Sheep Guarding Llama

I am very thankful for a Friday.  Having a weekend away at dad’s is going to be really nice.  I am even looking forward to some quiet time on the train with nothing in particular to do for a few hours.

Today was a lot of birthday preparation for Luciana’s birthday.  There was a rainbow cake to be made, on which I had to advise because even the family baker (Francesca) has never made a layer cake before!  It’s crazy that I have made them many times (but not for at least twenty five years, I am sure.)

The party was late this evening after everyone was home from work.  We had dinner and then we had the cake which turned out awesome with a full rainbow of colours inside.  Then Luciana opened her presents, which she loved.  She was so excited and I managed to get some videos of it as well.  She has been looking forward to celebrating her birthday for months.  Being four, it is a time when your birthday is a really big deal.

So the kids had a lot of fun this evening playing with new toys.  After everyone went to bed I stayed up for a while and started playing the Tropico 4: Modern Times Expansion set which has about thirty to forty percent more scenarios to play through with new twists and stuff to learn from the original game.  I am really getting my money’s worth out of this game.  It was only about five dollars to buy, I believe, and I have gotten scores of hours of gameplay and hundreds of hours of run time out of this game.  It has been a lot of fun.

Tomorrow I travel out to Rochester for SpiceCorps and will be visiting dad all weekend.

Very tired this morning having gotten very little sleep last night because I was up late dealing with being paged out.

The Steam and GOG Summer Sales have been going on and I’ve been taking quite a beating there.  There have been just tons and tons of games that I was really interested in.  I’ve gotten probably around forty games in these rounds of sales!  Liesl, Luciana and I have an immense backlog of titles to work our way through now.

I am still working from the kitchen.  I need to rethink this strategy.  Today is Thursday and hopefully things will be on the slower side and work with it being the lead in to the weekend.

I bought my train ticket for the Amtrak Lakeshore Limited on Saturday so that I can zip out from Utica to Rochester to go to the SpiceCorps Rochester meeting Saturday night and then get some time visiting with dad.  The plan is for me to go out Saturday, go to the meeting, then go to dad’s for the weekend and come back out to Frankfort on Monday driving the Chevy Spark back with me as we need a car for us.  Francesca has the GMC Acadia so that is in use and we do not all fit into it anyway.

Today did turn out to be pretty decent.  Not too bad at all.

Today was far less busy than yesterday was with work.  Yesterday was really bad.  Today, I am still working at the kitchen table, but it was much improved.  During the day I was able to make another attempt at playing the final scenario in Tropico 4 and I am very happy to say that I was able to beat it.  I have completed Tropico 4 which is something that makes me very happy because I have such a history of not completing video games.  It is really easy for me to start a game but taking the time to actually work my way completely through them and getting to the end takes quite some effort and it makes me feel very good to be able to stick to it and knock them out.  I have a huge backlog of games to play and completing some is a nice feeling.

This afternoon, while playing in the living room with her cousins which always gets a bit rowdy, Liesl fell forward and hit the couch with her face.  The impact knocked out one of the loose teeth that she has had.  She took it like a champ, though, and barely complained at all.  This is her second tooth in about two weeks.  She is losing them very quickly now.

This evening the kids were all outside using sidewalk chalk to colour all over the Toccos’ large, new black topped parking lot at the house.  It is perfect for the kids to all play outside.  They love the space and the neighbour kids came over too to join them.

This evening I was able to wrap up work and not stay at it all evening.  While we had a little bit of time to relax, Dominica and I grabbed the television in the dining room and put on The Love Boat and made it through one and a half episodes, which Emily joined us for.  We are now on the fourth season of the show (having skipped the second season as, for some reason, that is the one that is not available.)

After watching the show we tried to go to bed but after everyone else went to bed I ended up getting paged and needing to get up and work for a while before I was able to actually try to get some sleep.  I am still generally pretty tired.  Going to take a while before I get a chance to catch up.  Between the recent travel and all kinds of issues at work, there just has not been a lot of opportunity to be catching up on sleep (or SGL or much of anything else.)

Today was a very busy work day for me.  Figures that we finally get back to the US and it ends up being super busy.  I am working from the kitchen at Dominica’s parents’ house which makes things really hard as there is a lot of noise, constant interruptions and the space is just not very comfortable.  But after the time in Spain, I am used to working at kitchen tables.

I am finally down to the very last scenario is Tropico 4 and took a run at it today.  But after playing right up to the very end of it, I ended up losing.  The final scenario is the hardest one but quite some margin.  I am going to have to try pretty hard on another run at it.

It turned into a very long day with me working through much of the night tonight on a four hour long conference call with the office.

For obvious reasons we slept in quite a bit this morning. We are all really exhausted. Once awake, our first order of business was to get the rental car returned to Enterprise as we had only rented it until early afternoon to keep the cost down. This meant that we had to drive to the far side of Utica to drop it off. I drove the car over and Dominica rode back with Francesca in our Acadia. Francesca and the kids had driven up from Texas to New York in our Acadia this time instead of coming back in her Sequoia.

We got the car dropped off and went right back to the house. Now that we are on the east coast my day starts around noon (although I did not start until one today) instead of late in the evening so I have a lot of adjusting to do. Now we have jet lag to deal with.

We got pizza for dinner and I just worked from the kitchen today. Dominica’s parents were at work today. Everyone is tired so we were busy just decompressing. The kids were super excited to see their cousins and were off playing with them and we barely saw them at all.