Sheep Guarding Llama

After work today, which was already very dark when I got home, we immediately settled in for family fun night as Liesl has been requesting. Both girls asked that we continue playing Space Quest 2 tonight to which I agreed. We have the game set up upstairs in Dominica and my bedroom so Dominica got an iPad and just hung out on the bed and did her own thing while Liesl, Luciana and I played Space Quest 2.

We had a good time and make it through the last 80% of the game. The girls loved it which is amazing considering what horrible graphics and sound that game has. It is like playing something on an eight bit machine which for all intents and purposes we are. But we have a great time. Liesl has gotten really good at figuring out puzzles too. She knew when to knock over a tree to climb across a chasm or when to throw a rock to knock out a guard. She is really good at these kinds of games.

It took us until after ten thirty to complete the game but I did not want to stop short of actually beating it after we put in such a long evening. Luciana is now begging to play King’s Quest 2. But that is for another day.

We got the girls to bed and went to bed immediately ourselves. It was only fifteen minutes, though, until I got called in because there was a gnat flying around their room and landing on them and they could not take it. So we allowed them to come in and sleep in our room. Luciana was asleep in minutes and Liesl in under thirty.

I woke up in the middle of the night to a loud sound. It was a massive downpour and the rain was coming in our windows in our bedroom pretty heavily. I had no idea that it was going to rain tonight and this was truly torrential. Completely took me by surprise.

Back to work today. Feeling a lot of stress about the job transition process. Nothing has actually gone wrong yet but there is a lot involved and it is making Dominica and I very tense. We just want to get past all of that stuff and know what we are doing, if we are moving, when we are moving, where we are moving, etc. There are so many unknowns right now it just makes life impossible to plan. It feels like every moment is just more “holding pattern.” And this has been going on for more than a month which makes it that much worse.

I do know for sure, now, that there will be absolutely no news for at least nine more days and I am guessing that it will be even longer than that before we really know anything. It kind of helps knowing that there is more than a week yet before we get answers but in other ways that makes it worse because there is literally nothing to do but to sit on our hands for a week and a half.

Cool day today so I wore a fleece much of the day. This is my first time wearing a fleece to work in several months. Finally back to the weather that I really like. I love this time in New York. Sucks that it is so short.

Didn’t leave the office until six thirty. Got home and talked to Dominica about contingency plans for the new job for probably an hour just to make sure that we were on the same page and knew what we were planning or needed to do depending on any number of potential scenarios. That was pretty stressful.

After that Dominica went out to run errands and do the shopping and I spent the rest of the evening hanging out with the girls. We just camped out in their room because they wanted to watch some new shows that had just become available on Netflix today. So we snuggled and I just entertained myself on my phone while they watched a show about færies on the iPad.

When I got them ready for bed, Luciana put on her own pullup tonight. That is a first, as far as I know. She is growing up. Just a few days ago she finally got big enough that she is now, for the first week ever, turning on the bathroom lights by herself. She has been too short to do that until now. This is great, we can finally leave the lights off again!

After I put them to bed, maybe an hour later, Liesl came to get me to help her with the white iPad (the iPad 2 has the white gummy case.) She could not get Netflix to work. I looked at the iPad and apparently there had been an account issue and Liesl had managed to type her own name in to attempt to log in! This is the first time that I have seen her writing her own name on a keypad. A big step for her too.

We slept with the windows open last night and the room was super cold this morning which bothered my sinuses so I had a bit of a “cold” day all day. I was up before seven this morning but was feeling pretty good.

We got up this morning and actually put in a bit of time cleaning the house which was great. It looks so much better today. It was a lot of effort, it had gotten pretty bad. It is amazing to me how much better we feel when the house is all cleaned up and yet we never do it.

We watched some more of the first season of How I Met Your Mother. It has been easily seven or eight years since we have seen these old episodes. They are often references later in the series so they mostly do not feel that old to me but it has actually been a very long time since I saw them. I believe that we were living in Geneseo when we first watched some of them which shows just how long ago it was! It is good to see them again. Now we can see lots of setup being done that played out throughout the entire series. Amazing how well written the whole series is.

The girls played together much of the day. They have so much energy it is crazy. They went upstairs and we could hear them playing for a long time. They are so adorable how they have this elaborate, imaginative play together. They really are best friends.

This evening the person who rented our home in Peekskill for four years came up and babysat the girls at a quarter till five and we went out to the Quiet Man pub in downtown Peekskill with Rob who had driven up from Manhattan to hang out for the evening. Liesl and Luciana were excited as they love getting to have a babysitter. They regularly mention how much they miss Morgan.

Rob got to the house around five thirty and we rode with him downtown to the Quiet Man. We haven’t been there in months. There was live music going on in the street, which was pretty cool, and it meant that everyone that was outside was sitting out front rather than out back. So we request the patio and got the whole space to ourselves which was awesome. We had some beers and a nice dinner. We really like that pub.

After dinner Rob came by the house for a Scotch and hung out for a while longer after we got the kids off to bed.

Today is Dominica and my eleventh anniversary!  Time sure does fly.  Because we have been traveling so much and away from the kids and because there is just so much going on in our lives these days we decided that for our anniversary we were just going to take it easy and spend the day at home together.

For dinner this evening we ordered in from our favourite Chinese delivery place getting General Tsou’s tofu like we always do.  A movie and a no effort, tasty dinner.  That is all that we need these days.

Rob and Abby had talked about maybe coming up our way this evening at some point.  They were thinking about taking a trip north to see the leaves in the Hudson Valley but they ended up not coming up.

It’s Friday.  Tomorrow is Dominica and my wedding anniversary.  Eleven years now, if you can believe that.  And all of it documented on SGL!  Hard to believe that our whole lives are here at this point.  Pretty crazy.

Today is the end of my week back in the office.  We have not heard anything about my non-compete paperwork yet which is making us a little nervous.  We were not really supposed to have heard anything by today as it just went in on Monday and the process is supposed to take seven to ten business days which puts the earliest that information would be expected would be on Tuesday of next week.

I have transitioned, already, from doing “normal” work to just doing transitional work helping people to get ready for me to leave.

Nothing exciting today.  Normal day in the office, other than waiting to hear about the paperwork, and then home in the evening to spend time with the family.