Sheep Guarding Llama

Wednesday. We are heading up to Missouri tomorrow to have a mini vacation for the solar eclipse and to hang out with friends and celebrate Dominica’s birthday.

Most of our day was getting last minute work done so that we will be free to travel tomorrow.  It’s only a ten hour drive, but that still makes for a very long travel day.

Tuesday and the second day of school for the girls.  They slept in a bit this morning, we all did.  I was not awake until around ten.  Last night took a bit out of me.  But I was in a good mood all day having gotten so much work done yesterday.

The girls were up before us and decided to play games on Steam for an hour before starting school.  This actually worked pretty well.

Today was another highly successful school day for the girls.  They had fun, learned a lot and Dominica was not overly frustrated by the end of the day.  Can’t ask for much more than that.

Overall it was a good day.  This evening Dominica and I watched more of Cheers, we are on the third season now.  I am enjoying Cheers a lot more now than I have in the past.

After several episodes of Cheers, I went back to work and the girls played video games in the office beside me all evening.

Monday.  The kids are back to school today.  Their summer is over.  But they were pretty excited to get back into it.  Luciana has been really ready to get back to school.

Once they had breakfast and started moving into the dining room, which is now the school room, I got to work moving the desk and stuff out of the dining room into “Liesl’s Room” to set up a second office there.

The move went quickly and the new office is really comfortable.  It’s nice to have a quiet space now.  And the window is perfect for my eyesight.  I switched to having the desktop setup in the office with the big monitors and will use the back office space in the converted garage for the laptop when I need a standing desk.

My big surprise came today when a little gecko ran in to the office from the window beside my chair.  I failed to convince him to leave and he ended up running under the desk and hiding.  I have no idea if he ever left.  He was an adorable little lizard, though.  The kids thought that it was really exciting to have a gecko in the house again.

This evening the girls got me to go out and have daddy daughter game night.  I played XCOM for a while, but did so badly that I had to start over and give up everything that I worked on today.  That was disheartening.

I gave up and we played Elastix, the rubber band cannon ball puzzle game for a while.  I ended up needing to work so switched to the new office.  To let the girls be near me I moved the Steam gaming laptop into the office with me so that the girls could sit next to me and game on their own and I could easily help me as I am so close.  This actually works really well.

Dominica fell asleep while watching Malcolm in the Middle and the girls stayed in my office until eleven thirty.  I got them into bed and tucked in before Dominica woke up and put herself to bed.

I ended up staying up very late, till after four in the morning, getting work done.  It was actually a quite productive night for me.  Jeremy and I worked on the Sodium Project for a few hours, but he was gone by before midnight, I would guess.

I did loads of Sodium testing, built three PBXs, sent out loads of emails, updated tons of servers… it was a very busy, very productive night.  I was very happy with all of the work.  And I managed to do my DuoLingo before midnight hit so I am on a three day streak now.  Not very exciting, but I want to get back into the habit.  It made such a difference for me.

Finally got myself to bed around four. Really solid night of work.  I feel much better having pushed through and gotten all of that work done.

Sunday.  I got up this morning, posted a little, then played some XCOM.  Today we worked on our travel plans to go to Missouri this week for Dominica’s birthday and the solar eclipse viewing.  We are heading up to Cuba, Missouri and staying with Paul for a few days.  He is in nearly the perfect location to see the eclipse.

Dominica made “real” popcorn this afternoon how that our hard core serious popcorn popper was discovered in storage and brought down.  We have it set up in the bar now.

Saturday.  Quiet Saturday video gaming with the girls. We got a lot of new games yesterday, today we have been trying out many of the ones that Luciana didn’t test out last night.

This afternoon Liesl and I played Detective Hank and the Golden Sneeze for a while.

Then tonight Liesl and I played XCOM together for quite a while.  We both love that game.