Sheep Guarding Llama

DuoLingo Streak: 8 Days

Sunday. Finally a day that I am not stuck on the phone all day.  It has been a busy week.  At this point we are in a little bit of a holding pattern with Arizona and we are not sure what the plan is moving forward.  Hoping to hear something soon, but don’t want to push things too much either as we know that some decision makers are out of the country for a few weeks and are difficult to get to coordinate with during that time.

I did a bit of relaxing today.  And Dominica and I hung out a bit, mostly watching Cheers which is our current sitcom watching choice.  I know most of the episodes, but have never watched the show from end to end and it is definitely far better done in this way.  I understand so much more of what is going on now.

This afternoon we finally made the decision that Dominica was using some of her savings to buy herself a couch.  Lacking a place to sit in the house has been just awful and we are so happy with the one chair that we got from IKEA recently and we had told the kids that we would go get a couch as soon as I got a job and I sort of do at this point, so we figured that it was time to do it.  Luciana had even come into my office today and told me that we had agreed to that when we bought the chair.  From our last excusion, there was a low cost yellow love seat that the whole family had really liked that we felt would probably work perfectly for us in the master bedroom to replace the aweful old orange, broken Target futon that is in there now.

So we went to IKEA and I had read that the food there is so cheap that they actually lose money on every order.  So we investigated and decided to eat there before doing our shopping.  We had not done lunch yet, so this worked out perfectly.  Liesl got the kid’s pasta and loved it.  Luciana went for the salmon fillet dinner and really liked it; she got it without the sauce.  I got the salmon too, it was really good.  Dominica got the veggie balls in curry sauce, which she liked but realized too late that the sauce would bother her stomach so she could not eat much of it.  Overall, dinner was cheap and delicious.  A good find, we will do this again.

We did not have a lot of time as IKEA closes early on Sunday.  We found out couch and did a small extra bit of shopping. The girls love running around trying out chairs and couches and beds and exploring the little sample apartments that are set up in the store.

We stayed as long as we could, which was not long, but promised the girls that we would return sometime soon to do more shopping.

We checked out and I brought the minivan up to load in the furniture and we discovered that we could not fit the couch into the minivan with the girls in it!  Oops.  So we had to call an Uber to take Dominica and the girls back to the house and I drove back with just the couch.

So our evening was spent assembling the couch, which was mostly Dominica, while I got some work done.  The girls thought that playing with all of the cardboard that had come with it was lots of fun.  They made themselves coffins and pretended to be vampires, and boats and pretended to explore rivers.  They are so silly.

Once we had the couch assembled, Luciana asked that we watch Pirates of the Caribbean which Liesl sort of remembered having seen and Luciana could not remember (and maybe had never seen at all.)  It was on Netflix and we had mentioned recently that we should watch it, hence why Luciana brought it up.

So we did the first, real, family movie night on the new couch and our first family viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean which both girls really enjoyed.  And I doubt that either Dominica nor I have seen it in a really long time ourselves.  It was a fun evening.

After the movie, I put the girls to bed and read their next book in the Magic Treehouse series.  We started the fourth book tonight and totally by coincidence it was Pirates Past Noon.

Not only was this book about pirates, but right away in the story, the characters find and read a book actually called Pirates of the Caribbean! Both girls were like “WHAT!”  Talk about coincidence.  This was a bit crazy.  So it turned into a very caribbean and pirates themed night for this family.

We read five chapters, getting us halfway through the book, and called it a night.

DuoLingo Streak: 7 Days

Saturday.  Today was super busy.  I started the day consulting by phone for three hours. Which is great as it is a lot of money coming in, especially on a weekend.  And it all went really well.  Very happy about the work.  I had expected the call to only be an hour, not three, so I am very glad that I had gotten up and showered prior to doing the call or I would have been scrambling later.

Then I had just a little bit of time with Dominica to talk and have my coffee, then I had to drive up to McKinney for on site work with the doctor’s office up there that we have been supporting.

I drove up to McKinney, no chance for food all morning.  It was all just too busy.  I put in a few hours at the doctor’s office.  The big items today were getting their new firewall installed, moving all of their equipment over to the new addressing scheme, picking out and ordering new wifi access equipment (Amazon will deliver later today, but I can set it up tomorrow.), setting up printers and scanners, fixing a NAS that they have lost access to, some training and so forth.  A busy, but really successful and productive afternoon.

I grabbed Taco Bell on the way back home.  What a busy day it was.  It was probably five in the evening when I got my first bite of food all day!  I’d had nothing but coffee.  But it was a very full day of work, and on a Saturday, no less.  So I was quite happy.

Home and relaxing, spending the rest of the day with the family.

This evening, when I tucked the girls into bed, we finished reading the third Magic Treehouse book: Mummies in the Morning.  Liesl took a little bit to get back into the Magic Treehouse books as she read them long ago and they are geared for kids more Luciana’s age, but now that we read them before going to bed each night, Liesl is really excited about them, too.

This family reading time is great, it is helping the girls to wind down and get to sleep faster and we are having a wonderful daddy / daughter time just hanging out and doing these stories.

DuoLingo Streak: 6 Days

Friday. I got up and worked all morning.  It has been a busy week.  But was able to get things to slow down by the middle of the afternoon.

This afternoon I took the girls on a little outing down to the Farmer’s Branch Public Library that is basically straight south of our house.  Because we live in Carrollton, we get access to Farmer’s Branch as if we lived in that town.  This is very handy as they each have rather different digital resources and it gives us four libraries, instead of two, to use.  So lots of variety and selection.

I worked on getting library cards for the girls and getting my temporary card turned into a full one, which is necessary for me to be able to use it with the library’s online digital resources.  I had signed up for this library while we were still in Italy but the remote card that I got was a temporary, probational one that I could not use with the foreign language learning resources that I was interested in.  So I had to make an appearance in person to get access to that stuff.  But easy enough, here we are and it was dealt with quickly.  While I worked on that, the girls found the kids’ play area and were just chilling there playing with another small boy who was there as well.

We did not spend a lot of time at the library.  Maybe an hour.  The girls played for a bit.  Then we went to the library’s small museum and saw their exhibit on Russian art.  We stopped to check out the pond at the library and counted fifteen turtles that we could see in it!  Talk about a lot of turtles.

We started for home when almost instantly Liesl remembered that she had taken off her Pokemon cap and must have left it in the library.  So we had to turn around and go back to find it.  Luckily the library was empty and it was right where she had left it.  So no big deal.  She was pretty upset, though.

We swung past the house and Dominica ran out to join us and we drove up to Frankfort near the Dallas North Tollway and went to Yogurtland which we have not been to in a while.  The girls were super excited.  Frozen yogurt is a big deal treat around here.  One of the favourite places for our girls to get to go.

This evening Dominica and I decided that we were going to finally watch Rogue One which has been on Netflix for a while.  Liesl decided to come in and join us, but Luciana decided to do her own thing, as she often does.  Dominica made popcorn, and I melted the butter.  We made a big evening of it.  We were only able to do this because of our new IKEA chair for Dominica to sit in.  Now that we have that, her back and hips, which have been hurting her for weeks, have been improving.  The lack of seating in the house was definitely taking a toll.  Liesl and I snuggled on the beat up futon during the movie.

Rogue One, which stars Diego Luno who I have really liked since his days of doing Y Tu Mama, Tambien stars and did an excellent job.  If he had not been in the movie, I’m sure that I would have just passed on it.  I really had no idea what the movie was about and did not at all realize that it was the story of the days leading up to the beginning of the original Star Wars movie.  You could easily watch Rogue One and Star Wars back to back and have it feel like a seemless movie!

The biggest drawback of Rogue One was in their attempt to use the same characters from the original film (which was forty years ago this year) they could not use the actors nor find look-alikes, so they used fully digital versions of the characters mixed in and the uncanny valley hits the movie hard.  But overall, it is well done and by far the best Star Wars series title since 1983.  I am really glad that we watched it and Liesl really liked it.  It is a seriously sad movie, though.

DuoLingo Streak: 5 Days

Thursday.  This is it, the very final last day of 2017 that I had to go back and reconstruct from records.  By this point I was down to the days where I just had nothing to go on.  Today is a day where I have, quite literally, no notes.  I didn’t take notes about playing a game, having food, watching  a show, or even what I did at work.  It’s a day that has been lost.  Sorry about that.  But if you are wonder, it is currently late 2018 and I was looking for any days that were still missing an update and this one was the last one lingering and it is now… done.

Wednesday.  Just a normal work day at home for me.

This evening, Liesl came into my office so that she could play Age of Empires II HD in there next to me while I work.  She is so into all of these serious games.