Sheep Guarding Llama

It’s Thursday.  Because Clara has been sick with the flu (the real flu, not just something that people say) we are hunkered down at the Tocco house all day and the Grices are staying at their house.  So my dad was dedicated to worked and was otherwise quiet and uneventful.

No ability to watch any movies in the theater and likely there will not be for the duration of the time that we are going to be here.

New look on the site today.  It has been many years since the theme for SGL was updated and I decided that it was time for something fresh.

Joe worked on his projector late last night and this morning but to no avail.  He did managed to eventually get the firmware update done as recommended by Epson but after he did that all it accomplished was to have the projector able to flash the red light indicating that the system had failed.  No news there.

We found out this morning that our niece Clara has influenza A.  So she is on medication and is quarantined at home.  Francesca spent the morning at the doctor’s with her and then was home all day.  We were not planning on going over there today anyway, but now we are trying to keep the kids from getting sick.  Luciana felt a little warm to Dominica who was unable to find a thermometer with which to really test her.  But I think that it is just her feeling that it must be so.  Luciana acted normally all day, no signs of her being sick at all.  I think that she is fine.

It is a little warmer here today.  Although back home is crazy cold.  Niagara Falls has begun to freeze over and Lake Erie is nearly all frozen.

Not a very eventful day for me.  At the house in the morning, mostly hanging out as everyone was home today.  Then at noon I started working at sat at the kitchen table all day as that is where I work.  For lunch Dominica made salads which were really good.

Liesl and Dominica got back into their school routine today.  Liesl finished her first math book!  We have to order the next one right away so that we will have it before we leave for Spain.  She loves her math class and cannot wait to get on to the next book.  It is so awesome that she loves math so much.

Liesl also had writing, reading and history today.  She is learning about “The Tomb Makers”, all about the tombs and mummification processes in ancient Egypt.

After her school work was done, Liesl watched Raiders of the Lost Ark in the living room with her aunt and uncle.  She really likes the Indiana Jones movies and is looking forward to watching more of them.  She is so funny: she states that she refuses to watch them out of order.  She wants to see them as they are meant to be.  It was very sad that she has to watch them in the living room now, she would have loved seeing them in the cinema.  That would have been perfect for her first time seeing the second and third films.  But now the cinema will not likely be working again until the summer after we are back from Spain.  So the girls are missing out of a month of getting to use it now.  I am not sure that they managed to see a single movie in it since we got down here.

The girls were great, playing with each other all afternoon and evening.  They put together new Playmobile boat sets that Liesl got for Christmas and they played with them extensively.

Brittany made eggplant parmesan for dinner which was amazing.  We had that and salad and watched an episode of The Simpsons which Liesl really enjoyed.  I am pretty sure that this was her first time every seeing The Simpsons.

After dinner I finished up with work around nine o’clock.  Then I wrote up a new article that I am hoping is able to go to press tomorrow.  Nothing like cutting it to the last minute every time!

We got the girls off to bed at ten.  They begged for me to sleep in their room with them.  They love it when we have slumber parties together just the three of us.

Dominica and I have been doing a lot of shopping for South American cruises as we are very excited about the possibility of doing a cruise between Valparaiso, Chile and Buenos Aires, Argentina for a fortnight next year.  We have always wanted to do this particular cruise and it looks like we might have the chance to take the girls on it now.  It would be a very long cruise, especially for Liesl, Luciana and me who have never been on any cruise at all before, but the amazing set of otherwise inaccessible destinations like the Falkland Islands, Tierra del Fuego and the Chilean Fjords make it really attractive.  Not to mention it would be an ultimately practical journey too taking us from one country to another that we need to go between anyway removing the need for costly flights which would dramatically offset the cost of the cruise.  In fact, if the flights are an assumed cost as is the cost of housing and food which we would not be paying for during the cruise time, the cruise actually becomes extremely inexpensive as it is two full weeks!

So our hope is to be able to try the cruise in thirteen months from now.  What an adventure that would be.  An adventure to us.  For more normal people, cruises are the calm, safe way to travel. For us it is a bit of the opposite.  Moving to a foreign country where they don’t speak English, no problem.  Living in a small village with few resources, no problem.  Getting on a luxury cruise liner for two weeks of pampering, now that worries me.  Thankfully no seasickness or motion sickness for me and Dominica has been able to handle a cruise before so we think that that is not an issue at all.

We stayed up until a little after eleven.  Dominica edited my latest article and I submitted it before turning in for the night.

Tomorrow Dominica is going to be taking Madeline to her dentist appointment, if all goes according to plan, and I will be home watching the girls again.

We are only two days away from the one month mark before we depart for Europe and almost exactly at the one month mark before Dominica and the girls head off to Walk Disney World and Universal Studios.  Time moves very quickly.  It will be upon us in no time.

Today is back to work day for me.  Had a nice three day weekend to do the drive from Ohio to Texas and time to recover and get all caught up on sleep.  The Grice kids are all back in school today, so we did not see them.

Now that I am on Central time my day starts officially at noonish rather than one-ish.  I worked from the house all day.

Dominica went out and did some grocery shopping this morning and I watched the kids at the house.

Mostly today was a quiet day.  In the early afternoon Dominica had to go to the school and pick up Emily to take her to a dentist appointment.  They were only gone for a couple of hours.  I watched the girls again.

Dominica and Emily came back until Francesca picked up Emily after school was over.

This afternoon Joe went out to try to watch a movie in the theatre and the projector did not turn on.  He said that this happened to his Epson before and it had to be completely replaced.  Now it is dead again.  He spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do to fix it but was unable to get it working.  Epson recommended a firmware update that only works on Windows 98 through Windows 7.  Which suggests that Epson hasn’t been supporting their projectors for a very long time as that is four versions of Windows old at this point and no other OS is supported!  Joe’s dealing with this Epson is enough for me to never look at buying Epson products again.  Not good support at all and the same projectors completely dying twice in a short time is a bit much.  And apparently Epson had stopped supporting it before they had finished even selling it!  Not impressive.

The girls requested pizza for dinner so we obliged and ordered in from Dominos.  We tried watching the movie Hot Rod while we ate but the movie was unbearable and we turned it off.

I accidentally ate the last of the cheese sticks that we got and then we discovered that Liesl had been saving those for last.  I had not heard that she wanted any, I thought that she had wanted just pizza.  She was very upset but in Liesl style she was very magnanimous and said that it was fine and gave me a hug to make me feel better because I was very sorry that I had stolen her food.  But she went into the other room and was quietly sobbing under the dining room table.

So I ran to Little Cæsar’s and picked up an order of Liesl’s favorite style of cheese sticks just for her and brought them back.  She was very happy after that.

My first two paychecks came via UPS this morning.  Very exciting to be getting paychecks again.  I started one day too late to have been able to have gotten my first paycheck on the normal schedule.  So I had to wait and get two of them on the “ides” schedule.  I am pay bi-monthly now, so the fifteenth (ides) and last day of each month.  So this was all of my pay going back to January 26th.

We went to Cracker Barrel for breakfast (which turned out to be closer to lunch.)  Francesca met us there and we took the girls.  So it was just the five of us.  Dominica and I have been wanting to eat there since our drive down when we had both seen so many billboards for Cracker Barrel that we had independently decided that we needed to go there since it has been a long time since we have done so.  Our food brains are very much aligned.

Breakfast was good.  It was seventy degrees and raining when we left Joe’s house.  It dropped to fifty degrees while we were eating!

After our breakfast we went over to the Grices’.  Dominica continued to work on the Disney travel plans.  Francesca was reading.  The older girls were locked away in their rooms, I only saw Emily walk by once and never saw Madeline at all.  The four young ones were all have a grand time playing one game after another.  They are all so cute playing together.

I hung out until around three then went back to Joe’s house so that I could get some work done.  I worked from there for several hours this afternoon.  My big accomplishment was getting SGL up to date.

At seven thirty I drove down to pick up Dominica and the girls.  It ended up taking way longer than expected to get everyone out of there.  We stopped at Sonic on the way home and got food for the girls.  Liesl wanted onion rings, a first as far as I know, and Luciana decided to get French toast sticks which she did not eat one bite of tonight (but she had some tomorrow and decided that this is now her favorite food.)

We got back to the house and the plan was to watch Oklahoma! as a family.  It is about time to start Liesl on her appreciation of classic cinema.  But by the time that we got to the house Luciana was tired and decided that she wanted to go to bed and she asked Liesl to stay with her.  Liesl decided that she wanted to stay with her sister.  So they got into bed quite early.

Dominica and I went out to Cinema Joe and watched We’re the Millers which we ended up finding really well done.  We did not know what this movie was at all and had just selected it because of the name and cast and because Joe had it on Blurry which made it easy.  But we were very happy with the selection.

After the movie it was off to bed for us, too.  About eleven thirty when we went to bed.

Worth noting for fans of Rodger & Hammerstein musicals is that after waiting for a very long time Oklahoma! is now available for purchase on Amazon VOD and Carousel and State Fair are free for Prime members.

The girls from Madeline’s sleepover were still at the house until around noon with one lingering into the early afternoon.  First thing this morning I was sent out to pick up doughnuts for everyone so came back with three dozen assorted doughnuts plus some egg, cheese and potato tacos for Dominic and me.  I got myself an apple fritter too which turned out to be the largest doughnut-like product I have ever purchased and actually felt a little bit sick from eating.  It was ridiculously enormous. I think that somehow two or three apple fritters morphed into one giant fritter.  It was extremely tasty, though.

We mostly just visited in the kitchen until all of the girls were gone.  Then the Grices went home and in about half an hour Dominica and the girls went over to their house too.  I stayed at Joe’s house and did some catching up on work stuff, showered, got dressed and eventually walked the just over two miles down to Francesca’s house while I listened to more of Bill Bryson’s “Made in America.”

We had Bullrito’s for dinner and mostly just sat around the living room talking while the kids played.  Dominica and Francesca and presumably working on plans for the Disney trip in March but not very much planning had actually been done.

I did some planning today and we are seriously considering doing a trip to Argentina at the beginning of 2016, heading down in January right after we have returned from our second tour in Spain.  The timing would be perfect because we would use up time when we had to be outside of the Schengen area and we would keep up with our immersion in Spanish which, we hope, will be very solid by that point.

The trip to Argentina would be until mid-March when we would take a short vacation and I would get to do my first ever cruise going from Buenos Aires to Montevideo and then south around the horn and back up the Pacific coast of South America to Valparaiso, Chile where we would spend our next tour.  Two tours in South America with only one flight in.  It would be a long stretch down there but a good use of the money and time and we would get a fourth tour in a purely Spanish-speaking region.

We found an amazing option that would allow us to potentially leave Chile via a cruise as well letting us hit Peru and maybe Ecuador as tourists, then continuing on through the Panama Canal (which is just really cool to get to say that you have done) and then going up through the Caribbean to Florida so that we would not have to fly home!

We were really tired this evening and Francesca was getting the kids off to bed around eight thirty.  We went back to Joe’s house and got our kids to bed too. Then Dominica and I were off to sleep as well.  It was probably no later than nine thirty when we got off to sleep.