Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning is my overnight shift from yesterday.  So I was three hours into work when midnight rolled around.  Most of our work was done around three in the morning so it got mostly relaxing after that point.

Work went until just after six and I got myself off to bed at seven this morning.  I actually was not all that tired, although later today will be tough.

I slept from seven until about half past noon.  Not a lot of sleep, but enough to get me through the shorter day.  It would figure that the week in which I lose a night’s sleep would also me the week that has daylight savings time in it so there is an hour to be lost this coming weekend too.  Oh how I hate DST.

Did pretty much nothing today, after I got up.  Did some light work, but only light.  Kept an eye on things when I could.  We had no plans at all today because we didn’t know if I would be available at all or not.

So just a quiet evening at the Toccos’ house.  I did not get to bed super early tonight, my schedule is all messed up these days.  It is going to take a while to get my body back into a normal rhythm and if I managed to do that before we go to Europe it is just going to get all messed up again as soon as we get there.

I have today “off” because I am going to be working all night tonight.  So no need to work during the day.

Luciana came and got us up at eight thirty.  I went and got her her chocolate milk and Dominica got up.  I told Dominica that I was going to go back to bed.  She got up and went and read the books that she has been reading obsessively since yesterday.  I got back into bed and Luciana climbed in with me and snuggled, falling asleep almost instantly.  The dogs climbed into bed with us two.

Luciana and I managed to nap for another two hours so that we did not get up until ten thirty. That will help me a lot tonight as I am going to be pretty tired working all night no matter what.  And it was nice getting time to snuggle with Luciana.  She was very happy that we got a chance to nap.

Shortly after we got up, Dominica had to go pick up Garrett and take him to the pharmacy to get some medicine and brought him back to the house. He has strep throat and feels fine but can’t be in school.  So he was at the house playing with the girls all day.  They were pretty loud all day, but thankfully I did not have to work all day.

Dominica spent most of the day reading in the living room.  I spent most of the day getting caught up in stuff that I needed to do.  I got a chance to talk to Andy on the phone for two hours early this evening.

Dominica and Liesl did do school today, which was good, although there were a lot of distractions so they did not get very much done.  But at least they were able to do it.

This evening, after Garrett had gone home, Dominica and I took a small break and relaxed watching a few episodes of the second season of Father Ted and got Taco Bell to eat for dinner.

My work for the evening started at nine o’clock, so our evening was very short.  But I was not too tired heading into the long evening.  I made myself some tea and got to work.

It was moderately solid work heading up towards midnight when Dominica went to bed.  I will likely be still working when she gets up in the morning.

I was up quite late last night and slept in till after ten this morning.  Have to adjust my schedule for later in the week.  Tuesday night is going to be a little rough.

Today was very slow at work.  We had our morning meeting and found out that since we are working overnight tomorrow night that we will be effectively off all day tomorrow and Wednesday so that we can handle the overnight.

We had a pretty relaxing day.  It was mainly just us at the house.  I worked, Dominica started reading a new book series that she is now addicted to.

This afternoon Clara came over and played for a long time.  The three girls are quite a trip all together.  They are three peas in a pod.  Loud and rambunctious and tearing the house apart, though.

The girls watched Alice in Wonderland together, although none of them paid any attention to it.  They were too interested in playing most of the evening.

Dominica and I caught up on Sleepy Hollow after Clara had gone home and our girls had gone to bed. We are now completely caught up on our Hulu shows.

I really slept in this morning.  It was after ten when I finally got up.  Considering how early I went to bed (just after midnight) this was a lot of sleep for me.  Dominica was up just a little bit ahead of me.  She, Francesca and Madeline are going out shoe shopping this morning.  Madeline needs tennis shoes (literally, for tennis) and I need dressy walking shoes for Europe because sneakers really don’t cut it there, although my new ones are pretty decent.

Luciana, as usual these days, got me out of bed demanding her chocolate milk right away.  It is like her coffee.  She is a bear until she has it and the moment she gets it she turns back into a little angel.  I wonder if she gets low blood sugar during the night or something.

Liesl slept in, probably until eleven.  She came right downstairs and watched The Simpsons with her aunt and uncle.  Then the girls played together on the stairs with their toys, being so good, all morning and into the afternoon.

Liesl came and asked me if she could do Ooka Island, her early literacy home school program, which she did for at least an hour at the kitchen table with Luciana watching her.  It is so awesome that they choose school, quite often, as their desired activity all on their own.  How many kids voluntarily choose school on a Sunday?  Liesl also asked me if we could do computer school later today!

Dominica was out shopping for about eight hours.  It was pretty crazy.  Around six she called to have me get the girls ready and to drive them over to the Grices’ so that they could watch Peter Pan and have dinner.  They had picked up baked potatoes from Joe’s BBQ for everyone.

It took me at least half of an hour to get the girls out of the door.  We got over there and popped in the movie and ate dinner.  The baked potato was very good.

I left everyone there and came back to the Toccos’ so that I could get some work done in the quiet, which worked out well.  I was expected them to call around seven thirty, maybe eight at the latest, for me to come and pick them all up as they were only going to watch the movie and come straight back over to the house.

While everyone was gone I managed to do a MangoLassi user cleanup task that has been needing my attention (or someone’s) for months.  I had to go through six thousand user accounts and delete all but two hundred and sixty of them that were legitimate, human users.  Rather a bit of manual work.  All cleaned up now, though.  Hopefully I did not delete any real people.

It was nearly ten when Dominica had me come pick everyone up.  We got straight back home and got the girls off to bed.  Once the girls were in bed we caught up on The New Girl and The Mindy Project and then Dominica was tired and was straight off to bed.

I stayed up for a while.  I have an odd schedule this week and shifting to being up late will be good for me until late in the week.

This ends our next to last weekend all here together as a family.  Next weekend is our last weekend in Texas before the family heads to Florida.  Hard to believe that our time in the US (for this cycle) is nearly over!

Dominica pushed me out of bed this morning around six.  So I just got up at that point.  No reason to just stay in bed if I was not going to sleep.  I was pretty awake at that point so it really didn’t matter.

Dominica was up around seven.  She went downstairs and made herself coffee.

Francesca and the little kids came over just before ten so that she, Dominica and Brittany could begin work on their t-shirt assembly line getting their custom shirts made for their upcoming trip to Walt Disney World.

It is still cold here, much colder than normal.  There is still ice going on up in Dallas.  Nothing like that here, but you still need a jacket to be outside which is much colder than normal.

Dominica sent me out to Staples to get ink for their assembly line.  $200 of Epson ink.  Ugh.  I grabbed Sonic on the way home for my lunch.

They managed to finish the shirts today.  That was a big project.

Joe and Bennie were in the tavern most of the day.  The clear coat has been applied to everything in there now so it really looks like a finished pub.  There is Blue Moon on tap now too, just tapped yesterday.

I had to drive the guys to the sports store to get new darts as they have the dart board set up in the tavern now.  While I was there Dominica had me do some shopping for my sneakers.   I managed to find some Sketchers that I really like, they only barely look like sneakers.  Much less “athletic” and more casual sneakers.  This is my first pair with memory foam in them.  I am interested to see how well that works.

We had a big dinner this evening that the girls cooked.  Joe and I spent the evening bartending.  Everyone loves having the bar in the house.  It fits about six to eight people comfortably drinking too.  It is less “completely” as a bar than our bar in Dallas but more contained (it is its own room with closing doors) and can seat more.  We could only seat four and always treated it as a place to stand.  This is a full bar with bottom rail and seating for a lot of people.

After dinner everyone started leaving in little groups.  We ended up just putting on YouTube and watching Fail Army and Honest Trailers.