Sheep Guarding Llama

Wednesday.  This morning we still had snow on the ground from yesterday.  And our pipes are still working.  So far we’ve made it this entire season without our pipes freezing.

This evening Dominica and I finished watching the second season of Grace & Favour.  Then we started watching one of my old favourites, A Good Man in Africa.  I originally owned that one on Laserdisc and it is in my collection somewhere in storage.  We did not finish it.  Dominica is not into it.  I like it, though.  It’s a good story and good actors.

Tuesday.  Very cold here in Texas today, just nineteen degrees!  Surprisingly our pipes have not yet frozen and the local schools are actually still open.

Had to go out for a late afternoon meeting and then was home at six and did dinner with the family.

It’s supposed to drop to just thirteen degrees here tonight!

Tonight we finished watching the latest season of Fuller House with the kids.

Tuesday. I got up at eight thirty, there were already a lot of people messaging me by the time that I climbed out of bed.

Dominica and Paul went out this morning to do a big round of grocery shopping. They went to both Winco and Cosco. They were out for quite a while, and now the house is quite well stocked.

The guest bathroom work is slowly moving forward. Dominica and Paul made a couple of trips out to home stores to get supplies so that everything would be ready. Time is running out to have the bathroom all done before the Grices get here on Friday evening.

I helped with some literary school stuff with the girls. We are working on doing more literature stuff by doing quizzes on the books that we read. Today we did a Tom Sawyer quiz. It is clear that the girls really have strong comprehension of the material. Even though we took a really long time to read the book, with months off in the middle, they retained a lot. And we haven’t even gotten quite to the end yet; Dominica was just anxious to give them a quiz.

Dinner was salmon, butternut squash, and some veggies. Both girls loved the fish and ate all of it. They have turned into salmon lovers. We made it through one episode of Star Trek: Voyager while we ate dinner.

My work day was decently busy. Not terribly busy, but a bit. But I worked late. I kept working all day and decided, since I was getting so much done, that I might as well just keep working. So I worked right through until after midnight! About a sixteen hour day for me. I had a lot of time spent on the phone quite late with clients. It made for a busy evening. I was actually busier after seven then I had been all day.

Today is the “meaningful” vote on the Brexit that has been delayed for months thanks to the prime minister stalling. What a mess things have been over there. I spent much of the day watching the news to see what would happen.

Tonight, the girls and I read several chapters in Tom Sawyer to get us to the end of the book. There is a lot that the girls did not understand, but they both enjoyed the book. In fact, they liked it so much that they both decided, with Luciana leading the charge, that they want to move on to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tomorrow. They are pulling ahead of Dominica with their literary backgrounds.

Monday.  I did a bit of school with the kids, today.  Luciana came into my office and did her math class with me.  When she does it with me, we rocket through her math workbook.  It really goes fast.

Liesl was struggling with her creative writing class with Dominica today.  Creative writing is full of choices and that is not something that Liesl handles well.  So she spent some time with me today and I taught her about how I learned to cut through ambiguity and an overwhelming sense of choice by leveraging things like dice and coins.  I got her to make a series of possible choices, written down, and how to flip a coin to make a rapid decision when the outcome doesn’t really matter.

This seemingly simple lesson turned out to be really important and something that was making her really upset and taking tonnes of time turned into fun and fast work.

In the months to come, Liesl would really remember this lesson and often grabs a coin and quickly flips it to make decisions that used to be really hard for her and now are a chance to show off how she’s found a way to cope with decision paralysis.  Today was a great learning and development day.

Tonight we did three chapters in our reading of the Harry Potter books.  The girls are just loving this reading time that we have together at night.

Sunday.  Liesl is playing Broken Age yet again.  Today is roughly her fourth time playing through it.

I moved NTG over from our older, to our new PBX today.  We are now on FreePBX 14.

For dinner this evening, Dominica made vegetarian rachel sandwiches.  It was made with her homemade veggie turkey.  Dominica has been experimenting with making setan at home and it is turning out really well.