January 12, 2019: Velvet Taco

Saturday. I was awake around seven. Dominica and Kat didn’t get done watching movies till around three in the morning.

I learned from Rodrigo last night that Mexico is in the grips of a massive fuel crisis. He was out yesterday evening just trying to find some gas for their car. He left work “early” to go try to find it, and in an evening of searching had no luck. This morning he was out driving around and got in a fuel line before six hoping to get enough gas to be able to take his daughter to school this week. It’s really bad while the government is trying to tackle corruption and fuel thefts.

I started the day doing some dishes and cleaning up around the house. Then I set up my Chromebook at the bar and caught up on MangoLassi and did some SGL catch up. Around a quarter after nine I fired up the Steam laptop to see if there was anything interesting that I might feel like playing this morning before the kids woke up. I am assuming that once they are awake that they will want to get back to Nancy Drew and see if we can’t finish the game that they have been playing.

The blinds in our bedroom broke this morning. They don’t twist open any longer. Argh. Another broken thing in this house.

I don’t know if I mentioned it yet, but a few days ago Dominica got a food dehydrator. Her sister got one for Christmas, and Dominica has been wanting one, so she had to have one. Since then, about a week ago, it has been running non-stop. We now have a massive collection of dehydrated food products. Like seriously, so much dehydrated food. The problem is that there really isn’t very much dehydrated food that I would actually want to eat. I almost always prefer regular, juicy fruit to dry fruit, for example. The biggest deal is that Dominica is now able to make seitan jerky, I am hopeful that that will turn out well.

Luciana emerged at a quarter after nine, very sad because her nose was stuffy and her throat hurt. I gave her some water and she decided that she wanted to go lay back down and see if she could sleep some more.

Dominica actually got up pretty early, before ten. She came out and we watched Brooklyn Nine Nine. We are well into the fourth season now. It is just so good.

Kat joined us after a few episodes and we switched to watching Golden Girls, until mid-afternoon. Ciana came out a little after noon and set up her slime factory in the living room. It is so hilarious how good and creative she is at making slime, and how long she has gone on loving making slime.

I managed to do a lot of catch up work on SGL today. Another great day of progress. The end is kind of in sight.

Paul has been looking for the old video game Halo for a few months and finally found it on an abandonware site today. He downloaded that and was playing that for the early part of the afternoon.

Dominica taught Kat some knitting stuff this afternoon. I think Kat now understands that she does not want to knit.

Kat went “home” to head up to Winstar around three.

After Kat left, Dominica and I got dressed and went down to Preston Hollow in Dallas to the Velvet Taco there for a date. She has never been to a Velvet Taco before and I thought that they would have stuff that she could eat.

We ended up eating around five. Dominica got the paneer taco, and the fish and chips. I got the hot tofu, and the paneer. We also split some elote and some goat cheese tater tots. All of the food was amazing.

Velvet Tacos

Dominica ended up loving all of the food at Velvet Taco. This has to be a new regular place for us. It is a little far away, but has so many things that we can eat. I especially liked the hot tofu taco!

Elote at Velvet Taco

After dinner we went for a drive to explore some Dallas city neughbourhoods. We drove down Inwood all of the way to the south side of the city and went east on Colorado and explored all the way to the Bishop Arts District. Lots of really cool stuff in Dallas that we almost never see.

Eggs, Goat Cheese, and Tator Tots at Velvet Taco

We had a really nice drive. It was fun. We had no idea of the houses that existed on Inwood. It is crazy down there.

On the way home, Dominica wanted ice cream. We stopped at Braums and got banana splits.

Banana Split at Braums

We got home and watched some Brooklyn Nine Nine. We also tried an episode of Future Man on Hulu. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t very good. Poor writing and not very funny. We will give it more of a try, but we certainly are not going to binge it and Hulu’s huge marketing push for it makes no sense. They are pushing it so hard that they were even running ads for it during the show itself, as if they didn’t know that we were already watching it! Hulu’s algorithms for ads are absolutely the worst. I would never pay to advertise on Hulu, the way that they run ads makes no sense at all, has no logical targeting and is so over the top that it likely makes you angry with the advertisers and not want their products. Frontier’s ad is so grating that it makes me almost want to cancel my existing Frontier service! And they certainly have all of the technology to know that we watching the ad over Frontier’s network already! So why spend so much money and time to just make us angry?

The girls spent the afternoon and evening playing video games with their cousins. Raft is a pretty big hit, Luciana had chosen that one to get with her Christmas Steam money. It is a survival game that you can play cooperatively online. You have to do things to survive on a raft in the ocean. Doesn’t look interesting to me, but it is a big game and it is a good one for them to be playing. Luciana and Garrett like to play it cooperatively.

Paul spent the whole day playing Halo. Dominica and I went to bed early, just after eleven.