Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Started the day working offsite in Wilton.  That let me sleep in a little.

Dominica made really awesome pizza tonight.  The girls really loved it.  We ate two whole pizzas in minutes.

Tonight we watched Robin Hood: Men in Tights which I do not believe that I have seen since it was originally in theatres.  Luciana put herself to bed almost as soon as I got home.   Liesl didn’t hang out with us for very long, she wanted to watch some Care Bear movies so she went up to our room and watching movies on her iPad in our bed.

Dominica wanted to watch Bedazzled so we watched that which, like the last one, I’ve not seen since it originally released.  It is better than I remember.

It is Monday and I am back in the office, of course.  My schedule is relatively well regulated for the first time, well, maybe ever.

The weather is great today, almost sixty degrees.  I got home this evening and Dominica had baked cupcakes.  Fruity ones for the girls and bourbon ones for us.  They were very good.

This evening we watched John Huston’s 1951 Academy Award winning film about the First World War in German East Africa with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn: “The African Queen.”  It was rather a good film and both Dominica and my first time watching it.  Liesl even snuggled with us on the couch and watched the whole thing with us.