Sheep Guarding Llama

Everyone is home now and we are starting to get back to normal, as much as possible.  I have to go to work during the day so I am still missing the girls a lot, not a lot of time to spend with them yet.  Lots of house cleaning needs to be done too.

This evening we went to the playground and played a little bit of Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker tonight.  Quiet night.  Just time with the girls.

Tomorrow is a very busy day for us so tonight is time to just relax.  The whole family is coming out to go to the country fair with my office tomorrow and spending the night there.

This morning I went to work. Today is the big day, Dominica and the girls are coming home. Finally coming back after more than a month away (they were home a few days in the middle.) They have been away most of the summer. It has been really tough.

Work was pretty normal. Left at the usual time. Dominica and the girls drove down from Frankfort in the middle of the afternoon and got to the house about an hour before I did. The first thing was to give the girls a bath, they were still in the bath when I got home.

Both Liesl and Luciana were anxiously awaiting me to get home because they knew that I had bought them something and had it ready as a surprise for them at the house. They’ve been wondering what it could be since the weekend.

Once they were out of the shower I showed them the new Wii U. They were very excited once they saw what it was. Liesl immediately picked it up and started playing The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD. She loved it and was able to do things almost instantly. It requires reading, though, so that is going to be a bit of a challenge. But she was exploring and making progress in the game so quickly. This is not a game meant for her age range at all. Very encouraging. She really pushes herself.

We did a bit of laundry and cleaning tonight. There is no food in the house which is a challenge. Like really nothing except jars of peanut butter.

Liesl is excited to get to play more of her new game tomorrow and Luciana has all kinds of new craft projects that she is asking to get to do including using her first set of real paint.

Lots more driving to be done today. We got up this morning and went down to Mt. Morris to get breakfast at Brian’s USA Diner. After breakfast we went to Mt. Morris proper and took a quick walk around town to see how it was doing and what shops were available.

From Mt Morris we drove up to Geneseo and ended up meeting up with Mary. We tried going to the Omega but the wait to get in was crazy so we skipped that and just ran over to Tim Horton’s for about an hour. Mostly we were there so that Dominica and Mary could work out plans for selling off the contents of the house that we had brought out with us on this trip.

We could not hang out for very long because I needed to make it all of the way home this afternoon and on the way had to take Dominica and the girls to Frankfort and drop them off, which I did in the middle of the afternoon and as quickly as we could transfer cars I left them and was on my way south again. The girls are coming home tomorrow evening so this is not a long break without them. I’ll see them in a day.

My drive back had some rain but mostly I was impacted by a large storm that came through ahead of me. There were so many trees down that NY 9 was closed up in Columbia County and I was diverted. That made me drive many extra miles. More time to listen to the book that I started last week, “The Darkest Summer.”

Once I was back on 9 at least three times I had to deal with significant flooding on the road. A bit dangerous on a high speed highway.

But overall the trip back was not too bad and I was home in the mid-evening. I did some laundry and cleaning tonight since the girls will be home before I am done with work tomorrow.

We got up this morning and went down to Mt. Morris for a rushed breakfast at Brian’s USA Diner.  The wait was very long which made it a bit of a problem to get our food quickly enough since I need to work this morning.  Breakfast was awesome though.  Well worth the wait.

Liesl rode with her grandfather in his convertible with the top down to the restaurant.  She has her new safety vest that replaces her safety seat so she is able to do that now.  She did not like how the wind messed with her hair though.

On the way back to the house we swung through Mt. Morris really quickly just to drive up and down Main St. to see what the current state of town is like as we have barely seen it after all of the renovations.

We got back to the house with plenty of time for me to get set up and get to work.  I worked for several hours and then we took off to get to Lakeville to go to me twentieth class reunion!  I can’t believe that it has been twenty years.

We got to the Northshore Grill in Lakeville a few minutes after the reunion was supposed to begin. The restaurant knew nothing about it but Art and Danielle were already there, and no one else.  It was probably fifteen minutes before the next person arrived.

Over a few hours about a dozen class members ended up showing up.  It was a small showing but we only had a class of sixty-four and there were several in that sixty-four that none of us knew.  Looking through our yearbook (annual) there are close to ten that none of the rest of us can identify and we are pretty sure that they were in other programs and didn’t actually attend school with us.  So the actual class size was probably around fifty-five.  And we’ve had only one death, that anyone knows about, since graduation in our class.  Probably pretty good for that number of people over twenty years.

We had a really good time, we all hung out at the bar.  It was great seeing the people who were there again.  Only Kim and I traveled from any real distance away.  Everyone else was quite local.

We all decided that we would meet back up at the Wadsworth Grill, the usual class hangout, across from the school later that evening.  So Dominica and I stayed until the last of everyone left and then we went back to the house to make sure that dad and the girls were doing well, got them off to bed and then went down the hill to the grill and stayed until around one in the morning.  It was fun there too and there were more people than we had seen out at the actual reunion.

We stayed out until about one in the morning when Dominica was so tired that she just couldn’t handle staying out any longer.  It was a really great day.

Finally by long stretch at home alone is over. I packed up the car this morning and went into the office fully prepared to not have to return to the house before heading north. Work was fine, nothing special today. I was able to wrap up well and was able to leave on the early side. I was pretty excited because I haven’t seen the family all week and am excited to not have to work this weekend. The reunion should be fun.

I made amazing time leaving Norwalk down on the Connecticut coast. There was a little traffic on the north bound trek up to Danbury but once I got on Interstate 84 I was moving quickly and getting on to the Taconic Parkway north up through the Taconic Mountains allowed me to really make amazing time.

I have started reading “The Darkest Summer” which talks about the summer of 1950, the Marines and the Korean War. It is a part of American history that I really know nothing about, despite having grown up watching M*A*S*H all through my childhood. So the book is incredibly interesting as I learn about that portion of history and a war that I know so little about.

I made great time over the entire trip. I was doing so well getting to Frankfort that when I made a stop to grab a bathroom break and a sandwich en route I called Dominica to tell her to start packing because we had time for me to get there, get everyone loaded up, get on the road and go on to dad’s house rather than spending the night in Frankfort and going on to dad’s in the morning which would be a huge hastle because I have to work tomorrow and don’t want to spend the morning racing to get there before it is time to work.

It was just after nine when I got to Dominica’s parents’ house. Four hours flat from Norwalk to Frankfort in the slow, little Spark! That’s a record.

We packed up in a few minutes, transferred everything from the Spark to the Acadia and got right on the road west. The trip was uneventful and we made good time getting out to dad’s house. It was around midnight when we arrived there.

We stayed up for probably an hour. The girls are, of course, all excited to be at grandpa’s house. Liesl remembers it well and knows what toys and there and what she wants to play with right away. Luciana has a hard time remembering the house. So we were off to bed around one in the morning. Dominica and I got the television room and Liesl and Luciana slept in the guest bedroom.

For a nightlight the girls used my mom’s fiber optic swirling light lamp. Liesl thought that it was “so cool” to use it both because it is a neat light and because it belonged to her grandmother.

Tomorrow is my class reunion. Twenty years. Pretty hard to believe.