Sheep Guarding Llama

Monday.  I got loads of new games on the Steam Sale today.

Another major Internet outage across the country today.

This evening we went to Cafe Brazil on Josey.  We used to go here from time to time back when we lived here before but we have not been there since we have been back.  It’s a good place with a huge menu not far away.  And both Shawn and Tim work there, which is handy, although neither is there tonight.  The girls just got pancakes.  Dominica got salmon and I got a veggie sandwich.

After we got back, we watched Working Girl on the television that Dominica and I now have set up in our bedroom.  We have the old orange Target futon in our bedroom that we bought when we lived here long ago at the foot of our bed and the television on a little table against the wall.  We plan to mount the television on the wall eventually, but don’t have any mounting stuff right now.

It has been many, many years since we last watched Working Girl.  I’m not sure if we have ever watched it together.  It’s such a great movie, one of the movies that always inspired me to consider living in New York City and working on Wall St. Funny to see that movie now and think about how that isn’t a film looking back on the heyday of Wall St., but a movie made during it while that stuff was really happening.

It’s really neat to have grown up in the 1980s and have known Wall St. during that era, and then to have worked on Wall St. for a decade and actually gotten to be a part of all of it.  It was an interesting experience.

After many, many years we are finally able to sit down and watch The Usual Suspects together.  Dominica has never seen it and I am pretty sure that I have not watched it since seeing it on laserdisc long ago, possibly in the 1990s.

Sadly, Dominica already knew the plot twist so lacked the surprise that most of us get with that movie.  But she still liked it.  It is a classic and just so well done.  We have been talking about watching it, probably since we were dating.  And somehow it just got missed until now.

After having gone to bed so early last night I was up at a pretty decent time this morning.  I had probably two hours to myself before Liesl was awake and came to the office to ask me if I could help her play Skyrim today.  She loved helping me to play it last night and decided that she wanted to make her own character and play the game herself, instead of just helping me to play.  But Luciana was asleep on the futon in our bedroom so we could not fire up the Steam gaming system while she was sleeping there.

Luciana woke up in the early afternoon and we immediately set up Skyrim in our bedroom.  I played for maybe thirty minutes, if that, before Liesl kept asking to play herself.  So I turned the system over to her and she started making her own character.  That took her an hour, at least, but she is excited about having customized her character and having made it her own.

Dominica went out to check out an art museum in Ft. Worth this afternoon as there was an early Monet exhibit there and to scout it out to see if the museum would be good for the kids (it is not).  She then did some clothes shopping as Rue 21 had a huge sale going on and then some grocery shopping.

Liesl really enjoyed playing Skyrim with her own character and ended up playing it the entire day.  Nothing but Skyrim all day.

I packed up my desk from the back office room and moved it into our bedroom next to the bed and brought my Ubuntu laptop in so that I could set up and use it from the bedroom instead of running out to use it at the bar, which is what I had been doing.  That actually ended up working pretty well.

This evening I took the girls out to Yogurtland for frozen yogurt because they begged and begged to go get it.  Luciana has been asking for it since yesterday and there has not been a chance to get it.  So even though it is pretty cumbersome to do it was worth it.  The girls had to come along with me because they could not tell me what they wanted to eat without coming along to look while there.  That actually turned out well because there were two new flavours there, butterscotch pudding and white chocolate raspberry, that they have not had before and Luciana decided to go with the new butterscotch flavour and loved it.

We brought froyo back for Dominica and the girls ate theirs at home, too.

Today is Saturday and the day just seem to fly by and disappear.  We slept in a bit late and found that there was no food in the house when we got up, but no one felt like going anywhere.

Our friend Marcus had nothing going on this morning and came over and cooked breakfast with Dominica.  He had enough ingredients to bring over and add to the ingredients that we had to do a full breakfast of eggs and potatoes (basically we had eggs, he had potatoes.)

My project for today was to take the television and move it out of the living room.  None of us really want the living room set up in that way.  So now that Dominica and I have the master suite, we are ready to start moving stuff around.

I moved the little end table on which the television has been resting into our room, and then the television and the Steam gaming system.  This is far from how we want the room to be set up, but it is just to get us through for a week or so.  We are missing part of the television wall mount so we need to get a new one, at least for the moment, until we find the parts of the old one.  Once the television is up on the wall things will be much better and safer.  It’s just the cheap 40″ television that we are using right now, though.  We will still need space for the Steam laptop and stuff for now.

We made a plan, though, to have the Steam machine and related equipment move into the master closet.  We want to do this sooner than later, so that the television in our bedroom can be nothing but the television and no hanging cords or anything like that.  We want it to be clean and fancy.  We also want to get a small stereo system to put into that other room and in wall speakers so that it can be as clean as can be.

Chris came over and helped me to move the orange futon into our bedroom, too, which will be used for watching the television in there.  It has been unused and just “in the way” in the living room since forever at this point.  So this is a good use for it.

This evening was a full daddy daughter evening.  Dominica, Rachel, Chris and Estella are all going out to the big 80s night party in Ft. Worth tonight and going to dinner first and, of course, Dominica and Rachel take hours to get ready, so it was just me and the girls from the middle of the afternoon and all night.  We played Skyrim for a while.  It was me playing but after a while Liesl asked if she could control it for me and she probably played for more than an hour with her being in control of it!  I was surprise at how good she was at it.

Around nine the girls decided that they were in the mood for a movie.  But they said that they needed a “kids movie”.  So I looked at Amazon Prime to see what was newly available and discovered that the Pink Panther movies were now available.  This is awesome.  It looks like maybe all of them are there now.

I talked the girls into trying the 2006 reboot Pink Panther movie.  They were skeptical but agreed to watch it long enough to see how it would be and once we were watching it, they were very interested.

While the movie was on I ordered Domino’s pizza which came pretty quickly.  Their online ordering is awesome.  We got one thick double cheese pizza, one thin crust with onions and green peppers and some cheesy bread sticks.  Perfect for movie night.

They loved the first movie.  The Pink Panther was a good choice.  We will watch more of those.

I was pretty tired but this point, it was maybe eleven thirty, but the girls had loads of energy.  So I got them set up with The Spiderwick Chronicles and went to bed.  The girls sat at the end of the bed and watched the whole movie and really loved it. Another great pick by daddy tonight.

I didn’t get much sleep but I did get to relax and probably got at least an hour of sleep while that movie was on.  As soon as the movie was over the girls just climbed into bed and fell asleep.

Normal Friday here.  School with the girls during the day and writing for me until around three in the afternoon.  Dominica did some shopping during the day and picked up Panda Express on her way back for all of us.  So I had sweet shrimp today.

This evening was a daddy daughter evening.  Dominica and Rachel left in the middle of the afternoon to go down to Dallas on the train to meet up with Estella for happy hour in the city.  So it was just the girls and I all evening, which was fun.

We played some video games together, but mostly Luciana felt like hanging out in the dinning room with an iPad watching shows on her own.  Liesl wanted to spend time with me so we camped out in the living room and we watched both of the modern Scooby Doo remake movies together, back to back.  That was fun.  I have never seen either of them and she has not seen the one and the other she only saw when we were in Spain on that terrible, small CRT.  She did not remember it at all, so it was basically all new for both of us.  We had a lot of fun.

Thursday.  Lunch today was going to the Diner of Dallas, down on Beltline, which we have not been back to in years.  It was exactly like it used to be.  I got fish tacos for lunch, which were pretty good.  It was late by the time that we went, the kids were not awake until noon.

The Steam Halloween Sale started today and I got a dozen new games.

This evening Dominica stayed home with the girls while I went out to ladies night at Malarkey’s with Rachel.  Chris and Melanie ended up coming with us.  It was a short evening, we just went for an hour or two and then came back home since the bar is right up the street.

Everyone came back and hung out at the house for a while after being at the bar.  I took Melanie home around midnight.