Sheep Guarding Llama

Now that the main packing is done things have settled down a little bit.  There is still a lot to do but there is just two days until the family leaves and pretty much everything major had to be completed already by this point.

Today was generally pretty quiet.  Normal day of work.  Small amount of prep work around the house.

 

Short updates as we are generally busy and just a lot going on but nothing particularly interesting.  Routine days preparing for the big changes to come.

Watched That 70s Show this evening and had Taco Bell take out.

Today is a major day for us, at least mentally.  Dominica spent nearly the entire day doing the final rounds of packing – there is so much to do.  And tonight, once it was pretty late, she went over to Francesca’s with all of our luggage and packed it into the Grices’ truck.  This is it, basically everything that we are going to have in Europe has been packed and loaded into the vehicle to begin the journey.  The wheels are now truly in motion.  Mentally, our luggage has started “shipping to Europe” already, even though in actuality it will just sit in the car down the street for three days.  But it is out of our hands now and the trip has begun.

Normal work day for me.  Slept in a little and then got to work around eleven, about an hour before the morning standup meeting.  It’s Tuesday today.  Only three days until the family leaves for their vacation in Florida.  It’s starting to be big time panic around here to get everything done before it is time to leave. Because I am staying behind for an extra week it is really easy to forget just how “final” everything is at this point.  I only get to travel with a suitcase and my carry-ons come next Friday.

This evening was very busy with Dominica spending the entire evening dealing with travel logistics and me watching the girls.

Back to work today.  It’s Monday of my last week with the family in America.  They are leaving for vacation on Friday afternoon.  So only four and a half days left with them.

I was feeling better this morning.  After my extra nap yesterday I was all back to normal.

I worked a normal day today.  The girls mostly just played.  This afternoon Dominica began the long task of packing her and the girls up for Florida but, more importantly, packing us all up for Europe!  It is pretty hard to believe that we are already to the point that we are getting the luggage ready for our big move.

There has been, up until now and even still now, a bit of a feeling like things were not really happening.  Spain was exciting and there is a certainly reality that you feel when the money starts coming out of your accounts but there is also a constant feeling of “that’s a long way off” enough that it often does not seem all that real.  Even now that we are packing, it only marginally seems real.  Only eleven days until I fly out of Texas to head to Florida and on to Europe! I can’t believe it.  We have been trying to make this happen for so long it is really hard to accept that it is actually in progress.

She did a lot of packing tonight.  There is a lot to do.  And tomorrow she has to pack the car with all of this stuff.

Watched That 70s Show in our bedroom while packing was going on.  Brought the MacBook Pro in there and set it up so that we could watch things on that.

After having gone to bed so early last night I was up at one thirty this morning and could not go back to sleep because my nose was starting to burn and I knew that if I tried sleeping any longer that I would cause the same CPAP initiated problems that plagued me yesterday.  So I just got up.  I got about five hours of sleep so it wasn’t exactly terrible.  But I was still tired.

At some point in the evening, Luciana had managed to sneak into our room and find a spot in the bed.  I have no idea how she managed to convince Dominica to let her do this.  Maybe she went to bed early and I did not realize it.  When I got up, Liesl was still awake watching her shows.  After I had been up for half an hour or so she came out and asked me to take her into our room and help her get into bed there (because it was too dark and she couldn’t find her way through the room on her own) because she didn’t want to sleep alone in her own room.  So she took my spot in the bed and the three girls slept there till morning while I went out and sat at my makeshift office in the billiards room.

This morning is the shift to daylight savings time so I was awake to watch that happen.

Another insanely busy morning on MangoLassi.  I have no idea what caused it but a spike to nearly 9,000 views per hour in the middle of a weekend night is completely crazy.  I cannot believe the level of traffic that we are sometimes seeing now.

This morning I ran out to Waffle House and picked up breakfast for everyone, including for Francesca, who was not at the house yet.  Dominica and I ate breakfast but I had noticed that I was so ridiculously tired while picking up the food that I knew that I needed to go back to sleep so I ate and went to bed before the girls got up and before Francesca arrived.

I ended up sleeping for about seven hours.  It was early evening by the time that I woke up.  I felt so much better.  I needed that sleep so badly.  Finally I am fully awake and my nose feels all better too.

Once I was awake we went out to theater and Dominica and I watched the final two Harry Potter movies.  She and Francesca had watched the fifth and sixth installments while I was asleep.

I forget just how awesome the last two movies are.  They are so moving and I am not sure that I have ever seen them in the theater like this.  They were great.  Even though I have seen them several times now, they are still awesome.

As soon as the movies were over it was time for us to go to bed.  Dominica is still not 100%.

This “morning” I woke up very early with my nose (not my sinuses) just burning.  I get this sometimes from the CPAP.  I believe it happens when my CPAP gets a little loose and the air blows on a single spot in nose all night in a certain way that really, really irritates it or something to that effect.  What it feels like is that I wake up breathing something akin to diesel fumes and it just burns.  Once this happens I am done for the day.  There is no fixing this until I get a chance to sleep again.  It is horrible.  It makes my nose burn and run continuously, to a point that I am almost completely dysfunctional, and makes me sneeze regularly.

It was around three in the morning, with only two hours of sleep, that this happened.  So my day started very, very early and I was quite tired.  I have been a little low on sleep all week, even not counting the night that I worked an overnight, so this was not good timing.

So I did a lot of work early this morning since I was stuck in a dark, quiet house with nothing else really to do.  I was at my desk nearly all day.

This morning around nine Francesca swung by and picked up Dominica and they ran errands all morning and into the afternoon.  I did not see them nor hear from them again until about three when they got back to the house.  It was just me and Liesl and Luciana for most of the day.

Dominica and Francesca did some work, maybe an hour, on stuff for the Florida trip that is later this week.  Then they set up the theater, which Joe got fixed on Thursday, and started a Harry Potter movie marathon, starting with the third movie in the series.  On the Florida trip the family is all going to Universal Studios which is home to the supposedly unbelievable Harry Potter Experience and that is going to be a major component of their trip so they wanted to see the movies again and they wanted to refresh them for the kids because they are all so young that they only kind of remember them.  Liesl and Luciana barely know what Harry Potter is at all.  So all of the kids were out in the theater too.

I went out and watched the first movie and a good portion of the second film (actually the fourth in the series since they started on three) but I was starting to fall asleep while sitting out there and could not keep going.  So at eight thirty I went up to bed and was out like a light.  Good thing that I did, I really needed the sleep.

Tonight is daylight savings time.  So short night tonight in case anyone forgot.

At some point Luciana sneaked into bed with us.  But I was so oblivious to everything going on that I have no idea when that might have happened.