Sheep Guarding Llama

I was not horribly tired when the alarm went off at a quarter after three this morning. Dominica was up and ready in a few minutes then I showered while she got the girls ready to go.

We got everyone loaded up and were out the door at four, as planned. The drive to get to the Taconic Parkway that we took today is actually the first time, ever, that Dominica has seen how I go to work in the morning, at least the first several miles of the trip. It was very dark, though, so she really did not get to see it at all.

The drive down to JFK went fine. I got them dropped off at five. The girls were both very sad that I was leaving them. Even Luciana was sad and said “I’m going to miss you!” Liesl was very melancholy, of course, and clung to me and kept blowing me sad kisses as I drove away. It’s going to be a long two weeks.

I got to the office just after six. It is the same distance to the office from JFK as it is from home to the office. But the roads are faster so I did pretty well, only about forty five minutes of driving. My first few hours were very uneventful and quiet.

This morning I finished reading “Dragons of Spring Dawning”, the last book in the Dragonlance Chronicles.  This is the last of the books that I read when I was young.  I’m going to tackle other books for a while but this was to prepare me to be able to go and read the now, since I was young and last read these, expanded Dragonlance universe books as it had been so long since I last read the Chronicles, easily a quarter of a century, that I needed a refresher before going back to them.

Work was, as expected, very slow today.  I got to the office at just last six in the morning and was nearly the only person there.  Even once people started to arrive between eight and nine, there were very few people.

I worked in the office physically until one in the afternoon.  Then I switched to the house and worked from there solidly until seven in the evening and kept an eye on things until about nine thirty.  I have the bedroom office at home finally set up now and am using the giant, pink yoga ball as an office chair which really puts a load on your leg muscles but is generally quite convenient.

I did some work this evening, got some things done.  Got caught up on SGL a bit.  It was such a very long day of driving and working that I mostly did nothing this evening.  I chatted with a bunch of people and got caught up on some little things.  But mostly relaxed.  It is going to be a long week or two without my girls though.

It’s Thursday. Today is our last “normal” day of the week. Dominica’s parents will be here tomorrow to get ready for going to Florida on Saturday.

Normal day at work today. I managed to leave work at a good time and got home and thought that, because the weather was quite nice, that we would be walking up to the playground. But as soon as I got home, Luciana told me that she did not want to go to the playground today because she did not want to get wet from the sprinklers. So we skipped going tonight.

The night was very short. I was very tired and Liesl needed to start going to bed earlier so she was getting ready for bed just ninety minutes after I had gotten home. She got the message, though, and she was ready for bed in less than twenty minutes rather than in an hour and a half! Finally the message seems to be getting through.

Liesl was ready so quickly tonight that we let her stay up for a bit after getting ready for bed and she sat on my lap and we watched some of Monsters versus Aliens together which I don’t think that I have seen since we originally bought it on BluRay.

We were all in bed very early. We have to be up early, very early, on Saturday morning so getting plenty of sleep tonight and getting up early tomorrow will be important so that we are ready for Saturday morning without it being too much of a struggle.

Today was a day of meetings. I felt like I was in them all day.

On the way home I stopped at Dunkin Donuts and got the blueberry cobbler donuts again for Dominica because they are her favourite.

It was dark and cool when I got home but it was not too late so the girls quickly cleaned up the living room and we all went for a walk to the playground. The walk up the hill was easier that it was last week. Like usual, we were the only ones there.

We were later than usual tonight and the sprinklers were running. The girls spent more time playing in the sprinklers than they did playing on the playground. They were cold and soaked by the time that we were done but they had a really good time.

Tonight we went to bed on the early side. The girls got good exercise going up to the playground and running around like lunatics and I have been pretty tired the last few days and need some sleep. So we called it an early night and were off to bed as quickly as we could muster, which is very hard when you have a Liesl who likes to take hours to get to bed. We had to skip reading her story, “The Wind in the Willows”, tonight because it took so long to get her to bed. I had a long talk with her about having to go to bed earlier now because we have to make up the time from her taking so long to get there.

Normal day in the office for me today. I was pretty tired when I got up this morning as I only got three hours of sleep. But I was feeling okay.

When I headed for home today, it was dark and raining a little. It was raining and light thunderstorms by the time that I got home to Peekskill. So no trip to the playground or to the pool tonight. It was late, anyway, by the time that I got home. It was eight so not a good night for going for a walk anyway. I did bring home Dunkin Donuts for the girls, though, tonight.

It was a very short night for us. Liesl had taken an hour and a half nap in the middle of the day so was not too keen on going to bed tonight. But we convinced her to finally get going and the girls were in bed by a quarter after ten.

Dominica has been watching Game of Thrones and she watched that for a while. I continued my project of installing Atlassian software from yesterday and got Confluence installed tonight. I only had about half an hour before we went to bed. I didn’t even turn on the television for me at all tonight.

A short day overall. I needed some extra sleep.

Today is Tuesday. On Friday, the Toccos are coming to stay with us for the day and then they, and Dominica and the girls, are heading to Florida early on Saturday morning. Then starts my long week and a half alone.

Back to work. I got up at six and got into the office. The weather is starting to get pretty warm. Dominica decided to stick with keeping the windows open today but this is probably going to be the last of it as it is supposed to be nearly ninety degrees over the next couple of days. The sun is out in force too.

I got home a little before eight. Today was a movie day at the house, apparently. Dominica had been doing some cleaning or something and had come across many of the BluRays that were for the girls and had been in boxes here and there. So today was “watching movies the girls had forgotten about” day. They watching Wreck It Ralph at least twice and some other movies too. Dominica, in the last two weeks, has managed to watch all six seasons of True Blood and has decided to now watch through Game of Thrones.

We are trying putting the girls to bed much earlier tonight. Luciana always wants to go to bed earlier than we would expect anyway. It is Liesl who takes between an hour and a half and two hours to get ready for bed. So we sent them off to get ready for bed at a quarter till nine. It didn’t speed things up really but it helped get them actually into bed at a decent time.

Tonight we read the second chapter in “The Wind in the Willows”. It started off slowly and Liesl was struggling on the first chapter on Saturday night but tonight she was definitely more into it.

Dominica and I squeezed in one podcast recording tonight, we are trying to get a lot of them done this week so that I can take some of the time while she and the girls are in Florida to be working on getting them edited and scheduled for the website.

Dominica went to bed early and I stayed up to get some work done. I got a Stash server and a Jira server set up and running on Ubuntu 14.04 tonight. Stayed up working very late but was happy to have them running smoothly by the end of the night.