Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is my only real day to relax after the past couple of weeks of having been away from home and then being sick. I am feeling much better today (I slept for twenty straight hours) and hope to get a bit done. I still have a headache but overall I am feeling pretty good. I got my two new video games installed (Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Max Payne) and have tried them out a little. They are pretty cool. Eric and John both have Wolfenstein and it is multi-player so we will have to check that out sometime.

Dominica has been playing her new GameBoy Advance a lot and is really liking Zelda: A Link to the Past and Harry Potter: The Chamber of Secrets. She has been playing Harry Potter most of the day.

I woke up at 4:00 am with the flu and couldn’t get back to sleep. I went and got Dominica at 8:00 am and had her pack what we had left into the car so that we could get back to Ithaca and not everyone else sick at her parent’s house. The flu has been going around and it is pretty nasty. This is the first that I have caught the flu in ten years so I figure that I had it coming. I feel awful, though.

(Updated in June, 2006: There is a funny anecdote from this day that I cannot believe didn’t get put in when I originally wrote this daily. I can’t imagine how it was missed. On the way from Frankfort back to Ithaca Dominica had to drive because I was feeling so ill. I didn’t even bother to really get dressed but was just wearing pajamas that I had received for Christmas to be more comfortable in the car. Just as we were getting onto the Thruway in Utica heading west I made Dominica pull over so that I could be sick. I got out of the car but there was nowhere really to go so I had to lean into a snowbank. It was really cold and I was leaning into snow for several minutes and I got really cold. Later some of Dominica’s coworkers commented on me being sick on the side of the highway. It turns out that they were passing the Utica exit just as I was being sick on the side of the road and they managed to recognize me, in my pajamas, being sick, on the side of the Thruway! Utica is over two hours away from Ithaca so one would think that you would be safe from being randomly identified that far away but you are never safe.)

We made it back to Ithaca around 11:00 am and I went straight to bed. That is the end of me today.

Today is Dominica’s Mom’s Birthday. So a big Llama Happy Birthday to Mrs. Tocco!

Today was mostly a recover from Christmas day. Min, Francesca and I did a little shopping today while Bennie continued tackling the kitchen overhaul. Later in the afternoon, Min and I packed most of our stuff into the car as the task of packing is quite an enormous one – especially after Christmas.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE! Christmas is finally here and Dominica and I are REALLY happy that we decided to drive out to Frankfort last night instead of waiting until today… 30 inches of snow fell this morning and nothing is moving anywhere. We won’t be leaving this neck of the woods for a while. Good thing we brought all of our laundry with us! 🙂

The presents were laid out under the tree with care (sounds like the beginning of a poem.) I have never witnessed anything like it. It sure blew me away. So many presents. I always thought that Christmas was a big deal in my family but it was never anything like this! And so much candy too! It is all more than I can take.

A short recap of some of the Christmas loot (so everyone doesn’t have to ask me later – this is just the big items from today, there is a lot that I haven’t cataloged yet! Min got a Game Boy Advance with Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Yoshi’s Island, Rayman and Harry Potter: The Chamber of Secrets. She also got a new Uniden 2.4GHz Dual Handset phone (just like John has) and a new wool blanket with a ton of international flags on it that her mom knit for her that she has wanted for a while. She also got a lot of knitting supplies including some books and a “Needle Master” which is a “pro” set of needles that give her a huge variety so that she can knit almost anything now (although we will see how long it takes for her to make me those fingerless typing gloves…) I got Lord of the Rings RISK (Josh and Bob are going to be SO jealous), a TON of clothes, Smart Mass (again, Thinkgeek), Linux Pilsner glasses and a four person wine and cheese picnic backpack that I have wanted for a long time. We both got WAY more candy than any human can eat (but we are trying.)

Happy Christmas Eve. Min and I are celebrating Christmas at my parent’s today. We started the day by heading up to Rochester with my parents so that my mom could get her chemo and then we ran off to the mall to do a little last minute shopping (good thing that we did because I manage to find a couple of things for Dominica that I had been looking for!) Dad and I also had to stop by the University of Rochester to do a littel bit of work installing a new workstation there because the one that they had been using just died on them and they needed something right away. We made it back home just in time for me to do some last minute wrapping before my relatives came over for Christmas Eve dinner. We ate and hung out for a little while and then we went down to Leicester’s Union Presbyterian because my cousin was singing and playing the trumpet in the service. After the service, we came back to my parents’ to open presents. Dominica got a new watch, SimGolf and a Land’s End “snuggle sack” (which she was REALLY excited about.) I got some new tools (for my in-car Network Tech tool kit), a new Eclipse Computer Workstation light (Thinkgeek.com is the coolest place to shop for geeks) and some clothes (including dress clothes.) I also got some spending money to get more stuff with. 🙂