Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica was up at eight and already cleaning the house when I got up this morning.  Danielle and her mother are coming by this afternoon on their way through to Connecticut and the house is a disaster so there is much work to be done before they arrive.

We cleaned all morning.  Dominica from eight on and me from more like nine on until they arrived around one thirty in the afternoon.  We made amazing progress.  The living room was revitalized today.  After really pushing hard to get as many boxes emptied out as possible.  We really got the living room cleared out and the carpet cleared.

The house is looking great.  We feel much better than we did before.  The living room looks like we can actually live here now.  Still a ton of work to be done in the basement.

Danielle and her mom did not hang around for very long.  No more than two hours.  They had to get on to Connecticut.

This afternoon Dominica and I worked on our taxes quite a bit.  So much paperwork needed for that, it is awful.  We think that we have everything that we need now, though.  We still have not received our refund from 2012.  We are anxiously awaiting that to come through.

This evening I got the treadmill finally set up in the dining room area.  It is at an angle so that we can use it and still watching the television while doing so.  It is a pretty good setup.  We hope to be able to get it down to the basement sometime soon but that is going to be a lot of work and we are not sure that we can do it alone.  Maybe if I had a dolly I could manage it.

We watched Frasier more tonight, we really like that show, so much more than Cheers from which it was spun off.    And I did my first workout on the treadmill in over six months!  I am hopeful that we will get real use out of it now.  I just did twenty minutes but it is a start.

Luciana went upstairs early as is her new pattern and Liesl stayed downstairs and snuggled on the couch for much of the evening.

We had quite a screaming fit while Liesl was in her bathroom this evening.  There was a beetle on the closet door and she just about lost it.  She has, sadly, inherited both Dominica and my fear of insects.  It is going to be rough for her.

I got my old Google Nexus Android device up and running again tonight.  Danielle dropped it off for me today.  I’ve not had it in probably eight or nine months, I would guess.  It has been repairs and is now back in its awesome orange case and is useful again, it would seem.  I think that the girls will be happy to have access to it again and I will have some fun playing around with it when time allows.

It was on the late side when Dominica and I got off to bed.  We were tempted to stay up late, quite literally, because we were enjoying the nearly cleaned house so much.  So much more space and it just feels so much better.  Having the house be such a mess for so long has really been wearing us down.  There is still the basement to tackle, but that is without our grasp now that the main floor is not so horrible.

It was on the late side when we all went off to bed.  Luciana was still awake after midnight when Liesl went in to join her.

I got up this morning and went down to the basement and worked for a few hours.   I was actually very productive and got a lot of work done.  Did a little work on learning Chef too.  I am just getting started with that, it has a bit of a learning curve.

This evening Dominica chose G.I. Joe 2 as our first movie of the night.  It was horrific.  Absolutely ghastly.  One of the worst movies that I have made it through in some time.  I have no idea what compels people to watch this stuff.  I was quite disappointed to have spent time watching it.

After that bad movie, Dominica discovered that I have never seen Wayne’s World which I had intentionally avoided in the early 1990s because I never found the sketch from Saturday Night Live or, really, Saturday Night Live itself, for that matter, to be entertaining and had no interest in seeing this movie from it.  There are so many memes and quotes from the movie that I did not feel like I was missing anything.  So we watched it and I was definitely right to have avoided it.  Not really entertaining at all and no plot.  Very boring and unmemorable.  I’m very surprised that any quotes from it became so well known because it was not funny at all.  And I like Mike Myers in the years after that in movies like So, I Married an Ax Murderer and Austin Powers.  But this was not very good.  Better than G.I. Joe 2, though.  But that is not saying much.

It’s Friday!  Thank goodness.

I can’t remember if I mentioned the latest milestone but the little green car is now doing 35.1 MPG.

Today was a good day and I did not get stuck too late.  It was busy but not bad.  I was pretty relieved when happy hour rolled around.

This evening was a nice chance for the family and we spent it hanging out with each other.

Slower day at the office today.  Nothing to mention.  Went fine.

Dominica is excited about the new “Spiralizer” that she got this week.  It is a kitchen appliance that was very inexpensive that takes normal vegetables (zucchini, sweet potatoes, carrots, etc.) and turns them into strands like spaghetti which, obviously, you can then use as a pasta replacement.  Very healthy and quite tasty.  She has been quite excited about it so we are trying new dishes nearly every day.

Dominica is working hard and working through our backlog of food in the house and so it has been menu by availability recently.  Tonight she made chocolate cupcakes for us too.

Luciana did her “daddy is home, I’m going to bed now” thing and was off to bed by eight.

Back in my own office today.  Longish day but not bad.  Weather has been staying nice.  Got home at a roughly normal time.

We have been watching Frasier a bit recently, getting back into that.  We last watched it six years ago.  It was a lot newer then, in 2008.  Now it is over two decades old and what felt, more or less, like a modern show six years ago now feels pretty dated.  Amazing that we must have been living in Newark when we last watched it.  The original show only went off of the air in 2004 so when we started watching it for ourselves somewhere around 2007 or 2008 (back when we lived in NJ and I worked for CitiGroup) it was truly a recent show, only three years off of the air and only barely coming out on DVD.  The variance between watching a show “just three years off of the air” and starting a show over that is “one year more than two decades from when it first aired.”  These early episodes are from when I was in my first weeks of being a senior in high school!  Dominica was just starting high school when this show came out.  I did not watch it much during those years and to me I really think of it in the next few season from the 1997 to 2000 era when Andy and I used to watch it a lot while living up at Greenleaf Meadows, in Greece, New York.  That and Ally McBeal were regular shows of ours.

Luciana put herself to bed shortly after I got home.  The girls scream as I come in the door and run to great me.  It is so adorable.  They are so happy to see me getting home.  It’s great but they have so much energy right at the moment when I have so little.  Ciana seems to just be waiting for me to get home and then she feels that everything is good and she can go to bed.  I think that she is effectively waiting up for me these days.

Her new thing is that she goes up to bed, very early in the evening like around eight or maybe earlier, and takes her chocolate milk and the “orange” iPad wither.  She goes up and gets into bed and quietly watches a show, like “Blue’s Clues” or “Kai Lan” for a long time by herself.  I think that she really just needs quiet time.  Then, sometime much later like at ten thirty, she will come downstairs for ten minutes.  Then she has us take her back upstairs and really put her to bed.  It is very cute.  It’s sad that she needs her quiet time when I am home, though.  But it is nice that she is comforted by me being home and waits to know that everything is well before she does it.