September 9, 2010: Liesl Learns to Play Catch

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.

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