Sheep Guarding Llama

Got up at six thirty. Went down to the basement and worked for a while then up and on the treadmill. Got a decent workout and then headed into the office.  Day three.  Maybe this will be a trend.

The drive in was horrible this morning. Lots of rain, heavy fog and flooding in central Westchester. It made the drive take forever. Such a pain. The last thing I need is more reasons for slow and heavy traffic on the way to work. The drive is really wearing on me. I spend so much time in that car every day. Thank goodness for Audible and podcasts or I would be going out of my mind.

In the late afternoon the rain cleared and it actually because an incredible warm, nearly eighty degree, and sunny day.  Who would have guessed from the morning’s weather.  An amazing transformation.

Another quiet evening, we did not do too much tonight.  Get off to bed relatively early.

Got up early this morning and went down to the basement and did some work, mostly on taxes and some posting, before heading to the living room to hit the treadmill for a quick workout and then shower and off to the office.  That’s two days in a row.  I felt great all day yesterday.  Early morning workouts are the way to go.  Nothing big, just enough to get a healthy cardio workout before starting the day.

Mostly uneventful day in the office. Nothing worth reporting, at least. I made it all day thinking that today was actually a Tuesday until I got a “Happy Wednesday” Snapchat from Rachael and I looked it up thinking that she was confused on her days and realized that I was over halfway through the week already! Who would have guessed.

I didn’t get out of work until after seven and therefore not home until after eight.

Had a quiet evening tonight. We decided to do nothing. Just watched some “Frasier” and were headed to bed by around nine thirty. Luciana decided that she really needed to not be alone tonight which is extremely abnormal. I can only think of her wanting to sleep with us a handful of times ever. She is nothing like Liesl who would always choose to sleep in our room. Luciana normally prefers to be alone. So as it was a rare, special occasion we let her sleep in our room. This, of course, made Liesl upset because she likes to sleep in our bed and hates to be alone at night but Dominica is unable to sleep with them because they push her out of bed (they don’t bother me because I was trained by Oreo to be pushed out of bed) so Dominica ended up sleeping in the girls’ room in the nice guest bed there and the girls slept in our room with me.

I got up really early this morning and worked for about two hours down in the basement.  Paid bills, worked on taxes, those sorts of things and got some posting done before heading up to the living room and putting in about twenty minutes or so working out on the treadmill while catching up a little on Family Guy which we only get to watch when the kids are asleep so we do not see very often.

This evening we recorded more of our podcast. We are so far behind on that but having fun doing it. We recorded three more episodes tonight. Now to find time to edit them! This coming weekend I am home alone for quite a while and will likely get at least one or two edited and posted during that time.

We got off to bed just after midnight.

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.