Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today is my niece Madeline’s fifteen birthday!

We got up this morning at the EconoLodge south of Louisville, Kentucky.  Dominica had wanted to be up at eight thirty but it was nine thirty when we woke up.  But I am sure that we needed the sleep and it was probably a very good thing that we slept in as much as we did because we were now well rested and ready to really drive today.

We got on the road before ten and had a good day of driving.  There was no snow or rain all day and the roads were clear.  It was around forty degrees when we left the hotel but was into the sixties once we got into the deeper south.

We finished reading “Eldest”, which Dominica has read before but long ago and which I had not yet read, and then starting reading Sue Grafton’s “V is for Vengeance” which I have been waiting probably two years to have a chance to read.

Our drive went well.  Nothing really to note.  At one point I pulled off of the road to get dinner at a Taco Bell.  Just as I did that, Dominica said “I want Taco Bell!”  We had not coordinated at all.  We’ve not had Taco Bell for weeks and have only had it a few times this year.  How weird that we wanted it at the exact same moment!

It was thirteen past midnight when we pulled into Joe’s driveway.  We did not move our stuff in tonight but just the essentials as if we were in a hotel.  The girls were all still awake for Madeline’s slumber party but were all camped out in Cinema Joe watching Supernatural.  I had a few drinks with Joe and Bennie that Joe made for us in Joe’s Tavern which has been completed since we were last here.

We were pretty exhausted and were off to bed around three in the morning.

It is Friday the thirteenth.  I was up around eight this morning and got right to work down in the kitchen on my MacBook posting on MangoLassi as we were having a major event today.  It was a very busy morning with tons and tons of activity on the site.  We were really happy with the turn out.

Monica came over early this morning and played with the girls all day.  They had a great time.  Most of the family came over in the middle of the afternoon and stayed until I was nearly done with work.  They wanted to do lunch but we could not leave and getting dinner would have meant eating out after work was done and that was not a good option as it would have simply made us an hour or more later leaving Ohio which would have made the drive much harder.  No, better for us to just eat quickly while on the road.

We said our goodbyes and were off around seven thirty.  This is a three day weekend and Fridays tend to be early days.  So we were able to take off a little on the early side, which was awesome.

On the way out of East Canton we hit the Dollar General to pick up some candy for the girls and a  replacement auxiliary cable for the Acadia since we have no idea where we packed our existing one.  That only took a minute and then we swung into McDonald’s, since there was one right on Ohio 30, and grabbed a quick dinner to eat in the car and we were onto the highway and under way.

The drive went fine tonight and as soon as we were onto the highway portion of OH30 the roads were completely clear and we had to deal with no snow at all for the entire evening.  We were very thankful for that.

We continued reading “Eldest” which we had started while on the drive up to New York a few weeks ago.

It was around one thirty when I decided that I was getting pretty tired and that driving straight through was not likely going to work.  So we got to the south side of Louisville, Kentucky and stopped at the EconoLodge there.  Oddly, it turned out to be the EconoLodge that we stayed at on our last trip southbound to Texas before Christmas!  We were very thankful to get the very last room that they had available and it turned out to be two double beds so that worked out just fine.

We were asleep around two.  Tonight Liesl and I had one bed and Dominica and Luciana had the other.

Lots of driving to do tomorrow. Time for sleep now.

Today concluded my third week at the new job.