Sheep Guarding Llama

Monday.  Work during the day.

This evening, Liesl, Luciana, and I went out on a Pokewalk into the greenway and went an extra long way.  We explored past Josey into the areas that we have never gone to before.  We went far enough that we found another playground hidden way out there.  There was no one there, so the girls played there for a while.  It was a nice find.

Dominica made dinner while we walked back from the new playground.  The girls got to find a lot of Pokemon given the distance that we went.

Tonight Dominica and I finished watching season two of the Shanara Chronicles.  Our overall take was that the second season wasn’t bad, but was not

Sunday.  Slept in late this morning.  Our Lord of the Rings movie marathon went late and wore me out last night.  But we made it through all three now.  Liesl really enjoyed them.  Not nearly as much as the Harry Potter movies, but a lot.

Last night, Dominica completed Dragon Age 2, which she has been playing for a while.  And now she has started playing the third in the series, Dragon Age Inquisition, which I have not even had a chance to play, yet.

Saturday. I got up around seven thirty this morning.  I got up and went to the office and did some work before anyone else got up.

Dominica got up not too much after me and went straight for the Steam machine so that she could play Dragon Age 2 today.  She got started first thing in the morning and played for nearly the entire day.

The girls got up and spent the morning with their iPads hanging out together in our bedroom.  We’ve had a lot of family time the last couple of days, so they were ready for some quiet time on their own.

This afternoon, Dominica and I watched Assassin’s Creed, which is the movie based on the video game.  It was, okay.  Worth sitting through, but nothing special.  Certainly not on par with the story telling or production value of the video game.

Liesl played Skyrim for a while this afternoon.  Luciana played some Octodad, Red Ball 4, and finally The Sims 4.

Then this evening we did our family movie night.  We watched both parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  That’s five hours of movies, so ended up taking us until half past midnight.  Such good movies, the girls really enjoyed them.

Friday. It was a busy morning as one person was out of the office today and we just let someone go yesterday so I was helping to cover the shortfall and that kept the morning pretty busy.

The Certificate of Occupancy for our house in Peekskill was issued late this morning after a morning scramble of getting the house unlocked for ConEd to get the power turned back on.  That should be the last real barrier to selling the house.  The buyers are doing an inspection tomorrow and seeing if they want us to clean it out or if they will just take it as it is.  Fingers crossed.  We really want to get this wrapped up.

The girls slept in late, then got right into school.  Dominica did that with them for a few hours but we talked and decided to wrap up school on the early side today and get right into some family time.  It has been a busy, stressful week and we figured that this was just a good idea.  Plus we don’t know how long we are going to have HBO Go, so we need to use our chance to see the movies that we want to see.

So in the late afternoon we settled down and finished the last half of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that we had started last night, and then we watched Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince which we had just finished reading two nights ago.

For dinner, Dominica decided to just make a cake.

After our second movie was finished, Luciana decided that she had had enough of the movies and did not want to watch anymore at night time, because they are a bit intense, and she wanted to save the last ones for tomorrow instead.  But she still wanted to read; so we settled in around seven thirty and I read until half past midnight.  We are now sixteen chapters into Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Luciana asked to sleep in our room last night because she didn’t want to “stop family day” by having to go sleep in their own room.  So the girls stayed with us.  It was a really fun day, getting to spend nearly the entire day together as a family all bundled up in blankets on the Ikea couch in our bedroom.

We will probably finish the Harry Potter movies tomorrow, because we want to be absolutely sure that we get through them all before they are not available to us any more or it will be a big pain.  We own them all on BluRay, but we don’t have a BluRay player anymore (and have not for many years) nor do we know where any of our BluRays are stored (a natural thing to happen when you don’t have a player for a very long time.)

One of the things that has been awesome is going through these movies and both girls constantly pointing out how the movies are so short, so cut, and so modified from the books.  They have been paying unbelievably close attention as we read the books and are acutely aware of every, single discrepancy that happens in the movies.  Luciana especially is appalled by the movies’ lack of accuracy and completeness.  There are so many scenes and events that she wanted to see and they are just gone.

We have spent a lot of time talking about all of the bits that get missed and it is really evident just how enthralled they are with our reading time and how engaged they are with the stories.  It shows how important that time is.  Luciana says how much she prefers the reading time because she gets to “watch all of the story in her head.”

Thursday. No word today from my filing with the Texas wage board for my lack of salary yet.  I was really hopeful that they would reach out this morning, but I have never dealt with anything like this so have no realistic idea how long it will take before they respond, and even less idea how long it will take before anything practical happens.

I got a nasty note from the company trying not to pay my salary, though, and they said to stop discussing the lack of pay with them.  So that removed any last qualms I had about following the Texas Payday instructions of filing the report with Homeland Security.  They had recommended Tuesday, when I had spoken to them on the phone, that I file with Homeland Security which handles Immigration and Border Control to let them know what was going on and to flag them trying to leave the country. I hadn’t wanted to jump right to that, but it seemed reasonable; it is just a report and immigration can make what they want of it.  But I tried to reach them all day yesterday and they refused to respond and then sent a nasty gram today about not wanting to hear any more about their refusal to pay.  So, today I filed the report.  I called and called trying to talk to them about it, I can’t help it if they’ve decided that they have no interest in working it out.

Had a long work day today, had to let someone go who has been not showing up to work when scheduled a lot; and works from home so the number of excuses that there are for this aren’t many.  But now there is dealing with that to do; and it means that there is more work to cover.

Our house in Peekskill finally got inspected today and would have passed right away except that there was no power.  As it turns out, our renters turned off the power before they moved out and were not paying their final power bills.  So the power company, not knowing what to do, shut off the power to the house yesterday.  So, between the inspector taking two weeks to get to our house instead of two days like it is supposed to be, and with the renters screwing us over on the power, we couldn’t get our certificate of occupancy cleared.  But the inspector said that everything else was fine, including the idiotic placement of the carbon monoxide detectors, and that if we can get the power on, he will pass the house.  So Dominica dealt with getting the power turned back on today and they are, in theory, going to turn it on tomorrow.

We watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban this evening together as a family.  We had so much fun and the girls were so into it that we went ahead and started watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  We finished that and gave an attempt at Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Halfway through our final movie, Luciana decided that she had had enough movies for the day and that she wanted to save more for tomorrow.  But she wanted to do our Harry Potter reading right away.  But the girls needed to take a shower, too.

So we talked them into taking a shower and I sat in the bathroom on the floor reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to them in the shower and then reading to them in bed.  We ended up getting through six chapters tonight before everyone turned in.  It was a fun night.

We are trying to read the final Harry Potter novel as quickly as possible, because we want to get as far into the book as possible before we start watching the movies which might only be available to us for a few more days.  We have nearly managed to finish reading the entire series before going to the movies.