Sheep Guarding Llama

Monday. We are supposed to be getting the house all packed up, but we have been slacking on that a bit.  I did writing and posting mostly today.

This afternoon I moved the gaming rig into my office since we don’t need it in the girls’ room any longer as that is getting packed up and I managed to play a couple games of Age of Empires 2 HD, which I have not played in years.  There was a new update that came out over the holidays that we have that adds new civilizations and fixes so there is even more to check out on it.

Boy am I bad at AoE2 these days.  Both I have gotten insanely rusty after more than a decade of not playing but also the game has gotten a lot harder as the AI has been significantly improved over the years, too.

Sheep Guarding Llama enters its seventeenth year!  Hard to believe, we are approaching the two decade mark.  How can it have been so long?  This also begins our third year as a globe trotting family.

I was the first one awake this morning, up at least an hour before anyone else.  Eventually L got up and we hung out for probably an hour or two.  Eventually her boyfriend and Dominica were both awake and joined us in the dining room.  This is the first that she and I have had much time to hang out.

The morning lingered into afternoon and it was a slow and relaxing day.  A lot of cleaning to be done, of course.

This is it, the end of 2016.  It’s been a rough year here on earth.  This is the end of two years of continuous travel for the Miller family.  Very hard to believe that just over two years ago we packed up and left New York to begin our process of becoming full time travelers.  Two years on the road and in two weeks (and a day) we will be on the plane bound for Rome, Italy.  Our first time in Italy south of Tuscany.  We can’t wait.  And I have been working like crazy on my Italian.  I’m on day 44 of my streak with DuoLingo.  I can’t wait to see how much I am able to understand in Italy itself.

Dominica and I got up around eight.  I did some writing this morning and actually managed to pump out several articles.  It was a productive morning.  MangoLassi set a new traffic record this month, too.  Busiest month ever, that’s awesome.  Dominica went to the salon this morning at ten thirty.

When Dominica got home we went out to The Egg & I in Plano for brunch.  I got the holiday hash (without meat) and she got the crab cakes Benedict.  Yummy.  It was nice to get a quiet brunch to ourselves.  Rachel was still asleep until after brunch so she did not come with us.

After brunch Dominica and I did some shopping at Kohl’s in Carrollton and got a load of new shirts for me which is great.  I have been needing some.  And we got a pair of stylish boots for Liesl so that she can be twinsies with “aunt” Rachel.  I showed Liesl a picture of them over text with Emily down in Houston and Liesl said that she liked them.

We hit the liquor store while we were up near The Colony and grabbed a few bottles for the gathering that we have planned at the house this evening.

It was probably four when we got home.  We got to hang out with Rachel for a bit and do some casual cleaning.  I have also been working on removing unneeded games from our Steam gaming laptop so that it is faster and more able to handle indexing everything and to make it possible for the kids to actually find games that they are interested in playing as the number on there is just overwhelming.

Dominica’s mother has gotten addicted to Steam, just a week after getting her new laptop that “didn’t need to be able to play games.”  So now that their laptop is not even a fortnight old, they are looking at ordering a gaming laptop for her father so that he can play online games with the kids.  He bought thirty four games on Steam already today.

We had a pretty small, low key party this year.  Only about seven people stopped by and some people were asleep by half past might and by one thirty it was just Morgan and me left awake and we did all of the cleaning up and were in bed by two thirty.

Today is our last real day to see Rachel.  Rachel worked from home today, which we did not even know until late in the morning.  I thought that she had gone to work, but she actually had just not come out of her room all morning.  I heard her around seven thirty getting ready for work but I got up at eight and there was no sign of her so I figured that she was already driving to the office.  But she was actually home all day.

Dominica worked on planning and packing most of the day.  I worked on writing and posting, mostly.  Rachel came out and hung out in the house proper for the later part of the day.

This evening we decided to do something fun together since we have the rare chance to go out just the three of us.  We called La Cima and they tried to get us in for tonight but were so busy that they just couldn’t do it.  So I called the Tower Club downtown and they got us reservations for six!  It has been forever since we were there.

We had to leave the house around four thirty, of course Rachel wasn’t ready so we were running very late.  We just missed the train, it literally was sitting there as we walked up to get tickets.  So we had to wait a full twenty minutes in the cold for the next one to take us downtown.  At least going to the Tower Club we really do not have to drive anywhere.

We got downtown and were only about twenty minutes late for our reservation which was fine as they were not very busy.  We got a great table by the main windows, a table that I have been at several times before.  Dinner was awesome, we really miss the “clubs” and the dining that we used to have.  I got the blackened scallops.  Dominica got the pecan crusted snapper.  Rachel got the cedar plank salmon (and of course put ketchup on it.)  Overall, Dominica was the food winner of the evening, but it was all very good.

Rachel had loads of paperwork that she still had to do for the office so we came back to the house and were back before nine.  She put in about two hours or more working in the living room.  We hung out while Dominica laid down because her back was bothering her.

Around midnight Shawn came over and we played Cards Against Humanity with the four of us until around two thirty in the morning.

I am on my forty third day of my streak with DuoLingo!

This is our last day in Houston until next summer when we expect to be there sometime in July.  And today is my forty second day of my streak with DuoLingo!  I have been working so hard on my Italian for a month and a half now.

Today was pretty chill.  Francesca played Tropico 4 much of the morning.  She has really gotten into that game. Then the kids demanded that we play more of the Amazing Adventures: The Lost Tomb hidden object game that we had been playing last night.  They thought that that was so much fun.  Who would have guessed that such a simple, old game and some cheap laser pointers would be like the best thing ever.

We had been hoping to get on the road promptly today, but Madeline did not make it back from work until quite late, around a quarter after eight.  So we saw her just a little and were on the road up to Dallas.

The drive went pretty well this evening.  We had dinner from McDonald’s north of Houston and ate on the drive.  It was around one in the morning when we got to the house.  Rachel had been texting us all day hoping that we would get home before she went to bed, but she was asleep about an hour before we made it back.