Sheep Guarding Llama

I slept all afternoon and most of the night last night.  Was so tired.  Driving straight through from Dallas is so exhausting.  I did get up a little in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t for very long.  A couple of hours.  I did some posting and stuff, and then went back to sleep.

I slept so much today, it triggered getting behind on SGL again.

This afternoon turned into a big New York summer downpour.

Our Peekskill house had a showing today, we were hopeful, but nothing came of it.

Olivia came over this afternoon to play with Liesl and Luciana.  She was pretty shy, but they are very excited to have a little cousin to play with.

Weather was so extreme today that there were two tornadoes just over in Erie County, one county away!

We needed some new video recording gear for MangoCon, so we ordered a new Panasonic Lumix camera as recommended by Maggie from B+H in NYC.

The kids are leaving to go to Utica tomorrow to stay with their grandparents while we are here in Rochester for MangoCon 2017.  So this was our only day with there here at my dad’s place.

Got to bed at eleven thirty tonight.  I tried to take a late shower and everyone woke up and needed to use the bathroom, so I spent about an hour just trying to get to the shower!

We did a super long drive yesterday and pushed through the night arriving at dad’s place this morning.  Boy were we tired.  But Dominica had helped with some of the driving and it saves a load of time and money to not have to stop at a hotel, especially when we have so many kids.

Altogether we did the drive in just 24.5 hours.  Not too bad.  We did the Oklahoma and Missouri route.  It was mid day when we arrived today.  We visited for just a little bit, then I was off to bed to sleep for a very long time.

Today is the day, we are driving to New York.  We got up early as there are a lot of kids to get ready.  And, just as we were about to go out the door, we had Luciana lose a tooth!

We took out the trash before getting on the road and discovered that some of the boxes that we had been storing in the garage have disappeared.  We have no idea where they have gone.  Maybe they are in the attic.  Maybe they are buried.  Maybe someone took them.  We have no idea.  We aren’t sure what was there which makes it extra hard.

We grabbed Taco Bell as we were heading out to get onto the road.

It was a long day of driving and we ended up doing pretty well and decided to just push ahead.  We were planning to stop tonight if we got tired, but I did well enough that we decided that we would just keep going.  So we drove through the night.

Monday, our first full day with the Grice kids here.  The house was crazy all day.  Although they really did all do a good job of entertaining each other.  So other than being loud and running around like maniacs, they were pretty much out of the way all day.  Which was good as there is so much that we needed to do today.

Our first order of business was normal work, which was super busy.  And dealing with some house stuff today.  The house in Peekskill goes onto the market tomorrow, officially.  We are super excited about that.  The AC froze up on the house today, which is a big problem.  Apparently the renters are not aware of how an air conditioner works and have been driving it a bit too hard.  So we were dealing with that today, too.  We have lots of laundry and packing to do since we want to leave first thing in the morning tomorrow.

And I ended up having several calls this morning as we try to deal with all of the things for MangoCon.

I had to get an oil change for the Nissan today so that it is ready for the drive tomorrow.  The place that we use is basically next door, so that was easy and I appreciated the break to my day that it gave me.  Fifteen minutes of just relaxing and doing my DuoLingo lessons.  Thirty nine day streak on Spanish now!  And day two of Mango Languages Spanish as well.  I’m glad that I found that.

While getting the oil changed we learned that the Frontier FIOS was moved to the new house and that Rachel was going to come to get the router from the house this afternoon.  Um, just a little bit of a problem there.  That the service and the hardware was going to leave the house was just a little bit of a surprise.  We had no idea that that was going to happen, we thought that both were part of the house and no idea that they would move.  Argh.  So in a panic I had to run home and deal with getting Internet service switched over to us.

Because we are leaving first thing in the morning, we were unable to do anything about the Internet today.  So that is actually going to get turned on on August 1st, when we get back to Dallas.  So we have to time our return trip for that to work out.  What a pain.  So much to go wrong while we try to deal with that.

And, of course, we had to switch over the power, too.  That I was able to get scheduled for first thing tomorrow morning.  So, in theory, that will be all transparent and we will not need to be home to deal with that part.  Fingers crossed.  So much “stuff” to handle and, of course, it has to coincide with us needing to travel to New York for MangoCon.  How many things could all be happening at the same time.

Dominica took all four of the kids to one of the Carrollton splash parks today.  They had a great time.  Luciana tells me that this one is not as nice as the one that we took them to last time, however.

Early bed time here tonight.  We have a long drive to do tomorrow.

Liesl was up at seven this morning so that she could get all ready and be waiting for her cousins to arrive from Houston.  She has been looking forward to them visiting for a long time.  Luciana would have been up as she tried to go to bed at ten last night so that she could wake up and be waiting for them, but she was unable to fall asleep and so was still sleeping when they arrived.

We leave for New York in two days.

Francesca and Emily brought Garrett and Clara up, but were just staying for the day.

Dominica and Francesca went out shopping for a long time this morning.  They brought home Taco Bell breakfast.