Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica was up early this morning.  The girls both got up and sneaked into our room and climbed into bed with me and snuggled for a while.  That makes for the best of mornings.

Dominica and the girls went over to the Grices’ today.  I stayed at Joe and Bittany’s house and worked all day.  It was a pretty productive day.

In the middle of the afternoon Dominica surprised me with lunch from Bullrito’s.  I have never had their food before and it was awesome.  They make huge, fresh burritos.  So good.  She also dropped off the memory card for the GoPro. So finally I am able to get started working on that.  I have no even been able to update the firmware on it without a working memory card.

I put in a lot of time trying to get the GoPro set up to work this afternoon.  So I had just about no chance to actually use it.  I got a few minutes with it in low light in the back yard before it was too dark to shoot anything.  The video came out okay.  Now to learn how to really use the GoPro.

Once Dominica came home we got the girls off to bed because it was pretty late.  Then we set up in the theatre and we finished watching the first Hobbit movie that we had started last night.  I felt like we had watched a ton of it yesterday and were near the end but, in reality, we had only watched an hour of it and had most of it to go.

We finished the first Hobbit movie and then popped in the second one and made it maybe halfway through that one before being exhausted from watching those long movies and quit for the day.  So we were off to bed.  Those movies are just so long and so slow and drawn out.  It is nearly impossible to stay awake for them.  So much slower than the Lord of the Rings.

Dominica got out of bed and immediately went out to the theatre to watch a movie.  I was up shortly after that and set up in the kitchen to work.  No movies for me.

The girls both slept in for a while this morning.  Luciana until around nine but Liesl until after eleven!  She really is a little Madeline, there is no denying that.

Dominica made snowman pancakes for “lunch” today.  The girls got a snowman pancake maker for Christmas and have been asking for snowman pancakes continuously since then.  So she gave in around noon, as Liesl was finally awake by then, and made a batch of them.

Around one Dominica and the girls went over to the Grice’s house.  I stayed and Joe and Brittany’s so that I could get work done.  I got a lot of writing and posting done today.  It was productive, even if I got started on the late side.  Yesterday I got a new article over to Dominica to edit and proof for me.  I got another one, a large one at 3,300 words, completed today!

For dinner, Joe, Brittany and I ordered in from Cheddar’s.  I have not eaten from a Cheddar’s since Brian Souder and I tried them out in Dallas many years ago.  The food was quite good.  I got their fried shrimp, baked potato and broccoli cheese casserole.

Dominica came back to the house with Emily and by nine we went into Cinema Joe with Joe and Brittany too and the five of us watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes which none of us have seen before (this is why Dominica and I were trying to watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes for the past week so that we would be ready for the family to all watch this together.)  Like its prequel, “Dawn” was quite good too.  Also very sad and tough to take but very well done.  A good message and everything about it was really well done.  Also like its prequel it was a very long movie.

Dominica and I were still feeling like a movie after that was over so we decided to watch the Hobbit  movies (Joe has the first two on BluRay) so that we will be ready to see the third one which is in theatres now.  Joe and Brittany decided to watch it with us too.  We made it about an hour into it but the movie is so slow that we were all exhausted and ready for bed by that point.  So we are saving the rest of it for tomorrow.  Emily was so tired that she had started trying to sleep on the floor of the theatre before we called it a night.

Tomorrow the memory card for the GoPro is supposed to arrive.  I can’t wait to get a chance to start using the GoPro.

Today is a quiet day for me.  Time to hang back and get work done while everyone else hangs out.  Francesca and the kids have vacation all this week yet so Dominica and the girls will be hanging out there most of the week but I will be staying at the house and working most of the time.   Good chance to get caught up with SGL (already done) and get some other writing done and some Ruby training too.

We got up around eight. Dominica is feeling much better this morning.  The girls got up and we all went to Waffle House at eleven for a late breakfast.  Then, from there, I dropped Dominica, Liesl and Luciana off at Francesca’s house and then returned to Joe’s house, where it is just me, getting there around noon so that I could work from there for the rest of the day.

It is cold and rainy today.  Down thirty degrees from yesterday!  It is just forty six degrees here today.  Quite a change.

In the evening, Dominica brought me fish tacos for dinner.  I ended up running up to Houston in the evening to have some wine at 13 Celsius with John Nicholson and Nick.  We were only there for about an hour and a half.  Francesca has the stomach bug that has been going around so everyone there had gone to bed early so Dominica and the girls needed me to come back and pick them up early.

Once we were back to Joe and Brittany’s house we got the girls off to bed.  Then Dominica and I went out to Cinema Joe and watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes which was pretty decent but very sad.  Well made movie, though.

It was late by the time that that movie was over.  Ciana had long been asleep.  Liesl was still awake, though, watching Yu Gi Oh which she is completely addicted to.

Dominica was feeling sick before going to bed last night and was sick all night.  She definitely caught whatever Emily, Elton and Brittany had.  So she is the fourth one to have whatever this is.  And to add to it, Francesca has strep throat that she caught from Garrett.  So that is six sick people so far this Christmas!

Dominica spent most of the day at Joe’s house.  She slept until afternoon with the two dogs, Aurora and Indy, snuggled up in bed with her.

Liesl and Luciana got up and played quietly together at Joe’s house until nearly ten when the three of us all went over to Francesca’s house.  Dominica’s parents are heading back to Frankfort this afternoon at a six o’clock Southwest flight out of Hobby and are planning to leave Francesca’s house early so that they can deal with dropping off the rental car and not have to worry about the timing.  Although that will get them to the airport more than three and a half hours before their flight so we are all predicting an extremely long wait for them.

Emily and I walked down to the donuts, kolaches and tacos place on the corner and picked up a late breakfast or early lunch for everyone that was at the house.  Francesca and her mom had gone out shopping and were still gone when Emily and I got back.

It was a really nice day today, seventy six but dark and drizzly outside.  We had the doors wide open so that we had a breeze in the house.

Around one I went over and picked up Dominica and brought her over so that she could wave goodbye to her parents before they left.  With all of the sleep she is feeling slightly better but overall, still pretty crappy.  She has not eaten all day, nothing since the potato last night.

We went back to Joe’s house on the early side.  Liesl set herself up in the living room with the Orange iPad and watched her Yu Gi Oh anime show for the entire evening.  She has finished the entire show but is watching it again now. She really, really loves that show.

Luciana wanted to go to bed and was in bed by six!  Although she got up later on, she was a very tired little girl.

I ran out to Panda Express to get dinner for Liesl and I.  Liesl just ordered noodles (chow mein) but ended up trying my honey walnut shrimp and decided that she loved them and wants to get them next time.  Luciana was not very hungry and did not ask for anything.  So I stopped by Jack in the Box and got her French Fries which we figured that she would eat.

Dominica settled herself in out in the theatre by herself and watched lots of Marvel super hero movies that I have, quite literally, negative interest in watching.  So that works out well.  I am really excited that she can watch lots and lots of horrible movies that I don’t want to have to sit through.  She is working through a massive catalogue of them while I am able to sit in the house working.  It is grand.

I gave Luciana a bath and eventually got both girls off to bed.  Luciana went right to sleep, Liesl stayed up very late watching her show.  Dominica and I went out to the theatre to watch Anchorman which Dominica has never seen!  Sadly, though, the BluRay disc that her brother has is very scratched and cannot play.  We did not make it even halfway through the movie, it was skipping all over the place and she was missing a lot of stuff.  So we gave up and went to bed around eleven.

We got up this morning and Francesca met us at Waffle House for breakfast.  Everyone else was sleeping in a bit and recovering from Christmas.  After breakfast Dominica and Francesca went out to look for a cake for their mother at Kroger since tomorrow is her birthday but since she is traveling tomorrow we are celebrating her birthday today.

I took Liesl and Luciana and drove them over to Francesca’s house to hang out with their cousins.

Later today Dominica and I made a run to Best Buy to pick up our Christmas present, the GoPro Hero4 Black.  We had gotten a gift card for it so that we could buy it ourselves.  Everyone has it for the exact same price and we wanted to get it in hand as soon as possible so that we could start learning about it and figure out what all we are going to need before going to Europe with it as we know that we are going to need all kinds of gear for taking good videos.

Our first thing that we know that we need is a memory card for it.  Because the camera is a 4K camera it needs a faster memory card than normal cameras.  Best Buy tried to sell us a 64GB card for $199!  I looked on Amazon and they had an even better card (higher end, faster, same manufacturer0 for only $99 and the exact same card for $75.  So we opted not to buy one at Best Buy.  What a rip off they are.  If you are not buying something price controlled, they are insanely overpriced.  They really don’t think much of their customers.

We got home and looked online and checked the cards tested and recommended by GoPro themselves.  Amazon had those for only $44!!  Boy did we save a lot of money.  So we will have a memory card so that we can start using the camera on Tuesday.  Today is Friday.

Brittany is sick today, probably with the same stomach bug that Emily had a week ago and that Brittany’s dad got last night.  It appears to be making the rounds.  So she was home sick all day because of it.

Joe joined us at Francesca’s in the evening after work.  For dinner we ordered out from Kelly’s and Francesca and I went out to pick it up for everyone.  Dominica and I love their enormous Texas sized baked potatoes.  It is an entire meal.  That was all that Dominica got and all that I got was that plus a side salad and it was more than enough for both of us.  Pretty cheap too.

Once we got back to Joe and Brittany’s house, Dominica, Liesl, Luciana and I went out to the theatre and watched National Treasure 2.  We would have watched the first one but Joe appears to have lost his BluRay for that one.  The girls have never seen either of them but we figured that it would not matter.  Luciana watched it snuggled on my lap.  Liesl watched most of it but it did not hold her interest enough to finish it.  She said that she liked it and would like to watch it again some time.