Sheep Guarding Llama

It’s Friday!  We got some thunderstorms today.  They did not last long and the rain did not come down hard enough to be any problem.  The lawn will be growing again now, though.  I did figure out, since I had to bring the new weed whacker in from outside today to keep it out of the rain, that it hangs in the kitchen really well alongside the brooms and mop which is perfect.  Anything that keeps me from having to go in and out of the garage is a big deal with how bad the door is there.  And it is so much more convenient to just grab the weed whacker and start mowing without having to go and “fetch” it.

The kids played The Sims 3 and Luciana played Colors on Steam today.  Luciana has gotten even farther in that game than Liesl has!  Maybe Luciana is going to be our platform player.

This evening we started really playing The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles which is a prequel the The Book of Unwritten Tales that we completed (for the second time) last night.  Liesl is controlling the game and we are well past the first chapter after playing tonight.  This is our second time playing the prequel as well, but neither of the girls remember it at all, it was too many years ago.

Dominica did some shopping for school supplies today at Target.  The girls are doing crafts every day in school, and Luciana has been doing math every day and is really enjoying it.

Thursday.  The weed whacker is charged today and so we gave it a go.  It was a bit exhausting but overall it went well and I am very happy with the battery powered weed whacker that we go.  Very easy to use and very compact.  It doesn’t have as much power as other options would have, but it is cutting the weeds with some effort and it makes me more able to go out and actually attack the lawn than I would otherwise be able to do.  So, overall, I am quite happy.

I mowed, with Dominica outside watching me, until the battery died which let me do about a quarter of the front lawn.  It will take several passes before we catch up with things.  But this is not indicative of how it will be in the future. Right now I am spending all of my time taking out huge weeds that have grown up.  That will not be such a problem in the future.  But it is going to take a week of this to work through them now.

The weed whacker is lighter than I thought that it was going to be which is nice given that it is my only form of mowing the lawn.

Tonight the girls and I played The Book of Unwritten Tales and we finally made it to the very end of the game.  We played all of Chapter Five tonight.  What an awesome game.  It has been many years since the last time that we played it.  I think that Luciana was likely only two last time!  She wants to play it again now with her controlling it instead of Liesl.  They both loved it and I had forgotten what a fun story the game had, although all of the game was familiar to me.  To me, it was a recent game.  To them, it was in the murky mists of their memories.

We also fired up the first ten minutes or so of the prequel game The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles which we played right after the original game many years ago but the girls do not remember at all.  They are very excited to get to play this one, too.

I really like these games and it is nostalgic for me not only to go through the stories of the games all over again, but also to play them with my girls as we had played them together so many years ago (I believe when we were living in Peekskill in 2013 or 2014.)  We have certainly gotten a lot of value out of this series.  And I am realy looking forward to getting to play the third title in the series because that is the new one that none of us have ever seen. So for the first time it will be more of the story to enjoy and not just playing the old story over again.

Wednesday.  We are so excited that our new weed whacker has arrived today.  It might sound like a trivial thing, but we have been suffering from lawn issues for a while and now that we are back and living in our Texas home we need to take care of the lawn and in order to do that we need some device for cutting it and until now, we have not owned one.  We ordered a Black and Decker battery powered rechargeable weed whacker from Amazon on Monday and it arrived today.  Only about $79 for the entire unit.  We could not use it today, though, because it needed to be charged up.  The real test of it will be tomorrow.

Today is a special day for us.  Today is the first full day of us living in our Texas home with the house to ourselves, just the family without roomates, since October of 2013.  Almost four full years we have been either away from the house, not all living in it or have been sharing it with someone.  It is hard to believe that this whole house is ours, we have all of this space now!

Yesterday and today we worked on cleaning up the back bedroom, the one that we used to call Luciana’s room because Liesl had always claimed the front bedroom, the one across the hall from the master suite.  When we returned from Europe the girls decided that they wanted to use the back bedroom as it is a little larger but Rachel was already moved in there and did not want to move so we let her stay.  But now that she is gone the girls are anxious to get to move into it.

So after a few more runs of the Roomba (our main vacuum is dead as the belt is burned out from all of the hair on the floor) the room was pretty clean and this morning we moved the girls’ bed and dresser into the room and let them start moving in.  They are so excited. They have been waiting months to get to move in there. The bed is in the back corner to give them maximum space and the dresses (the one that we just brought back from New York) is by the window.  Eventually we will get a television mounted on the wall in there but there are a bit of logistics that need to be done because we can do that.  We really want to paint the room as well, but that just has to wait.  Right now it is a horrible dark brown that makes no sense. And it was painted in a single pass so even for being a bad colour, it looks horrible.  The girls are excited to get it painted to a light blue that they have picked out.

Getting the kids into their new room gives us a chance to swing the mess out of the old one into that one so that we can do more house cleaning.  We are slowly going to get the house in order.  There is so much to do after years of neglect.  We are having fun having our own house back, though, evenwith all of the work that is needed.  It has been so long since we were able to work on this house and make it our own.  Now we have to do it all over again.  So much to do.

Tuesday.  I was up at seven thirty this morning to make sure that I was ready for Frontier in case they arrived on the early side.  With the house being without Internet, we do not want to be taking any unnecessary chances of something going wrong.  So I got up and was at my desk (which can see the front door) before eight so that I was ready for anything.

I got some work done and Liesl came out to join me shortly after eight.  We hung out for over an hour.  Around nine Liesl wanted to help me unload the Quest of all of the stuff that we had brought back from storage in New York.  We had been too tired last night to deal with it and carrying everything in in the middle of the night is pretty annoying.  It is hard to do and that is how you end up dropping things on the ground and not realizing it.

We got the van open and were just starting to take our second load into the house when the Frontier Internet van pulled up behind us.  Perfect timing.

Frontier was great.  The guys said, as I had suspected, that absolutely everything on our account had been screwed up.  First of all, Rachel and Shawn were not supposed to have taken the service or the router away with them.  They were supposed to leave that and just switch the service over to us which would have made this all completely painless and simple.  As it turns out, this caused them to be without Internet all of this time as doing that made it impossible to hook them up at their new house.  So even though we have been in New York for two weeks, we had our Internet hooked up more quickly than they did (they will end up getting Internet access tomorrow.)

Because they did not properly shut off the service, Frontier had all kinds of bad info about our property and had things registered as us being a “multiple business location” needing some seriously large equipment to get our Internet access working.  The installers were like “we knew that this was all wrong, but they didn’t record your phone number properly so we’ve had no way to reach you to ask what was needed or to let you know when we were coming.”  All stuff that I would have guessed from the ridiculously confused phone conversation that I had with Frontier two weeks ago.

But we talked it through and got everything straightened out.  It was all quite easy and the Frontier guys were really helpful.  We did not have to replace the outside fiber connection box (contrary to what the guy on the phone had said) and they were able to remove the huge, pointless Verizon box that has long been in our back server closet with a small, new Frontier one.  The old one has been beeping because of a dead battery for several years now and is incredibly annoying.  The new one does not have a battery as there is no need for one (and never was) so we have more space, draw less power and don’t have to worry about a UPS beeping every few minutes year after year.

The Frontier guys didn’t just hook up the service for us, they made sure to hook up our Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite, hook it up to our Netgear Prosafe switch and ensure that the house was online before leaving!  They were great.  With the new service and the EdgeRouter in place, we are getting more than 150 Mb/s in both directions at the house.

After they left I spent a while getting rooms wired up, getting our Ubiquiti wireless access point working, getting wireless devices hooked up to the new wireless and so forth.  But we are super happy.  We have been very nervous that there going to be problems getting the service hooked up today and have worried that we would be left for weeks without Internet access (like what happened to Rachel and Shawn.)  So mentally my day had been set aside for disaster.  But instead, it was a best case scenario and everything was working great long before lunch time!

After the Internet was all working, we got the minivan all unloaded and moved into the house.  It is not that big of a load, but it will make quite a difference in the house, especially since we have almost nothing in some places, like in the kitchen.  We brought a lot of kitchen stuff back with us like my “Midnight Sun” stoneware that dates back to my first ever kitchen purchases from around 1996.  I think that I got them on mom’s discount when she worked at the home store in Rochester.

Dominica spent much of the day looking around the house figuring out all of the things that were missing that had been here when we left two weeks ago.  She found more and more stuff all day long.  From boxes to kitchen stuff to food items.  She was making a list all day long.

But we are home.  We are moved in.  We have been cleaning, unpacking, getting the house back to usable all day and it is our house again.  We are making it all comfortable for us. The kids are excited about all of the space and are anxious for us to get the floors cleaned enough that we can move their bed into the back bedroom where they will be switching tomorrow.  We could have, in theory, moved it tonight as the Roomba ran over and over all day today getting the floor cleaned but it was so late by the time that we deemed the room clean “enough” to start moving things in that we were not in the mood for doing it tonight.  They can make it one more night in the old room, that we still sometimes call “Liesl’s Room” – the room that Liesl chose when we first bought the house in 2010.  The same room that had the lone stuffed animal in it that she found that day.

Overall, a very good day.  We are feeling very good about being moved back into our home.

Monday and day two of our drive from New York to Texas.  We started the day in Springfield, Illinois where we stayed in the Country Inn and Suites last night, which was really nice.  We got good sleep and were on the road first thing this morning.

A bit of a long drive back to Texas starting from Illinois instead of Missouri, but it was not awful and we had all day to do it.

Good to be home.  We got in pretty late tonight.