Sheep Guarding Llama

It is the weekend, although none of us can really tell what day it is anymore.  Our schedules have been so weird for so long that we are really just kind of lost as far as what day it is or even what time of day it is.

We relaxed most of today too.  It is a weekend, you know!  We slept in like crazy today, none of us were up until after eleven!  We have been pretty tired so that was probably pretty good for everyone.  It makes for a short day, though.

Dominica and I tried to watch the British file The Trip today but found it to be boring and actually kind of annoying.  Two bad actors doing fictitious and annoying versions of themselves while doing bad impressions of people we mostly could not identify while driving around the countryside (the only interesting part)  and stopping to eat.  Not entertaining at all.  We gave it about twenty minutes and gave up.

We then watched Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels which is a classic and neither of us has seen in a very long time.  What a great movie.  It has been so long since I have seen it that I really forgot just how good it really was.  We really enjoyed seeing that again.

This evening we watched National Treasure as a family.  Liesl came downstairs and said that she had decided to watch a movie with us because I had seemed sad when she said that she didn’t want to do something together this evening so that she could play her Furby game.  She is so sweet.  She ended up really enjoying the movie too.

Right at the beginning of the movie Luciana said that she was going to bed and promptly put herself to bed and was asleep in no time.  She fell asleep with an iPad on her head, which was pretty funny.

After Liesl went to bed at eleven, Dominica and I stayed up and watched the latest episode of Sleepy Hollow.  Although I am afraid that that series has now jumped the shark.

I really had forgotten just how awesome our beds are here at the house in Peekskill.  Both Dominic and my bed and the girls’ beds are just awesome.  So easy to get a great night’s sleep here.  I am pretty sad thinking about the fact that after the next two weeks we are looking at probably years before we get to sleep in beds so nice again!

I worked most of the day from my desktop.  Boy have I missed that too.  A great chair, a great work surface, two huge screens, a good keyboard, a mouse that does not skip all over when trying to use it… it is the little things that you miss the most when you have been away.

This afternoon, since there is no food in the house, we ordered in Domino’s pizza to make things easy.

This evening Dominica went out running errands and doing some shopping for three and a half hours. There is no food, no chocolate milk (Pediasure) for the girls, no nothing in this house.  It is empty.

I managed to get some GoPro footage from the past week edited, compressed and uploaded to YouTube today too.  Just a couple of videos.  One of Liesl using her new needle felting “sewing” kit while in Houston is there along with two videos of the cousins that I took while we were in Ohio this week.  The GoPro takes great video but it takes a lot of effort to get videos uploaded from it too.

After Dominica got home from shopping we watched a movie together as a family.  We started watching the new Tom Clancy movie Jack Ryan: Shadow Agent but after ten minutes or so we realized that we had watched it already this year.  Probably at some point it was rented while we were at Dominica’s parents’ house.  So we stopped watching that and decided to watch Bruce Almighty instead.  We have not seen that movie in a really long time.

We were going to watch another movie after that but then we realized that it was after midnight!  Our internal clocks are all messed up from having been in central time and having done lots of very late night driving.  We can’t tell what time it is at all.

Another driving day.  Not so far to go today, though, only about eight hours of car time.  We slept in nice and late this morning.  By the morning it was Liesl and I sleeping in the “pink” room and Dominica and Luciana sleeping in the “diamond” room.

Dominica was up first and I was not too far behind her.  Probably around nine.  We spent the morning in the kitchen hanging out with Aunt Marlene.  The girls got up, first Luciana around nine thirty and then Liesl at more like eleven.

We stayed at Aunt Marlene’s house until about one.  It was bright and sunny but still extremely cold and we had little desire to get out and onto the road.  We were avoiding the cold for as long as we could but by one we really had to be in the car and underway.

We stopped in Louisville at the grocery store for fortified meals for the kids (generic Pediasure) and then ran across the street to Taco Bell for cheesy rice and bean burritos for Dominica and me.

And then we were on the road. Less than eight hours of highway time to do today.

The drive went fine.  We managed to avoid all of the bad weather today. No snow, no rain and only moderate winds for the entire drive from Louisville, Ohio to Peekskill, New York.  Both of the girls slept a lot of the way too.  They really did well.

Dominica and I completed Eragon and started reading Eldest which Dominica read in print long ago but I have never read at all.

It was around nine thirty when we got to the Peekskill house where we no longer live.  The house was surprisingly holding sixty degrees when we arrived even though the thermostat was set down to fifty four!  Even with no one home and nothing running it held the temperature fifty degrees above the outside temperatures!  That new insulation that we paid for this summer really paid off!!

Dominica managed to make the entire trip without having to so much as move the car in a parking lot.

We did nothing this evening.  Just got into the house, got the kids ready for bed.  It was a short evening.

We are very thankful today that we decided to push on to the north side of Columbus, Ohio last night.  We were able to sleep in until nine this morning and get a relaxing start.  The Comfort Inn that we stayed at was great and very cheap.  A good decision all around.  We got a good night’s sleep and are feeling good today.  And we only have to drive about two hours or maybe a little more but less than three to get to my aunt’s house in Louisville, Ohio where we are going to be hanging out all day and staying tonight.

It is bitterly cold in Ohio today.  It was nine degrees when we got onto the road.  Dominica and I listened to some more of Eragon on our drive.  The drive was smooth until we got to Massillon where we ran into a lot of snow and nearly blinding conditions.  It was a slow go from there to East Canton. We were doing only twenty five miles per hour.

It was around one when we arrived at Aunt Marlene’s house.  This was my first time having driven there all on my own, which is pretty surprising as we go there all of the time and she has been living in the same house for about twenty years!  Grandma was already there.  It was just the six of us (Aunt Marlene, grandma, Dominica, Liesl, Luciana and me) for a while.  Uncle Don came home early and was there around three.  Eventually my cousins all came over (Gwen and Mike, Brett and Molly and eventually Monica and Joe.)  Aunt Cheryl and Aunt Gayle came too.  It was a full house.  We all got pizza for dinner and hung out until around midnight.  The girls had a great time playing with everyone.

We had a really nice time getting to visit with everyone and having enough time to really get to visit and not just popping in quickly, saying “hi” and leaving again.  Spending two nights in Ohio plus getting some sleep, not needing to deal with interviews and everyone having a few days warning on the visit helped a lot.

We spent the night there like we did a year ago.  The upstairs sitting room has been completed since the last time that we were there.  The girls had a great time playing upstairs and naming all of the rooms.  The new sitting room is called the “Fall Room”.  And the bedrooms are the “Pink Flower” room and the “Diamond” room.

Getting the girls off to bed was quite a chore tonight.  First of all the time change back to the east coast is causing no end of issues.  Their schedules are all messed up.  And then all of the naps in the car have made them wide awake late at night too.  We were struggling to get them into bed by one tonight and they were mostly not asleep until three in the morning!

We started off with Liesl and Luciana in the diamond (full size bed) room and Dominica and I in the pink flower room (queen bed.)  But Liesl was having a bit of a temper about having to go to bed and ended up losing access to the iPad for the night.  Luciana had to be moved to the fall room (upstairs sitting room) while we dealt with that.  Then they got put to bed but after a while Luciana came to our room and said that Liesl was so loud that she could not sleep.  So it was the three of us for a while.

Liesl sneaked in and did not fit in the bed so tried sleeping on top of my diagonally which kind of worked.  Eventually, somehow, Dominica and Luciana wound up in the diamond room and Liesl and I wound up in the pink flower room.  I think that Dominica was in the other room by herself for a while, if I remember correctly.   We lost quite a bit of sleep during that whole mess.  The only reason that I ended up staying put at all is because the CPAP more or less anchors me to a single location with some major effort.  Everyone else can move around pretty freely.

There is not much to tell about today.  We got up this morning at the Comfort Suites in Louisiana and were on the road by around nine.  We were very glad that we got a head start last night because even though it was not all that much driving yesterday it really takes a good chunk off of the day today.  We have so much asphalt already behind us before starting out on our very long day.

The weather was gorgeous.  It was bright, clear and in the low sixties along the Gulf of Mexico this morning.  We were really surprised.  What a nice day.

About fifteen hours of driving for us today.  We were on the road and the girls did really great.  It was a really beautiful day and, for my first time ever, I got to drive through Louisiana in the daylight!  After all of these years this was my first time to ever get to see the state when it was not the middle of the night.  Hard to believe.

The whole day went very well.  The girls slept a lot and complained very little.  I did all of the driving, Dominica did none, again.  This is her second trip in which she has had to do no driving at all.

We listened to most of the rest of Eragon today.

We pushed on until well after midnight knowing that we really wanted to be north of Columbus before calling it a night.  We made it there without a problem and got a good rate on a Comfort Inn there and got to bed.