Sheep Guarding Llama

Happy New Year and happy Monday.  It is a cold and sunny one today, seventeen degrees when we got up this morning.

Today I completed the video game The Clockwork Man: The Hidden World which is a sequel to The Clockwork Man that I completed earlier today.

Sunday.  Happy New Years Eve.  The end of an interesting, and challenging, year.  This morning Dominica and I got up to a frozen Dallas landscape.  It was a freezing drizzle this morning leaving us with a car that was coated in ice.

Our house was totally devoid of food or supplies.  Everything that had been here was either consumed by me during my ten day stint alone before traveling down to Houston, or had spoiled during our two weeks down there.  So we had to throw everything that we had out.

So our first order of business was to get out to Walmart and stock the house with supplies so that we could eat.  We were out the door at nine thirty and found Dallas surprisingly deserted.  A truly empty city.  The roads had barely a car on them, which was really nice.  There was ice on the road but we weren’t slipping.  It was fine for driving.  We just had to wait a long time for the car to warm up since it was coated in ice and it isn’t like we have an ice scraper or anything.  This has never happened to us in Dallas, before.

For lunch today, Dominica made a breakfast casserole.  We can eat anything that we want this week while the kids aren’t here to complain about it.

This evening I got Jade Empire working on our NVidia Shield.  It doesn’t have the graphics quality of the game when I play it on our Steam laptop, but I need some games that will work on the Shield so that I can game when the Steam machine is otherwise engages.

Dominica and I watched Are You Being Served? this evening.

Saturday.  Dominica and I got up this morning and packed up the Nissan Quest.  We got on the road relatively early so that we would have a clear drive up to Dallas.  The cold spell was pushed off a few hours so there wasn’t the panic to get up to Dallas, anytime today would be fine.  It won’t be super cold until very early in the morning, so we are good for the day.

The roads were pretty decent, we didn’t have a bad drive at all back up to Dallas.  We had worried that we were going to have to deal with bad conditions on this drive but it turned out to be just fine.

We got to the house, got the heat turned up, unpacked what we had to from the car, got the water dripping, opened the cupboards, inspected everything that we could, did a little cleaning, and were off to bed before all that long.

The predictions for this week are that we are facing the coldest stretch that we have ever witnessed in Texas.  Not just the longest freeze, but the deepest one.  Last year our pipes froze at twenty four degrees after one day.  This year we are looking at being that cold for about six days and going as low as seventeen degrees!  We have no idea what Dallas is going to be like when it is that cold.

This also starts our long stretch at home without our kids.  Hard to believe that Dominica and I have the house to ourselves for several days, this has not happened in a very, very long time.  Even just one evening to ourselves is pretty rare, but most of a week on our own is unprecedented.

It will likely be frozen out by the time that we wake up in the morning.  We are really excited to be back in our own, super comfortable bed today.  It is amazing how quickly you miss it.

Friday. We are still in Houston, but heading back up to Dallas this weekend as there is a freeze coming and we need to be there to make sure that the pipes do not freeze in the house.

This morning Dominica started playing Dragon Age 2.  Her dad joined us in the upstairs living room at Francesca’s house and we watched her play for a few hours.

Today was a big video gaming day for all of us.  Dominica games almost all day with DA2.  Luciana played Skyrim this evening and managed to level up twice, which is pretty good for her.

Later on this evening, Liesl really wanted to play Minecraft: Story Mode with us watching.  So she started from the beginning and played it in our upstairs bedroom and we watched what we could.  Dominica and I packed while we watched since we will be traveling tomorrow.

The kids are going to stay down here in Houston for the week while Dominica and I go to Dallas to deal with the house.

Thursday.  Got up and fired up Skyrim on the Steam laptop in our upstairs bedroom.  This is where I will be today.

The kids are all having fun playing with their cousins.  They don’t need us around at all.

Tonight, after a few years of playing and booking about two hundred and seventy total hours against the game, I have “completed” Skyrim.  There are still a lot of side missions and expansions that I can play, and after taking a break I am sure that I will happily return to it and play through them.  I want to get as much out of the game and universe as I can, but I have completed all of the core and main quests and have moved the main story to completion.  Overall, it was pretty good, although I feel like my involvement and interaction with the game world was much too shallow, as is often my complaint in games of this nature.  The whole “I’m a nobody” and a few minutes later “I’m the saviour of the whole world” all combined with “I have no impact on the world and no influence” is too weird.  But the game is overall pretty fantastic and I enjoyed it a lot.