Sheep Guarding Llama

Today we are returning from Houston, where we have been for Liesl’s birthday and for Thanksgiving, back to Dallas.  So it has been a week here.  Now we are spending the day packing and getting ready to go.

We were on the road around three this afternoon, and it is a five hour drive up to Dallas.  Nice to be back home.

For dinner tonight, Dominica made amazing sloppy joes.  Sadly, the kids were not into the format of these sandwiches and they did not go over well.  We liked them, though.

This is our last full day in Houston for a couple of weeks, then we will be returning soon for the Christmas holidays.

This morning, Emily got really sick at school and I got to run down to San Leon to pick her up there and bring her back home. She got sick, for real, in class and the nurse not only didn’t let her go home, but forced her to go back to class!  Ridiculous, completely unacceptable for her or for the other students that she would get sick.  Another shiny example of why our kids will not be going to public schools.  Total disregard for the students, for education, for just general ethics. That nurse has no business being allowed around children and none for being in medicine.  That’s not how you treat sick people and you don’t intentionally try to make others sick.  No business would treat employees that way, but the schools could care less about the welfare of these kids.  They don’t even get treated like bad employees.

Got Taco Bell on the way back for breakfast, though.

Tonight is Liesl’s birthday party.  She turned nine yesterday, but we celebrated tonight with the family.

Liesl got The Sims 4 for her birthday and they played that all evening.

Our baby turns nine years old today!  How time flies.  She is getting so big, so fast.

I was the first one up this morning.  Luciana slept with us last night because Liesl wanted to sleep alone in the room next to us.  Luciana has been sleeping in our bed all week.

For her birthday, Liesl got Undertale which she has been wanting for a long time.  We are celebrating her birthday tomorrow, but she got this today so that she would have something on her actual birthday.  So far, she loves it.  She is set up in the living room and able to hang out with everyone.

We took an outing this afternoon to go check out the Oculus Rift to see if the kids can use it and if they would like it for Christmas as everyone has been asking for it.  Oculus themselves advertise that the Microsoft Store here in the area is the one and only place that you can check out the Rift, they list it as a demo location.  So we drove to the mall and went to the Microsoft Store.

So it turns out that Microsoft does not honour the agreement with Oculus to allow people to demo the Rift system.  They sell it, but they will not allow anyone to see it.  They used to, but they now have a deal with HP to show off some awful laptops instead – as if people need to demo a laptop to know how a laptop works.  Basically, MS has no faith in the Oculus Rift and wants nothing to do with it, to the point of being willing to make people extremely upset with Microsoft in order to not promote it.  The people who worked at the Microsoft Store were totally unhelpful and even said that even back when they did allow people to demo it, as advertised online, that they didn’t allow children to test it, but apparently don’t put that information online so that they can lure more people into their stores.

Microsoft went ridiculously out of their way today to ensure that we were that much more disgusted with how little regard MS has for their customers and how much they laugh at people stupid enough to buy products from them.  I will certainly never make the mistake of thinking the Microsoft Store might be useful ever again.  What a joke.  Both Microsoft and Oculus lost some big sales today.  We won’t really be looking seriously at the Oculus Rift after this.  The HTC Vive seems a lot more logical, now.

So that was hours wasted and everyone was pretty annoyed by the whole experience.  Unbelievable the lengths a company will go to ensure we don’t do business with them.  They had the systems there, but wanted to throw away the sale rather than just be nice people.

 

The last day of our Liesl being eight years old!

At nine this evening, when most everyone had gone to bed, Liesl came down and climbed onto the couch with me and said that she wanted to spend the last three hours of being eight to just snuggle with her dad and play Skyrim together.  She is so sweet.

We played for a few hours, then at eleven thirty we got into bed and I read chapters three and four of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  At midnight, I had been watching my phone to know the time, I added in that the characters in the book told Liesl “Happy Birthday!”.  Liesl thought this was fun and Luciana thought that it was so great that tomorrow she will tell Madeline how much she enjoyed that and how special it was and that she expects something similar for her birthday now.

Saturday. We are in Houston this weekend.  Just a quiet day for us.

This evening, Dominica and I watched some holiday movies together.  The season has started, and it isn’t even Liesl’s birthday yet.