Sheep Guarding Llama

Happy Valentines Day.  Wednesday. This is a big one for us, our “baby niece”, Francesca’s eldest child, turns eighteen today!  She was so little when she was a flower girl at our wedding.  We will be taking her to the UK as her graduation present in June.

We started the day with everyone getting breakfast down in the hotel lobby.  We are trying to make this a habit.

Today was my second day in the office in Norcross.  Had a very productive day and got to speak at a board meeting today, which went really well.

After getting home from the office this evening we had about an hour to just relax in the hotel room.  Then we went down to the lobby for happy hour to get snacks and drinks.  The place was all decorated for Valentine’s Day.  The girls thought that that was really cool.

We did the regular happy hour and were just about to head back up to the room for the evening when the hotel management invited us to stay for the Valentine’s Day activities that would start after happy hour.  They had games and prizes and stuff.  We weren’t thinking that it would be for us, with the kids, but they asked us to stay and there were not many people and the kids thought that some games would be fun, so we decided to hang around for it.

It turns out, it is a good thing that we stayed for the entertainment, there was only one other table of guests from the hotel.  Partially this was due to really bad promotions about this event.  The in-room calendars had the evening activities limited to just the normal happy hour event, so no one knew about all of this.  But they had a DJ, all kinds of decorations, party games, and so forth.  It was very nicely done.  A lot of people who work at the hotel got dressed up and participated since there were so few guests.

We ended up winning many of the games and got lots of prizes.  The girls had a fun time, although Liesl was so shy about some of the games that it made her quite upset.

It made for a fun and really nice evening and we got to know many of the people who worked at the hotel pretty well, which is perfect as we will be living there for the next two weeks (they offered me a job, too!)

The Valentine’s Day party went quite late, I think till nine or ten!  They had food, drinks, games, dancing.  The girls even did line dancing!  It was  a very nice time.

Tuesday. We are in Norcross today, having arrived around midnight last night.  We got the kids up this morning and dragged them down to have breakfast in the hotel.

After breakfast I had to find the office, which was not far away and was not too hard to find.  It’s actually in a converted house, which threw me off a bit.

I’m working in the “basement”, or semi-basement.  Lots of space, though.  We had a very good day.  And I got sent home to hang out with the family during lunch, which will not be practical to do most days, but made sense to do today.  So I was home with the kids not long at all after I went in, maybe just three hours later, and got forty minutes or so to spend with them before returning.  The office is just a couple of blocks from the hotel.

The girls were very happy that I came home for lunch.  And then I was home around four thirty again, so not a long day and with them doing school we really aren’t missing time with each other at all.

This evening we did the manager’s social hour, which is really just a happy hour, down in the lobby.  We were surprised, there is a lot of food plus it is an “open bar” of wine and beer!  Very impressive.  We ate a full dinner down there, plus had our wine for the evening.  This works out great.  We never think about this social hour in the hotel as part of the value of the Hilton long stay properties, but boy does it make a difference both in giving you something to do, but also in making it affordable.  Really, with how good this and breakfast are, we can’t afford not to stay with Hilton!

We hooked up the Kindle Fire Sticks in the hotel.  That worked great.  We really need one additional one, there are so many televisions in so many places that we stay now that having an additional fire stick would go a long way.  In this hotel we have two bedrooms, and a living room, all with televisions.  The girls have the Steam laptop hooked to the television in their room, and the Fire Stick is on the television in the living room, but it would be nice to have something on the television in Dominica and my bedroom, too.

We went grocery shopping together as a family at Publix just around the corner from the hotel this evening.  We have a full fridge and pantry in the hotel, so are able to really grocery shop and make it make sense.  Dominica is able to feed the girls their lunches that way.  Very easy.

The girls are loving having their own room and have no interest in sleeping with us here.  They each have their own beds, which is a huge novelty, and their room is much farther away from us here than it is back home, so they like that, too.  Although it is nothing like the distance away from us like it was in Spain or Italy, or even Greece.  More like Panama.

Monday. This is it, we are traveling today.  Today we are driving from Dallas to Norcross, Georgia where we will be for two weeks.  Then we are driving to New York for a week and a half.  Then from there we will drive back to Texas (stopping in Missouri, of course) where we will get one day, before I need to fly out to California for half a week more.  It is an extremely busy month of travel that starts today.

We were up around six in the morning and did a good job of getting ourselves out the door and on the road.  I was the first one up, let everyone else sleep a bit longer.

It’s about a fourteen hour drive from Dallas to Norcross.  We did okay on the drive.  Nothing major happened on the journey.  We got to do a slightly different route than we normally take across the south so while it crossed many places that we have been before, it was just a little bit unique for a lot of the distance.  We have taken I10 across before.  And we take I40 quite often.  We do I30 all of the time.  But today we are taking I20, going between many of the places that we have been before or crossing other routes that we have taken.  So nothing super amazing, but at least it isn’t the “same old.”

The girls have been to Georgia but have never been to Atlanta, so this is a little new in that way.  I’ve spent time in the area that they have not, so less of something new for me. But I’ve never spent much time in Atlanta, so I am looking forward to it myself.

It was pushing midnight when we arrived at the Hilton Homewood Suites Norcross / Peachtree Corners and got checked in.  We got a great deal on the hotel and are here for two weeks.  We will be racking up the points on this one.  We were surprised when they gave us not one, but two suites that are joined.  We have three full beds (a queen for the master, and each girl has their own normal bed.)  We have three televisions, a full living room, a small kitchen with pantry, two full bathroom suites, we even have a fireplace (possibly two!)  This is a great hotel set up!  The girls are super excited about having their own room that is a bit separate from us and having their own individual beds.  I don’t remember them having that sinc we left Crete a few years ago.

It was late and I have to be in the office in the morning.  So we unloaded the minivan and settled in as quickly as we could.  We set up laptops and made sure that things were working, then it was time for bed.

Sunday. Tomorrow is our travel day, heading to the Atlanta region.  Today is our final day to hang out in Texas as a family.  We won’t get downtime like this again for an entire month.  This is going to be exhausting.

So this morning the girls and I fired up Steam and played video games together for a bit of the day.  It was as much daddy daughter time as we could muster today as we are not going to get that much for a bit.

The girls started learning to play chess today.  Dominica got them No Stress Chess to help to teach it to them.

Lots of packing to do today.  We are traveling for so long that it requires packing the same as if we were heading off to Europe, again!

Saturday.  A day of scripting for me.  Very busy.  Slept in a bit late as the kids were up terribly late last night.  Lots of work to be done.  We travel on Monday so this is pretty much a work day for me.

For dinner tonight, I made us tuna melts.  We watched Death in Paradise while we did some packing.