Sheep Guarding Llama

DuoLingo Streak: 61 Days

The Grices are back to school today, so it was a quiet day at the Grice house for the Miller clan.  Our plan is that we are going to be driving back to Dallas tomorrow.  It was a really nice day in Friendswood.  Liesl was actually awake before any of the rest of us.  She went to the upstairs living room and just settled in with her iPad.  She loves the giant couch there, it is a huge hit.

I put my Dell Inspiron laptop on the bar in the kitchen so that I could stand on the living room carpet and work today.  That worked out pretty well and I was able to work for the entire day while standing which is much healthier than sitting.  With the nice carpet, I didn’t need shoes to make it all day.  And it encourages me to walk around a lot while I do it.  I’m sure that I got a kilometer or two in today.

It was a generally productive day.  Standing and working in the living room seems to work pretty well for me.  Dominica and the girls did school today.  Part of the day they did it up on the second floor, part of it they did it out by the pool.

In the middle of the day the girls went and swam for a bit.  Mostly they seem to just like to put on swimsuits and play by the pool, they don’t actually spend all that much time in the pool itself.

We got just the tinest bit of rain this afternoon, but barely enough to notice.

The Grices got home and the kids played video games for just a little bit, and then went outside and played in the pool for a while.  I watched them from the living room while I continued to work and Dominica ran to HEB to go shopping for a cake for Francesca’s birthday, which is Saturday but as we are not going to be here, we are going to celebrate tonight.  There was apparently some confusion as I had thought that we were leaving on Sunday, but had heard Dominica mention to the kids that we might leave today, so when I asked her she said that we’d leave tomorrow.  I thought that she needed to get back and she thought that I needed to get back so it was just a bit of confusion.  But I had set up meetings as soon as I knew that we were heading back, so we were stuck with the decision once we figured out that we were just confused.

DuoLingo Streak: 60 Days

Two solid months of DuoLingo every, single day.  I am very happy about that.  I can really tell my own progress.  I am so much better than I was sixty days ago.

First thing today Dominica and I got up and drove up to Kingwood to drop off the Nissan Rogue that I had borrowed last night.  That took a little over an hour to get up there, only a few minutes to drop it off, then an hour back.  It is a huge pain in the butt to get between Friendswood and Kingwood.  Especially if you don’t have toll tags for the toll roads.

Dominica and I had grabbed breakfast from Taco Bell on our way out of Friendswood, so at least we had that.  Sujit was not around when we dropped off the car, so we did not see him today.

Jeremy was traveling from Phoenix back to Rochester today.  He was in the office most of the day

We were all a little tired this morning.  Yesterday was a lot of work.  The Grices have the day off from school so we have all of the cousins at home together today playing.  Francesca had to go to school for most of the day, only the kids had it off, but she did have a shorter than usual day, at least.

The kids spent part of the day playing out at the pool and a lot of it playing video games upstairs in the secondary living room.  The teens had lots of homework that they had to do so spent much of the day doing that.

We were so tired this evening that we started getting the kids to bed at nine thirty!  We had two chapters left of the third Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban which we read in the upstairs living room tonight.  The girls just loved it.  They have enjoyed all of the books thus far, but this one was their favourite.  It is Dominica’s favourite of the entire series.  It is the first one that I really love, I always found the first two to be lacking a bit, the story telling really improved by the third book.  So we read the last two chapters and wrapped up the book tonight.  We will be started The Goblet of Fire tomorrow night.  Our nighttime reading time has really turned out great the last few months.  We have gotten into a great pattern.  It has helped a lot with everyone getting to sleep at better times, too.

DuoLingo Streak: 59 Days

Tuesday and Halloween.

Originally Sujit and I had planned to leave by eight this morning, but he rescheduled to nine thirty last night.  Then before eight this morning he texted me to tell me that he had just woken up and that he would let me know when he was ready to go.

So my morning went from “getting up early and getting right onto the road” to “sleeping in and having loads of time to just hang out around the house.”  It was not until after one that he finally picked me up and we got onto the road to drive down to Houston.

We had a decent drive, but we hit some rain on the way.  We got a late lunch at Burger King while fueling up along the road.  We pushed down and got to Kingwood, where the office is, just before six.  Traffic was just terrible.

I got a quick tour of the office, dropped off some stuff there, dropped off Sujit at his hotel where Naeem would take him from there, then I took the Nissan Rogue and drove down to Friendswood in the hopes of meeting up with the family before they were done with trick or treating.  The original plan was that I was going to arrive in Kingwood before one and Dominica was going to pick me up there, but we were so late that we barely made it by six and Dominica could not pick me up because it was Halloween and there was stuff to do so I would have been stranded all evening had I not borrowed the car to drive down.  As it was, the drive was over an hour and traffic was not good, so it was dark and well after seven when I got to the Grices’ new house.

I met Emily at the door as she was handing out candy to trick or treaters.  She called the family and let them know that I had arrived.  Dominica Telegrammed me her location and I set out on foot to catch up with them in the dark.  It really wasn’t too bad and I was able to catch up pretty quickly.

So I got to do half an hour or a little more of trick or treating with the girls.  Joe has an electric golf cart that he was driving around the neighbourhood which was pretty funny.  The girls got so much candy this year.  This is their biggest haul ever, by a long shot.

We got back home and the teens went out for their own trick or treating.  We hung out at the house with the kids.  It was a nice evening.

The Grices do not have school tomorrow so were able to stay up kind of late.  But Clara was in bed and asleep well before nine, being worn out from all of the walking.  The others stayed up for me to read a few chapters in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban which my girls have been waiting to finish for a week.

We were all in bed long before eleven.  I have no idea how we all ended up being so tired, but we are.  The kids and the adults were all worn out, even the teens were back and tired.  So the place was quiet quite early.

DuoLingo Streak: 58 Days

Monday.  Today is my last day home alone in Dallas.  Tomorrow morning I am heading down to Houston to join the family.  The plan is to leave before eight in the morning and Dominica will pick me up from Kingwood just after noon.  Then I can spend part of the week with the kids and go trick or treating tomorrow night and then the schedule is that Jeremy and I are flying out to Qatar on Friday.  It is going to be a busy week.

Since I had a little time to myself today, for what I am expecting is the last time for quite some time, I played another video game today: AR*K Gone with the Sphere which is the first part of what is currently a three part sci-fi point and click mystery trilogy of games.  I have had it for a while, but have never gotten into it enough to really play the game.  So knowing that it was pretty short, I decided that today I would do it.

It was only a few hours of gameplay to get through the game.  It’s not a great game, but it was enjoyable.  The story is pretty quirky and felt more like a warm up to a story than a story itself.  But I can see the series potentially going someplace good.  I own all three parts that are currently released, so I can move on to the second and third parts sometime in the future.

I am enjoying having some time to myself to play some of these games that I have been saving up.  Point and click adventures often remain the things that I really want to play when I have the time to do so.  It makes me sad that not so many of them get created, because it is such a good genre with so many possibilities.

This evening Rachel and Shawn stopped by for just a little bit to pick up Rachel’s mail that has been piling up at the house for months.  They did not hang out for very long, but enough time for a glass of wine.  The Bota Box Nighthawk Black is a hit.

Shawn has started taking a Python programming class as he has decided that he wants to get into software development.  Oddly, he never talked with me about this, at all.  After years of living in our house, he never talks about doing anything with computers ever and then, just two months after moving out, silently decides that he is going to go into that field.  Kind of a missed opportunity there.

I got myself off to bed at a very reasonable time tonight.  I need to be up pretty early in the morning and wanted to be well rested.  So pretty much after they left I just packed up and got myself ready to walk out of the door in the morning.

DuoLingo Streak: 57 Days

Sunday. Today I decided that I was going to camp out in the living room today and play some Broken Sword 2.  The original Broken Sword was great, but it has been years since I played it.  I have been putting off playing the sequel for a long time, but the time has finally come.  The original is from 1996 and the sequel is from 1999, but I have never played it at all.

It took basically the entire day but I played the game, essentially from beginning to end, all today, which is pretty much the best way to play a point and click adventure of this nature.  Broken Sword 2 is stylistically identical to the first game, which is basically just like playing a cartoon, which is great.  It is great artwork and style, I really enjoy it.

Broken Sword 2 is not as long as the first title, which would be very hard to play through in a single day.  The story was not nearly as good either, but it was not bad.  A worthy sequel, at least, and definitely a classic.

So it was an enjoyable day for me, I liked the game and it was a very relaxing way to spend the day.  And I have been enjoying my Bota Box Nighthawk Black wine.

Before going to bed I also watched a couple more episodes of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt which is pretty good.