Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up early again today and was off to the office on the early side.  When I got out of the shower I found that Liesl had sneaked into our room and gotten into bed with Dominica.  I have no idea why she was up so early.  She gave me lots of hugs and kisses before I left.  She still has a hard time with me going off to work even after all of these years but it is nothing like it was when we first moved to Texas.

Good day, rather slow, at the office.  Got home a little after seven and surprised the girls who were hanging out in our bed using their iPads while Dominica was doing closet cleaning.  She got a huge box of clothes moved out of stuff that does not currently fit us.

I hung out with the girls for a bit.  Then we all watched a few episodes of 30 Rock.  Then the girls wanted to just hang out upstairs.  So I brought them upstairs and spent an hour or two with them until it was time to get them ready for bed.  Then I spent some time getting caught up on SGL.  Was not too far behind, just had not posted what there was for the last few days and had to fill in a few things that were missing.

Dominica stayed up watching one of her shows until half past midnight.

I woke up at 4:40 this morning and felt like it was probably time to get up.  I could not believe how early it was.  I attempted to go back to sleep but at five the girls were calling for me because they thought that they saw a bug in their room.  It was just a shadow but I was up at that point so shaved, showered and went to work.  Ended up leaving around six so go into the office just after seven.  By the time that I left the girls and sneaked into bed with Dominica and Liesl had already almost pushed Dominica onto the floor which she will do if you let her.   It was a very foggy drive in this morning.  So it was quite an early start at the office for me.

There was horrible traffic on my drive home so I did not manage to get home early at all.  It was close to eight when I finally got home.  We did nothing much this evening, just watched 30 Rock for a bit before going to bed.  I worked with Danielle a little this evening, maybe half an hour.

Was off to bed rather early.

We have most of our SpiceWorld plans made now.  Dominica and I are taking the girls to their grandparents’ on the Friday before and driving straight the Art and Danielle’s house from there.  Jumping into their minivan and hitting the road immediately to drive straight through down to Dallas where we are going to make a super fast pitstop at our house there to get stuff out of the attic and then on to Austin right away.  That is going to be one long drive.  About six hours longer than a normal Texas drive.  I will be doing the longest going from Connecticut to Peekskill before picking anyone up.  Then Dominica and I have a ton of driving before we start the “to Texas” portion of the trip.  And the Dallas stop is going to add some time.

I will be driving back with the Ralstons but Dominica will be flying back early.  She got her flight booked tonight as well.

We got to sleep in until after eight this morning.  Liesl wanted to play video games the moment that she was awake.  She is very excited about Quest for Glory that we started yesterday.  But I told her this morning that I thought that that game was looking like it was going to be too hard so we were going to go back to the original title and start with King’s Quest because I felt that it would be a lot easier for her.  She thought that that was a good idea and could not wait to get started on King’s Quest.

Dominica parents left late this morning.  Her dad and I loaded the old metal bedframe that had been out back since before we bought this house in NY.  They are taking it up to have the metal recycled back upstate since we have no good means of dealing with it down here.  That frame has been sitting out there for at least six or seven years, maybe many more.  We had no idea what it even was until recently.

As soon as they left, Liesl and Luciana ran upstairs so that we could start playing King’s Quest I: Quest for the Crown.  Liesl was so excited to get to play it.

Liesl did really well on her game.  She managed to play straight through it, with some help from me of course, in a single sitting from beginning to end while getting a perfect score!  It probably took her about three hours but I did not keep track so I am only guessing.  While she played I took some time and cleaned up Dominica and my bedroom which had become a bit of a mess.

Liesl was so excited to have played the entire game today.  She loved it and did really well at it.

This morning we decided to go to the Westchester Diner for breakfast.  We had to wait for Liesl to wake up as she was the last one sleeping.  Everyone else was ready to leave and she was still completely asleep.  We made it down there before ten which is amazing for us but even so it was super busy and took forever for us to get our food.  The food was good when it finally arrived.  Why do we keep choosing Sunday mornings for breakfast, I have no idea.

Dominica made me string my old guitar and play it today.  We bought new strings a few months ago and they were hiding back behind the bookshelf in the dining room.  We fished them out and I spent an hour or so getting the guitar strung again and semi-tuned.  We had to put in at least half of an hour hunting around the house in boxes looking for my guitar music as well.  We managed to find everything, though, and I was able to play for a while.

This evening we watched a few episodes of BBC’s Sherlock.  Dominica’s parents had not seen it before and her dad is addicted now.  We watched two episodes all together before Liesl insisted that we try out some new video games…

Today I bought the Quest for Glory game series (five titles) for the girls from this weekend’s GOG sale.  Super cheap and I think that they will like them even though they are old (from my childhood.)  We played a little of Quest for Glory 1 this afternoon, maybe half an hour or forty five minutes.  I think that this game might be a bit hard for Liesl as it has a lot of time sensitive elements in it and she is not good at that yet.  I am going to have to find her an easier alternative.

We got up this morning and the morning was mostly focused on major household cleaning.    That was hours of cleaning.  A very busy morning.  The house is looking pretty good, though, especially the upstairs.  The girls’ room is looking more like a guest room than a kid’s room.  The house is feeling much improved after this week’s work.

Dominica’s parents arrived in the early afternoon.  The girls were very excited.

For lunch we had tomato and fake bacon sandwiches.  The tomatoes were fresh from Dominica’s grandfather’s garden and the sandwiches were amazing.  So tasty.

We had a pretty leisurely day.  This afternoon Dominica’s father took the pressure washer out that he had brought with them and pressure washed the house and the deck. That is another thing off of our list of things that the homeowner’s association wants us to do.  What a pain it is living here.  Now we need to get the deck sealed.  Always something.

Dominica cooked stuffed shells for dinner tonight.  After dinner we watched The Amazing Spiderman 2 which is really a perfect example of why I don’t watch comic book movies.  It was like the director didn’t even care.  The movie was uninteresting, ran on for forever and made no sense.  It wasn’t true to itself.  Suspension of disbelief is different than lazy writing.  Good writing, even in a fantasy world, still rewards people for paying attention.  Sloppy writing does not.

Liesl had a good time at movie night, snuggling with her grandmother most of the movie.  Liesl felt that the movie was far too long, though.  She started off strong but for the last forty-five minutes was like “isn’t this over yet?”  Luciana fell asleep before the halfway point on my lap.

Luciana slept on the inflatable mattress in our room tonight.  She was asleep hours before we all went to bed.  Liesl came into the big bed with us being the only one awake at bed time.