Sheep Guarding Llama

Finally after a month of being behind I am working on getting caught up on SGL.  This is going to take a lot of time to get caught up.  So here we go.

I got to sleep in a little this morning not getting up until about eight.  I did a little work before everyone woke up.  Dominica was up around nine, Liesl at ten and Luciana at eleven.

I spent most of the day sitting up in the bedroom working on posting both on Spiceworks and on MangoLassi.  I got a lot of posting done.  Very productive, in some ways.

I had a lot of phone calls to do today, but I got a lot done.

I finally got done working around eight and came down and we watched “How I Met Your Mother” some more.  The girls decided not to hang out with me much but went down to the basement and spent the entire evening playing with a doll house.  They are so good at playing together.

We worked on Dominica’s new laptop all day today.  We loaded up Windows 10 on it today.  That presented a few challenges.  And we worked to get a desktop ready to take north with us tomorrow.

Tomorrow we are driving up to dad’s house for the weekend.

We stayed up until after midnight working on the house computers.

Today was my first complete day of being home and knowing that I was going to be home – but we have no idea how long that this will last.  Could be a few days, could be a month or more.  I slept in a little but not very long.  Surprisingly I just woke up and was ready to go.

I put in a lot of time working on SW and ML today.

This afternoon Dominica’s new Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro arrived.  We had to work on it much of the day trying to get it ready to use.  We found all kinds of issues with it and it couldn’t even post on a website.  So it is going to take a lot of work to get it working.

This afternoon, after a full day of begging, I agreed to play Space Quest IV with the girls.  They have been so excited to play this for a week.  So we played for several hours and made it through a good portion of the game.  They both really love it.  Liesl said that it is her favourite one so far although that does not take much as the stories are so cheesy on these games.  I am surprised that the girls like them at all but they really love them, in fact.  Very strange, but little kids like some funny things.

We stayed up way too late with the girls.

This morning was my sleep in morning.  I slept in nice and late.  It was great.  Then I got ready and drove out to Connecticut to get the scoop on what is going on at work.  I left the house at eleven thirty, to give myself plenty of buffer time for a one o’clock appointment.  You never know how long that drive is going to take.

So the story, at the moment, is that I am going to be staying home while we work out all of the details at work.  So that is likely going to be a week or two at the very least.  So I was home by three and got to spend the rest of the day with the family.  This is stressful but good at the same time.  It is not like a vacation as I really cannot go anywhere and we are concerned about what the future will bring and I need to be mostly on hand for whatever is needed vis-a-vis the job situation.  But getting to be home for a potentially extended period of time is a nice change of pace.

Unfortunately, we already have future travel plans for Dominica and the girls to go to Texas for nearly two weeks.  That is probably going to overlap with me being at home.  There is no way to change that now, though.  It is what it is.

This begins an untold lengthy stay at home.  This will be interesting.

I got up this morning with pretty much no idea what was going to be happening this week.  I had assumed that I would almost certainly be going into the office today for one reason or another but I waited a little while and then got the call that I did not need to come in today at all and would not be needed until early tomorrow afternoon around one.  So I got the day off at home!  That was awesome.

I did some work on things up in the bedroom for the first part of the day until just after noon.  I thought that I would have a relaxing day at home but Danielle needed me to take care of some things for her in the city so I ended up, around one, getting into the shower and then heading out to go into Manhattan.

Dominica and the girls drove me to the Peekskill station and put me on the train to head south.  Thus began my long afternoon.

I got off of the train and immediately looked for a Pret a Manger as I had not eaten a single thing all day.  I found one on Fifth and ate as I walked south.  I was very hungry by that point and knew that likely I would not have food again for a long time.

I ended up doing a ton this afternoon and stayed in Manhattan until one in the morning!  On my walk back north to Grand Central I was able to find an awesome all night deli that had amazing tuna salad sandwiches ready to go which I bought and ate while I walked briskly to make sure that I would get to the train before it left.

Dominica and the girls picked me up in Peekskill around two in the morning.  A very late night for us.

I have gotten a lot of exercise this weekend.  Three consecutive days in Manhattan with around forty five blocks of walking each time.  That’s a good workout.

So even though I was in Manhattan all day yesterday, or nearly so, we are back in the city today too. Dominica had thought about going in with me yesterday but since she could find no one to be able to go around the city with her to help out with the girls she decided that she would wait until today to do it with me to make things easier.  That was a good idea as she would not have been able to easily maneuver the girls around the city on her own at all.  And she has never done the city on her own and has never even taken the Metro North before, alone or otherwise.  So a lot of firsts for her today as well.

We got the girls up and packed up and drove the Acadia down to Croton-Harmon Station.  I dropped Dominica and the girls off at the elevator while I drove way out into the visitor parking which is ridiculously far away from the station.  We were in a really tight time crunch to get the express train that we wanted so she hurriedly got the tickets and got the girls to the platform while I jogged across the expanse of parking lots to join them on the platform.

This is the first time that Dominica has ever ridden the Metro North community rail into New York (or to anywhere) and also, of course, the first time for the girls.  Liesl and Luciana have not been on a train at all since they were on them in Europe.  Their last train ride would have been the night train from Madrid to Lisbon that we took in June, 2012.

The train ride went well.  The girls, of course, fought over who would get to sit where  But it was not that long and they had fun.

This was, to the best of my knowledge, Dominica’s first time in Grand Central Terminal and it was most certainly Liesl and Luciana’s first time setting foot in Manhattan.  Technically they have driven through the edge of it once or twice because some of the highways that we use cut through it once ever six months or so.  The only time that I actually remember doing that was on the drive from Walt Disney World to Connecticut when the family was moving north in November, 2013.  But we might have done that again since then.  I remember Liesl being really excited to see New York City out of her window.  The girls are both really excited about being in the city.  They are city people, like me, I think.  They loved getting a look at it last month.  Now they are actually in it.

The reason that we are in the city today is that we are doing a Flat Stanley in NYC day for friends in Dallas.  So we are hitting bit sites in midtown to get as much as we can without making the trip impossible with two little kids in tow.  We can’t go to downtown and get the Statue of Liberty, unfortunately.  That is just way too much to handle.  Last time, when Katie and I did Flat Stanley in NYC (I am guessing that that was around 2008) we did only downtown and never went to midtown.  So the opposite this time.

Our first stop was brunch.  We had not eaten all day and it was a little afternoon at this point.  We went to the “diner” at Pershing Square right across 42nd Street from Grand Central, under Park Avenue, and ate there.  Expensive but the food was amazing and super fast.  Really excellent food.  Everyone really enjoyed what they got.  Liesl ordered penne with butter all by herself and loved her food.  Luciana got pancakes, big surprise.  I got eggs Benedict with salmon which was excellent and the roasted potatoes there are really amazing.

We did some walking.  We started by heading north on Madison and took the girls up to Rockefeller Center.  The girls thought that it was really interesting to see “The Rock” given that they have both seen so much of 30 Rock and know exactly what that is.  We got caught in some Columbus Day parades in the city.  I was pretty shocked to see that in this day and age that New York City would allow there to be public displays of celebration for that.  Very disappointing.  I thought that New York was a bit more progressive than that.  Incredibly insensitive and inappropriate.

From there we walked to Times Square and they got to see some fountains along the way and then they got to see my office, or hopefully my office, where we are waiting on news if I will be able to start working there soon.  It has been more than a month waiting to see if that will all work out as planned and, at the moment, it is looking rather precarious which is extremely stressful.

It took forever to walk through Times Square with the girls.  We are pushing them in a double stroller and there is just no way to get through the crowds there.  That was exhausting and the girls really did not enjoy it at all.  Dominica has decided that she truly hates Times Square.  I could have told her that.  Unfortunately my new job (knock on wood, fingers crossed) is right on Times Square itself, so little means to avoid it.

We went down to the Empire State Building, took some more pictures, and called it a day.  It does not sound like a long day but with the two girls in that big stroller and all of the crowds, the detours and the route that we took, it was a lot.  We were ready to get back home.  We got a lot of walking in today and pushing the stroller all day added to the exercise.  It was nice, though, and we were glad to finally get to take the girls into the city.  I cannot believe that after being here for an entire year now this is the first time that the kids got to come here.  And this is the first time that Dominica has been in the city since we lived in Newark, if I remember correctly.  It is amazing how little time they spend in New York City considering how close we live.

We had to wait a while for our north bound train but the ride was smooth and we had no issues.  It was late when we got back to the house.  It was actually a rather long day.  But we had fun.