Sheep Guarding Llama

This is it, our final day before we go to Panama and really, because we are going to Panama so early in the morning, it might as well be today that we are leaving.  We do not have time to get anywhere near a full night’s sleep tonight.  We’ve been telling the girls that we are leaving tonight, rather than tomorrow, because that is what it is going to feel like.  We have to be on the road to the airport by three thirty in the morning!!  There is so much left to do before we leave, too.

This morning the Grice kids came over, except for Madeline who went with Francesca on a school trip to San Antonio in the Acadia, and mostly spent the day swimming in the pool with Dominica watching them while I worked.

Today Liesl showed me that she was able to make her own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  This is something that she has never been able to do before.  This is a big step as we make sandwiches for the girls all of the time.  She was so excited that she insisted on making one for her sister too.  And now that Liesl appreciates how hard it is to cut her sandwich into quarters she has decided that the big girl thing to do is to eat the sandwich whole.  So in one fell swoop we went from us making sandwiches for the girls and having to cut them up to Liesl eating whole sandwiches that she makes for herself.  Pretty awesome.

In the evening Dominica took the kids out to dinner, brought home Subway for us and it was time to set to work packing everything up.  Not just packing to go but packing up the upstairs of the Toccos’ house because the kids had toys covering a huge percentage of it.  What a mess.  So much to do.  Dominica worked solid on it all night.  There was very little for me to do, so much required her to make decisions about where it was going to go and how it would be stored or whatever and which things were coming to Panamá and which things were going into the closets and which things needed to be kept together or whatever.

There was so much to do that the packing process went late into the night.  She worked to get the girls’ bedroom cleaned up so that they could get to bed but it was probably after eleven when they went to bed and that meant that they would only be getting a few hours of sleep before we had to get up to leave.  Our own night of sleep was getting shorter and shorter very quickly, too.

We ended up working until it was so late that there really was no reason to go to bed, but we were hopeful that we we would get some amount of sleep so we attempted it.  We went to bed, with everything packed, about ninety minutes before the alarm was set to go off.  Not fun.

The countdown to Panama is on now!  Today is our last normal day where we will have a day in Texas and get to go to bed at the end of it.  This international trip really sneaked up on us.  We are not prepared and almost nothing is packed or ready.

I was up early and straight off to Friendswood City Hall to see the Tax Assessor about getting the Chevy Spark registered in Texas. This time they were open and when I got there literally I was the only person in line (there was one person already at the window.)  I talked to them about the issues with it being expired for two years and they said that that was no problem and that I was doing the right things at the right time, so that was great.

Before registering the car I had to run across the street to get it inspected.  That was quick and easy, no line at all and no issues with the car.  Then right back across the street to finish up the registration which was super easy.  This was a great car registration experience and was over in no time.  Had I known how the inspection process worked it would have been quite a bit faster too.  And I even had time to talk to the tax assessor about what to do about when we are out of the country for the lapse of registration next year, which is going to happen in June no matter what we do because we can’t be around Texas anytime near when the car is going to expire again.  It was all very helpful.

Dominica and the girls went to the Grices’ again for the final day with them (Francesca and Madeline are traveling on Friday to San Antonio for a band conference all weekend.)  I just worked at the house.

This evening, after everyone was done visiting family, Dominica and the girls came home and picked me up and we went to Jimmy Changa’s, a Tex-Mex place, for dinner.  They have all been there before but not me.  The food was quite good and we were able to sit outside in the heat and humidity which is perfect training for Panama in just a few days while the kids spent most of the time that we were there playing on the playground that they have.  It was perfect.  Dominica and I each got grilled tilapia fish tacos and we had some chips with green sauce.  Liesl just had rice and Luciana had mac and cheese.  It was a nice evening and the price was really reasonable (actually, downright cheap.)  We had plenty of tasty food, I even got a cocktail and the whole thing was like thirty two dollars for the whole family!

More packing tonight and some more Big Bang Theory.

I was up a bit late last night working on the MangoLassi update from 0.7.0 to 0.7.1.  It went mostly smoothly and I think that the site is running a little better today.

Dominica and I got up this morning and we were right off to Houston to go to the AAA office up there because, other than getting our car registered here in Texas, our other big task this week is to get our International Driver’s Permits issues so that we are fully legal to drive wherever we go.  We have a rental car for our time in Panama coming up here and we do not want to have any issues.  We had some issues in Spain not having one and we do not want to run into that again so we are going to be careful to keep these up to date and ready to go at all times.  We have to get them issued once a year, which is a bit of a pain.

The drive up to the AAA office on the west side of Houston near Richmond and Sage took almost an hour.  The actual AAA office was able to do the pictures, make the IDLs and have them back to us in about thirty minutes which was nice.  Not overly expensive although this is something like a $60 per year tax on traveling abroad to add to the laundry list of things like that.

We went right back to the house after getting our IDLs.  I had to get back in order to get to work.  It was almost noon (when my start of day meeting is) by the time that we had gotten back between the hour drive to the north, the paperwork and the hour drive back.

Dominica took the girls over to the Grices’ for the day so that I could work at home in peace.  Then this evening Dominica asked me to go pick up Thai for dinner.  That took a bit of driving because of all of the construction.  I picked up the family from the Grices’ on the way back home.

We watched some more Big Bang Theory tonight while Dominica worked on more of our Panama packing.  So much packing to be done.  The packing (and the cost) is definitely the worst part of all of the traveling that we do.

So excited to be going to Central America, though.  A new adventure and just a few days away.

This morning I had to get up and go to the DMV (or the Tax Assessors Office as that is who functions as the DMV in Texas) to deal with getting the little Chevy Spark registered there.  It has not been registered anywhere for nearly two years because we have been out of the state where it exists and there was no means of getting it registered.  We have only these five days to deal with any of that kind of stuff so I got up this morning and went right to the Friendswood City Hall to get the call all set just to discover that the DMV is only open on Thursdays and Fridays.  So I need to come back on Thursday morning to make sure that we get this done as it is rather a big deal.

I did a ton of “email cleanup” today trying to get my inbox down to a manageable level.  I have so many emails and they back up really quickly these days.  I am just so busy and so much of it is stuff that I cannot action quickly.  Once you start getting buried it never gets better again.

Dominica and the kids hung out at the Grices’ today.  They are getting in as much family time as they can before we leave.  Once we head to Panama it is going to be a long time before they have a lot of time all together again.

This evening Dominica started getting some of the packing down so that we will be ready to head off to Panama in a few days.  We can’t believe that we are only four days away!  We will be there on Saturday afternoon.

Dominica has been addicted to watching Big Bang Theory and so I watched several episodes of that with her this evening.  I have not seen that show since it was in the first season or two still coming out.  It’s okay, I enjoy it but not a ton.  It is rather condescending and because of the nature of the show I tend to get rather nit picky about characters failing to remain true.  The writing has always been very sloppy and there is no one true to the character to check it, I guess, or they just don’t care so it is really easy to see the character mistakes made.

Had to be up at eight this morning and it was just a long, long day.  I was seriously tired by the end of it.  Spent the whole day working on one issue or another.

It was super hot today, must have been a hundred outside.  Even with the air conditioning running I could not keep the house below seventy seven and I was the only person here all day!

First thing this morning Dominica and the kids went out with the Grices to go see the movie “Inside Out” and then went shopping all day.  So I was home alone until this evening at seven when I drove out to meet them an Menchies, the frozen yoghurt place right up the street.  It is five dollar all that you can eat night there so we all skipped eating meals today and just ate there instead.  Probably not the best idea, but at least it was cheap, we got our probiotics and it was heavy in protein.

We had been talking about going out for dinner after froyo but by the time that we ate all of that we were not hungry any more and just went back to the house so that I could continue working.

Tomorrow is going to be busy.  My first order of business is to get to the DMV, or the equivalent of it here in Texas, and get the Spark registered which has been needing to be done for a long time but we were unable to do because the car has not been in Texas until now.  So much to do in such a small window.

Only five days left until we are off to Panama!  Hard to believe that it is coming up so soon and there is just so much to do between now and then!  We are getting into the final home stretch crunch.  Need to get to AAA too to get an Internation Driver’s License done too for both Dominica and me.  The nearest office is quite some ways away which is really frustrating.  At least twenty one miles in a really inconvenient direction.

I noticed today that Liesl actually has a tan now.  That is pretty amazing considering how hard it is for her to tan.  I am not sure that I have ever seen her with anything approaching a tan before.