Sheep Guarding Llama

Another gorgeous morning in Westchester. We really have to enjoy these few days of great weather that we are afforded living here in New York. I slept in a little too much this morning, because Dominica and I were up too late last night working on recording the KAE podcast, and so was rushing to get off to the office this morning.

I finished reading Irene Hunt’s 1966 book and Newberry Award (1967) winner “Up a Road Slowly” this morning. A really great novel. I would guess that I last read it somewhere around 1987 or 1988.

Work was finally not so incredibly busy today. The first time in two weeks that I have had any breathing room at all. This is looking to be a much more relaxing week. This coming weekend Dominica and the girls are traveling up to Albany so that they can attend circus with Dominica’s parents.

On the drive home tonight I started reading “War and Peace” which I have never read.  Very dry, for sure.  This is a long one so I will be reading this for a while!

Short evening.  We watched some Frasier and hung out with the girls a little but they were off to bed pretty early, as were we.

When we got up this morning, Dominica asked me to make a run to go to bagels for the family. Liesl was awake before I left and asked to come with me. It has been a while since she and I went out to go breakfast shopping together. Luciana wanted to come to but would have been much more difficult to manage and we were only running down to Yorktown to get bagels, so she stayed at home and waited for us.

It was a beautiful morning, very late morning, when Liesl and I went out for our Sunday morning bagel run. Liesl thought that it was great fun taking a trip with daddy. I told her that I had a story ready to listen to in the car if she wanted to listen to it and she thought that that was a great idea. We put on Tony Shaloub reading “A Cricket in Times Square” which I had started reading to Liesl more than a year ago but she was not very interested then. Now being older and having it while in the car just worked and she was really into it. I have not read the book since I was seven years old in the second grade when Mrs. Starky had us read it. That was the year in school when I fell in love with reading and this was one of the first books that did it for me.

We got a dozen bagels and a cookie for each of the girls as a treat. The Daily Bagel was packed this morning. Liesl likes the crowds and looking in the bakery case to decide what she wants to try today. She is a girl who loves an outing.

On the drive home Liesl asked if she and I could do this every Sunday together. Both the trip and the book. She had a lot of fun. Our outing took less than an hour but it was great time together.

My project this morning was to get my desktop set up up in our bedroom. That ended up being way more of a pain that I had anticipated. The wireless does not really successfully extend up to there and I spent an hour, at least, trying to figure out how to position the computer on the floor to get enough signal for it to get online. This is going to be a pain. Dominica and I talked and decided that we need a real wireless access point for the house and not just the one that comes from Cablevision which is sitting on the basement floor in the closet. We will order that tomorrow. Not an expensive fix and really we knew that we needed it anyway with the amount of wireless devices that get used on the top floor of the house. Liesl and Luciana both use iPads up there and Dominica and I have iPad, Nexus, iPhones and more all connected from up there and now the computer. There is good reason to have a quality access point in the house.

Dominica went out to do some shopping today and while she was out I took the girls outside to play with their “bikes” in the parking lot. Liesl is really awesome on the Big Wheels that Ciana got for her birthday. She roars around the parking lot uphill and downhill, over big bumps and even intentionally pops the curbs to land on the grass with her front wheel. Luciana is more pedestrian and just goes about on Liesl’s scooter but she has fun. She falls a few times every time that we are out but has not gotten hurt or even bruised herself. She doesn’t tend to fall while scooting but only while standing around.

The girls also decided to climb some of the big rocks in front of the house. They thought that this was great fun although it stressed me out a little bit.

I spent most of the time while the girls played outside sitting on the sidewalk near the mouth of the parking lot entrance watching for cars and reading “A House Like a Lotus” on my Kindle Paperwhite. I got a lot of reading done.

This afternoon Dominica made pizza for the girls and an amazing Stromboli for us. So delicious.

Luciana, true to form, put herself to bed around seven thirty. While she was out shopping today, Dominica picked up pullups for Luciana instead of diapers. A big step for our littlest girl. No more diapers for this household. Luciana was very excited when she got a pullup at bed time (she hasn’t worn diapers during the day for quite some time already.) Luciana keeps her pattern of going to bed super early but taking the “orange” iPad (the old one) to bed with her and watching Kai-Lan, Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go or Blues Clues for a few hours. She appears to be the introvert of the two and really needs a lot of alone time to recharge herself at night. It’s sad because we get so much less time together but it is good that she has established such a good pattern for herself.

Liesl stayed up with us while Dominica and I watched more of Frasier. Both Dominica and I took turns on the treadmill tonight. Liesl set herself up on the couch with my HP Folio 13 ultrabook and had me get her set up on YouTube with what started off with a series of videos about mercury (the elemental liquid) which she watched until they did experiments with spiders and mercury which took her down the proverbial rabbit hole to videos on spiders and then on to scary animals and eventually to wonders of the deep. She leaned against me on the couch all evening with her back to me and held my arm around her being all snugly.  At the end of the evening when it was time for Liesl to get ready for bed she had chosen to watch an hour long National Geographic special about deep sea animals which she was really into. Her propensity for educational programming is incredible.

After Liesl was off to bed Dominica and I took the chance to record two podcast covering our travels in Europe from 2012. I can’t believe that we have not gotten those done yet. We’ve not recorded far enough that we are up to our being in Germany on the Rhine where we have left off. A lot of trip left to record. It is really fun doing those recordings, though. And this really gives us a chance to relive the massive vacation again.

We ended up being awake until one in the morning working on the podcast.

Ah, the weekend. Dominica was not feeling well today, very tired. So she was under the weather all day long.

I worked down in the basement a big today at the desktop down there. I did a bit of work with Loggly learning how to use that and getting different systems reporting into it. That is a pretty cool service but sadly it does not support RHEL 5 well which is a big pain. But overall I am liking Loggly a lot and it is going to take a bit of a load off of my plate. I am very glad that I stumbled across it.

We decided that we needed to suck up and face reality that we are not doing anything extravagant with our dining room space anytime soon and it is better to make good use of the resources that we have rather than hoping for things to magically improve someday. So in the spirit of embracing that, we set up the remaining office desk that we have in the dining room space and set it up in the corner with Liesl’s Acer Chromebook so that she can use it as her own workspace. Liesl thought that this was very cool. She is excited to have access to her Chromebook back for one thing. She used to use that all of the time when we were in Texas and she had her own desk in my office space. She used to use the Chromebook to watch Netflix sometimes and to do her ABC Mouse stuff quite often. She has not had a computer of her own for a long time. So this is very nice. And Luciana is about old enough to start using the laptop too. Time to learn how the mouse works and start putting that coordination together. And it looks much better than the pile of boxes that was there before. It’s far from perfect but it is an improvement.

What we are really looking forward to is getting the treadmill moved down to the basement. That is going to make the biggest difference. Having that in the dining room space is just awful. It takes up way too much space and make it impossible to move around at all. We are really feeling the lack of space after moving from Texas where the layout was so much more open. And not having a garage doesn’t help either. And not having a third bedroom. We are really missing the house in Texas.

The girls went out and rode their bikes around yesterday outside and today they talked me into going out with them for probably close to an hour. I took a few videos and got them uploaded to YouTube for people to see. Liesl decided that she wanted to try out Luciana’s new Big Wheel plastic bike and Luciana wanted to use Liesl’s scooter (the kind that you stand on.) Luciana is just too short to use the Big Wheel. Her feet do not make it to the peddles. She is only just three years old as of yesterday and the bike is for ages three to six so she is in the first day of being “old enough” for it and she is a little peanut in general so she is just too small to really use it. We had a lot of fun though. They were so cute and Liesl really loved the Big Wheel. She is the perfect size for it and can really make it go.

Mostly today was a relaxing day. We did not do too much.

Rough day today.  The day started off good.  Got into the office and only got a little turned around taking the new route.  Overall it went well.  We’ve been catching up a bit after a very busy two weeks and I am really looking forward to the weekend.

By around eleven this morning the office was feeling a little odd and just before noon I learned that one of our coworkers, who sits very near me and I see many times a day, one of the relatively few that I actually know and have even spoken to outside of work, and one of only a couple that Dominica actually has met and even met his wife and has spent time with them – was killed in an automobile accident last night leaving behind his wife and two kids, one of which is between Liesl and Luciana’s ages.  So the day was a very somber one.

I was able to come home slightly early today.  I left around five and was home shortly after six.  At least I had time to spend with the family this evening.  We are fine, it was not someone that I was very close to and I have not been working there that long, but it still hits home.

I slept in a bit this morning. Another bright, warmish morning, below fifty degrees, though. Liesl and Katie were up and playing before I left for the office.

I took the highway into the office today, my first time taking it “to” the office rather than just “from” the office. The new construction on 35 is so bad that I need an alternate route. It adds thirty to sixty minutes to my morning drive!

Had sushi for lunch today and then in the middle of the afternoon we had a surprise tune tartar station in the office which was excellent.

Another extremely busy day in the office. I am really getting worn out. But I am keeping productive and getting just tons done.

I got home at seven this evening. That was really nice. (Boy is it sad that now I am excited to be home at seven when I used to be home by five when we were in Texas. No wonder the girls feel like they never see me.)

I ate dinner with Dominica while we watched an episode of “Frasier”; Dominica made sweet and sour veggie chicken and rice tonight. After we ate I played Skunk Bingo with the girls for a little bit which they love and then Dominica and Liesl went out to Walmart to go shopping.

Last weekend, Liesl had asked me if she could go shopping to buy a birthday present for Luciana. She really wanted to pick out a new doll for her because, Liesl said, “Luciana doesn’t have enough dolls of her own.” She likes sharing with Ciana but wanted her to have more that were expressly hers. Very sweet. But Luciana got a Doc McStuffins doll for her birthday that Luciana had requested. So tonight Liesl was going to Walmart to go look for something else for Luciana. They were gone for a little under two hours.

While Ciana and I were home alone she asked me to put on Kai-Lan on the big screen and to snuggle with her on the couch, which I did for a few episodes. We had a nice time just the two of us. After two episodes she declared it to be bedtime and took the orange (covered) iPad up to Dominica and my room and put herself to bed in our bed and fell asleep after not too long.

Dominica used Luciana’s birthday money to buy her a “Big Wheels” tricycle that she can ride around in the parking lot and Liesl got her a present that I am not allowed to see until tomorrow.

We put on the “Odd Couple”, the original 1968 film, and the three of us watched about half of it before I declared it to be bedtime for all of us and we all went to bed.