having her own room and she likes having a bed that is more her size and that is much lower to the floor.  We are hoping that this helps a lot with our sleep schedules as she has pretty much been stuck sleeping with us for the past nine months.  That makes it very hard for us to sleep when we want and means that I have a hard to managing to work in our bedroom after Liesl falls asleep as she is in there and I might wake her up.  Now I can spend the evening hanging out with her and when she falls asleep in her room I can move to the office in our own bedroom and get lots of stuff done at that point which is often when I want to be working anyway.  So this should be very good for us all around, I think.

I had to get up at seven this morning so that I could work for several hours before the family hit the road to drive from Lake LBJ up to the metroplex.  I managed to do a bit of work for the office and also to catch up a bit on SGL while we were there.

Originally I had thought that Dominica needed me to get up and be ready to be on the road as quickly as possible.  I had the impression that with me having to work in the morning that everyone would be waiting on me.  That ended up not being the case and while I was ready to leave by just after nine we actually left at more like ten thirty.

It wasn’t all that hot when loading the cars this morning but it heated up quickly and was another hot Texan summer day.  The drive went well.  We all (except Bennie who drove back to Houston earlier in the day) stopped at McDonald’s in Killeen for lunch.  Then, on the highway north, we stopped in West for gas and kolaches at the Czech Stop.  Yum.

We drove up to Arlington where there was a surprise, early 60th birthday party for Dominica’s dad.  There was quite a turnout too.  The house was packed.  Liesl had a great time playing with the kids in the back yard.  She loves being able to go outside.

The party went pretty late.  It was probably nine thirty or so before we managed to get back to the house in Las Colinas.  Madeline and Emily went with Megan for the evening for a girls’ party night.  Francesca, Garrett and Clara came to our place for the night.

Dominica, Francesca and I were up till after midnight talking.  Boy was I ready for bed when I finally fell asleep!  I was exhausted.

Tomorrow Oreo will be coming home as well.  I am planning on sleeping in a bit tomorrow.  I am way behind on sleep.  Dominica had to drive a bit of the way today as I just could not keep myself awake on as little sleep as I have been getting.

Today is a day of logistics.  Brian was up and cleaning the house around three I think.  I slept in until nearly four when I rolled out of bed, got dressed and was ready to be out the door in about five minutes.  Oreo got up and moved into the living room on the “new” couch that we just brought down from New York.  He missed that couch, I think, as he used to always lay on it when it was in the basement of the Peekskill house so that he could be near to me while I worked in the basement office.

We were on the road pretty quickly over to the airport.  Without a doubt, DFW is the worst airport ever. Having used it twice in the past couple weeks it still remains an incredible challenge just to get to your terminal even with GPS, Toll Tag and all the other tools necessary to make it is as easy as possible.  The roads are horribly labeled and confusing, tons of information that you need is not available, there is a toll (without any warning) just to drive through the airport (they call it a parking toll but we never parked – this is twice now) and there appears to be no way to get to the actual places that we need to go and “near enough” is as good as you can do.  It is absolutely terrible.  I travel a lot and never have I had to deal with an airport like this in the US, Canada, England, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Holland, etc.  I will actively avoid trying to use this airport even though I live right next to it.  The whole thing needs to be razed and a professional needs to design a working airport in its place.

I got home from the airport at around five.  It takes way too long to go to an airport that is almost walking distance from our home.  I had originally thought that I would try to go back to sleep, but I was wide awake and decided to just start working as there is so much that needs to be done.  Oreo had gotten out of bed so there were not puppy snuggles waiting for me.

It turned out to be a productive morning.  I signed right in to the office and got to work.  It was a good morning to be on extra early as today was the announcement of the unemployment numbers by the federal government so it was convenient to already be awake rather than waking up just to handle that call.  The US has lost another 131,000 jobs this month.  But mostly those were from the public sector and the private sector actually added jobs.  So the economy appears to be recovering with the government being unable to find a firm footing.

Dominica emailed to tell me that Liesl used the potty for the first time yesterday!  I can’t believe how quickly she is growing up.  Potty training already.  She is only just over twenty months old.  Ahead of schedule for that as far as I can tell.  Even before this happened, about a week ago, Dominica had said that we would be beginning potty training as soon as Liesl returned from Lake LBJ.  Liesl has been giving many of the signs that she is ready to potty train.

I ended up working from home this morning.  I was already signed in and getting stuff done and there was just too much to do, both at the office and around the house, to be able to go in this morning.  I was very productive.  I had several phone calls that I had to do today so that worked out really well.  I had been planning on spending much of the morning cleaning the house but ended up being so busy that I never really managed to do that at all.

When I left the house I looked around for Oreo and discovered him in his kennel.  This is the very first time that I have ever seen him voluntarily use the kennel as a place to sleep.  I found it surprising that he used it since he loves the couch and it is only he and I in the house so he has no reason to be escaping anything.

I finally got a chance to take the Wii that Dominica boxed up for the Ralstons to the UPS Store during working hours and to get it shipped off to New York for them.  Surprisingly, even with insurance of $300 on that massive box, it still cost less than $40 to ship the box to New York.  Not bad at all.  So next week they will have a Nintendo Wii and tons of boring games to play.

I also ran to Target to get emergency cleaning supplies that we needed to get before Francesca and the kids come to visit us tomorrow afternoon.  Since I was over there and had not managed to eat all day and as it was one hundred and eight I decided that I needed to get some ice cream from Marble Slab Creamery.  From there I ran into the office so that I could work from there this afternoon.

Work went a little late but pretty good for a Friday evening.  As soon as it was clear that the work was done for the evening I ran back to the house.  Oreo was still in his kennel.  I didn’t close the door on him, he just felt that he should be in there I guess.  He is such a good, sweet little dog.  I had to pull open the flap for him and tell him that he could get out before he would.

Jeff had some work for me to do so I spent an hour and a half getting work done for him.  Then I was able to pack the car and get Oreo’s stuff together so that he could go on his vacation weekend to visit Maggie.

It was roughly eight forty when I was finally able to pull out of Las Colinas.  My first stop is Fort Worth to drop Oreo off with Maggie.  I stopped in just long enough to drop off my little boy.  We will see him again on Sunday afternoon.

The drive south went okay.  There was some rain for the first two hours of the drive which slowed my progress considerably as I had to drop my speed by almost fifteen miles per hour to avoid hydroplaning.

I stopped in at Taco Bell for a quick dinner.  I discovered that they now have delicious “crispy potato soft tacos” on the $.89 menu which is awesome.  Finally another vegetarian option.  Taco Bell is always veggie friendly but this is a great addition to their veggie lineup.  That will definitely make me more likely to stop in at TB as it is very delicious.

I stopped near Temple to get fuel and found myself swarmed by flying cockroaches and crickets. It was amazingly disgusting.  I’ve never had any insects get all over me like this before let alone cockroaches and their noisy kin.  I was kicking them away but still they were getting all over my legs, shirt and head – and I was in shorts so it was that much worse.  At one point one flew into my hand and got stuck in between my fingers!  All I can say is… EEEWWWWWW!

I pulled into the lake house on Lake LBJ at one twenty in the morning.  Better than expected.  I shaved forty minutes off of the GPS’ original estimate of my arrival.  I have to be up before seven in the morning.  I am going to be quite tired tomorrow after a very tired day today.

Once my office work is completed in the morning we will be on our way back up to the metroplex.