Sheep Guarding Llama

The Grices did not come over today.  We all took today as a relaxing holiday.  We did very little.  It was great having a day with nothing that we needed to do.

This afternoon I saw someone post something about Red Lobster on Facebook and I decided that we had not been there in quite some time. I asked Dominica and she asked the girls and they were very excited to get to go out to Red Lobster for dinner.  Liesl says that Red Lobster is her favourite restaurant!

It was latish when we went out to the Red Lobster on Bay Area Boulevard.  Thankfully it is really close for us so going to one is really no effort at all.  Since it was dinner time on Labour Day it was not busy at all.  There were lots of empty tables and we were seated immediately.

Luciana, surprisingly, decided that she did not want calamari tonight and instead just got mac and cheese, which she did a good job eating.  Liesl got popcorn shrimp and devoured them.  Dominica and I went for creating our own meals.  We have gotten better at ordering when at Red Lobster and avoided an appetizer, dessert and getting massive meals.  We are always so full and waste so much food.  I got the coconut shrimp which I love and the stuffed flounder.  The girls are so excited to get the cheesy biscuits.

After dinner we came home and snuggled in the bed in our room watching Modern Family until it was time to go to sleep.

It is the middle of the three day Labor Day weekend and today is the pool day for the Miller and Grice kids.  I did not get very good sleep last night as Liesl came into our bed having had a “bad night.”  We don’t know what she meant and she did not seem to want to elaborate.  Something about being scared and crying but she was not clear if she had had a bad dream or what.  So she climbed into our bed, which is not a king, which meant that there was not enough room for me to do my necessarily turning or to keep myself cool so I was overheated and my back hurt and I basically never fell asleep.  So only an hour or two of sleep all night for me.

The Grices came over on the early side this morning and Dominica and Francesca went out shopping for a few hours while I sat outside and watched the four little kids in the pool.  It was a really hot day and pretty much I could do nothing but sit and try not to pass out in a chair.  There was no breeze at all so even though it was only in the mid nineties it was too hot to do anything at all.  The humidity was really high too.

Liesl is getting better and better at swimming now.  This was her first time, I think, alone in the pool with her cousins without her floaties and she did really well.  She did not need anyone to help her all day and they swam for a really long time.  She was jumping in and playing and swimming the whole time.  She has gone from unable to swim to full swimming so quickly!

We did not do much today other than the swimming.  The cousins stayed at the Tocco house until late afternoon and then went home so that everyone would have a chance to get some rest.

This evening we decided to just stay in.  We had been planning on getting Subway for dinner, because I had promised Liesl that we would, but she wanted left over Chow Mein for dinner and that worked out well for us as Dominica and I were happy to just have some salad that we had available.

Dominica and I watched a bit of Modern Family this evening.  Liesl has a fever and is not feeling so well so she climbed into bed and just watched the show with us.  Luciana decided that she wanted to take a bath.

Luciana forgot to turn off the bath water and discovered that there was a leak in the overflow of the tub.  Suddenly we heard Brittany downstairs yelling that water was coming through the ceiling.  We ran into the bathroom but Luciana had not spilled any water, everything was fine in there.  But it was spilling inside the wall from the overflow of the tub.  A lot of water was in the wall.

So that made for a very dramatic evening.

It is my first full day back in Texas.  I was really exhausted after traveling all day yesterday and having gotten almost no sleep all week so I slept in very late this morning, till around ten.  I got probably eleven hours of actually sleep last night!  I really needed it.  I was doing fine until yesterday when the exhaustion caught up with me.

This morning we met Francesca and the kids at Waffle House around eleven and it took two hours for us to get through our meals!  It was by far the least competent Waffle House experience ever.  They took more than an hour to get our food and our drinks were not delivered until we had requested them easily three or four times and not until long after our meals.  Someone took our syrup away in the middle of us trying to eat the waffles that we had waited hours to get as well.  And even when water arrived that we had been waiting for forever they took some of it away again without telling us so the kids still didn’t have drinks!  It was ridiculous.  They were lazy, inconsiderate and incompetent all at once.  Two hours to get breakfast and much of the food was wrong, somethings never came, we were never paid attention to and by the time we left there were only four customers in the entire store, which was fewer than there was staff!

Today we did very little.  We went over to the Grices’ on the early side and spent most of the day there.  It was a very light day.

Emily and I made an epic run to Sonic for ice cream and slushies in the afternoon.  Got way too much and had three times as much as we needed for everyone.

We took off on the early side, around six, and called it a night.  We relaxed at the Toccos’ house a little bit and everyone was in bed pretty early.  We were all pretty exhausted.

The alarm went off at eight.  Thirty minutes to get up, packed and down to the waiting bus.  Only two hours of sleep so did not want to cut it any shorter than that.  I would be too exhausted to handle the day otherwise.

It was a scramble to get ready for the bus but I made it in plenty of time.  Today is going to be a very, very long day, though.

The drive from Silver Bay to Albany was about two hours on the mini-bus. Not fun.  That’s a long bus ride normally, even worse when you’ve had zero sleep.  Jeff was on the bus with me so we got to hang out a little bit during the ride.

Once at the airport, Jeff, Jill and I hit Dunkin Donuts for some quick food as at least I had no time to eat anything before leaving Silver Bay.  Then it was through security and off on our separate ways as they were flying Delta and I was flying Southwest from a different gate (thank goodness – so glad I am not on Delta this time!!)

I had two hours to kill before my flight so I went to the one restaurant that was in the terminal and got a grilled cheese sandwich there to kill some time.  Then I just sat in the terminal until my flight, which was delayed by one minute, was ready to go.

The flight from Albany to BWI in Baltimore was super fast.  It has been a long time since I had a really short flight like that.  I forgot that these even happen.  It was well under an hour and I barely noticed that I was even on a flight.

I had a long wait, another two hours plus a little extra from a forty minute delay, in Baltimore.  I decided to get some exercise and walked around the airport on the “cardio trail” a few times putting in a few kilometers of walking with my backpack on.  Then I sat at the gate for a bit and made a friend who talked for half an hour and gave me a free drink voucher for the flight too (which I saved for another flight as I did not need a drink this time.)

Once in the air this was a much longer flight.  BWI to Hobby in Houston. I was exhausted and really, really wanted to sleep on this one.  I really had nothing to do on the flight and was too tired to try to read or anything.  I semi-napped most of the flight.  The week was starting to catch up with me.

No issues at the airport.  We arrived just a tiny bit later than originally scheduled, no big deal.  I only had to wait a little bit for Dominica and the girls to arrive to pick me up.  Liesl was awake waiting for me, Luciana had fallen asleep in the car and did not realize that I was there until we had arrived back at the Grices’ house.

Just a little relaxing this evening and then off to bed as soon as possible.  I was so tired.

Today is the last day of our corporate retreat in Silver Bay, New York on Lake George.  I knew that I was getting low on sleep and so slept in more this morning than I have been.

It was another hot day today, but not as hot as it has been quite.  This week has been brutal with no air conditioning.  The heat is really wearing on me.

I skipped some of the light stuff early this morning and started the day in a security discussion and then a large group discussion on racism in America which went really well.

From there the rest of the day was really just a whirlwind.  It was all wrap up sessions that go rapidly from one to another without any breaks.  We had groups photos and close out events and all kinds of stuff.  No free time at all.

In the evening we took a two hour boat cruise, with three hundred of us, around Lake George which was nice.  There was open cocktails but the boat was too crowded and some food would have been good as it was a long day without much food.

After the cruise was the big formal gala.  It was a really nice, fancy dinner outside and thankfully things had cooled off so it was pretty pleasant.  I spent most of the dinner sitting outside talking, long presentations are not really my thing at all.  It was all very nice, though.  We had a good time.

A bit of facilities drama this evening as the YMCA confiscated all of the alcohol from everyone at the event.  Not very smooth for a professional retreat. I would avoid the YMCA in general. The facilities were interesting given that it was up in the mountains but the actual ability to hold an event for adults was lacking.  It was a bit like being teenagers at summer camp.