Sheep Guarding Llama

It’s Saturday, and my first day with some time away from the office. I drove down to Houston to go to a crab boil at my brother in law’s house. We will be returning to Dallas tomorrow.

Playing Nancy Drew and the Curse of the Carousel with the kids and their cousins while we are in Houston.

Happy New Years 2021 everyone. I’m just in the office working today but am starting a year of being decently dedicated to growing the vlog. I’ve gotten into the pattern and this year promises to be an interesting one. I’ll be heading down to Houston tomorrow to do some packing.

Tomorrow is a crab boil with the family for a late celebration of Dominica’s father’s birthday.

This is going to be an exciting year.

Thursday. New Year’s Eve, 2020. Time to put a nail in the coffin of what everyone agrees is the worst year in living memory. It’ll be hard for anyone later looking back on this year to really understand the mental struggles we have all had, while the death toll has not actually been that staggering, it has come at the cost of millions of lost businesses, global economic failure, lost jobs, a halt on travel, lack of social interaction, reinventing what it means to be… human really. We don’t go to restaurants, bars, clubs, events, and in many cases even school. We are super fortunate that we already worked from home and already home schooled because it really minimized the impact on us as a family, but even we are feeling it heavily – especially in being unable to see family and being unable to travel.

We started the year with travel plans, company growth plans, the kids finally having local friends who were an easy walk away that they could go see anytime, Kat visiting all the time, Rachel having moved just up the street… and by March all travel was blocked, the company was struggling to hold on as customers collapsed, the kids never get to see anyone, we didn’t see Kat for most of the year, Rachel moved to Europe and can’t return for a long time, we went around ten months without seeing the local family in Houston and we are now over a year since we’ve seen my family in New York!

To wrap up a truly awful year, we learned today that our sweet Lula, our first foster Boston Terrier, passed away. She had been having seizures and had stopped eating and drinking and her body was just shutting down, so they had to put her to sleep. It’s so sad, she was such a sweet dog and had had such a hard life. But she was so sweet and once we got her healthy always ready to play and always wanting to be with us. At least she had a few months with a good family that really loved her, but it’s so sad that she had three fosters in her last months – no stable home life to get familiar with. We had such high hopes that she had a few years of luxury dog living ahead of her once she had started getting healthy.

We started the day yesterday with open windows and today we started at thirty eight degrees and a cold rain that went on all day.

I had an eight thirty meeting this morning so had to be up and moving on the early side. It was a good meeting and if all goes well I will need to be in Connecticut for a week sometime in about a month.

No New Year’s Eve party plans for me. I suppose not for anyone, this year. Just Paul, Mia, and I at the house. Paul is addicted to homemade pizza so is making that as our NYE treat.

Tornadoes predicted for tonight in the League City area. Had to be one last thing in 2020, I guess.

I had to run over to Rachel’s old apartment today to try to fix the Internet there, but the equipment appears to not be working so there was nothing that I could do. I picked up several ancient laptops of hers that she wants me to take a look at as well. These laptops are ancient and not going to be easy for me to work on. None have working power supplies. I’m going to have to rip these all apart and get the hard drives out of them. I had been hoping that at least some of them could be sent down to Nicaragua for the team to use, but not a one of them would be worth giving to someone there even if the laptop was already there, let alone taking the effort to ship it down there!

Once I was home I set to working on a big Linux software migration project that I have scheduled.

We had pizza for dinner around seven and then watched some of The Expanse and then part one of Atlas Shrugged, which I have never actually read. If the book is anything like the movie, which felt like you were reading a book rather than watching a movie, then I get the point but it is very weak. You can really feel how it influenced the far better BioShock, though. Then some Elementary before going to bed.

The girls, and their cousins, all stayed up for midnight for once. I can’t remember the last time that they did that. Even Dominica was still up at midnight.

And with that, 2020 is done. Wrapped up. Hopefully 2021 will be a whole lot brighter than this past year has been.

Episode six of the footage that we shot while in Greece with Emily and Madeline Grice last summer is now up on YouTube. This is shot on June 22, 2019 on Kolatsos Beach at the ALmy Hotel, and then that night at the folk dancing demonstration at the Cretan Corner and then in our AirBnB house in Aptera on the Greek Island of Crete.

In the fifth installment of TakeFlight’s Grand Tour of Europe 2, we go back to the Ruins of Knossos where Dominica, Liesl, Luciana, and I visited in 2016, to tour it again with Madeline and Emily. It was hot and busy so we did not stay too long. Since we had driven to the east side of the island, we took the time to drive south into the mountains to visit the legendary cave of Zeus as well, officially known as the Psychro Cave.